Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain (Continuum Literary Studies)

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Author: Hywel Dix

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Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain

Related titles available in the Continuum Literary Studies series: Character and Satire in Post War Fiction Ian Gregson Fictions of Globalization James Annesley Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism Stephen J. Burn London Narratives Lawrence Phillips Women’s Fiction 1945–2005 Deborah Philips


Hywel Dix

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Hywel Dix 2010 Hywel Dix has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-8470-6407-3 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

vi

1

Chapter One

The Novel – and Britain – in Transition

17

Chapter Two

Voyages In

37

Chapter Three High Rise

61

Chapter Four

Feminist Satires of Monarchic Culture

84

Chapter Five

A Borderless World

105

Chapter Six

Race, Reading and Identification

126

Conclusion: Break-Up or Make-Up?

155

Notes

159

Bibliography

164

Index

169

Acknowledgements

This book is a follow-up to my earlier After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain, completed on a research fellowship at the University of Glamorgan between 2003 and 2006. I remain extremely grateful to Gavin Edwards, Jeff Wallace and Jane Aaron at Glamorgan for encouraging me to develop my work into a second project. Off campus, a number of people have helped and supported my work through the course of my friendship with them. I would like to thank Mina Ishizu, James Walsh-Heron, Russell Hargrave and Rosemary Edwards for a number of stimulating conversations about some of the texts discussed here. I hope that when they read the following chapters they will remember with interest our shared discussions. As ever, my family have provided invaluable encouragement for my work. I would like to thank my brother Gareth Dix for challenging me to use the word ‘capriform’ in print; Gemma Potter for baking the meanest chocolate cheesecake in Christendom; and my mother Lesley Dix for inspiring my lifelong enthusiasm for literature. Without their love and support, this book could not have been written.

Introduction

Guy Fletcher, the protagonist of Anthony Horowitz’s 2005 novel The Killing Joke, is subject to an unusual fate. He overhears the telling of a rather tasteless joke, which offends his sensibilities because the butt of the joke happens to be his own recently deceased mother. In the short-term, his reaction is to take umbrage at the teller of the joke and seek adequate apology. In the longer term, however, his strategy is different. He decides to trace the origins of the joke back through the course of its lifetime, asking each teller where he or she heard it, and hence hoping to trace the joke back to its source, where, presumably, it can be stifled. What Guy does not know is that in Horowitz’s world, jokes are not the expression of individual exasperation. Rather, they are produced by a specific government ministry as a specific public service. Jokes are placed into circulation by this mysterious ministry in order to compensate the public for a tide of other government-produced ills: taxation; social inequality; even bad weather. To trace a joke back to its source is thus to investigate the activities of the Ministry of Jokes, and ultimately to threaten its social purpose. For the joke once known is no longer effective. If Guy’s investigation is allowed to reveal the existence of the ministry, it will undermine the minister, Liddy’s entire raison d’eˆ.tre. Accordingly, a group of three secret agents is convened and given the task of tracking Guy down and eliminating him: Through the half-open door, Liddy saw a screen with a map of England projected on to it. There were half a dozen younger people – men and women – sitting at a long table, taking notes. The next office was empty. A pair of identical twins sat in the third, both talking on the phone. As Liddy continued along the grey-carpeted corridor, a tired-looking woman with a tea trolley turned a corner and began to move towards him. He allowed her to pass, and without knocking, went into the last room. The Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman were already there.1

2


The Englishman Smythe, the Irishman O’Neil, and the Scotsman McLarrity are the agents detailed to eliminate Guy. Horowitz’s novel is a parody of the conventional thriller genre. His portrayal of the secretive and powerful offices of government service is incongruously combined with Guy’s haphazard and ludicrous activities. The one about the Englishman, the Irishman, and the Scotsman is well embedded in British literary history. It is at least four hundred years old, and can be seen at work, for example, in Shakespeare’s play Henry V, where members of the English army on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt bolster their spirits and camaraderie through the medium of jokes with the Scottish, Irish, and Welsh captains. What is striking about Henry V is that it was written barely half a century after the Act of Union between England and Wales in 1536 effectively brought the United Kingdom into existence. The Killing Joke, by contrast, was written in quite a different historical context. It appeared less than a decade after successful campaigns for political devolution in Scotland and Wales, and the introduction of a joint power sharing executive in Northern Ireland. Shakespeare’s Henry V reflects a period in which the newness of the British union was the very property that made it interesting to write about. The period surrounding The Killing Joke, by contrast, is one where not the introduction, but the seeming dissolution and transcendence of the united British state, are the emerging historical processes at work. The Killing Joke by no means stands alone. Rupert Thomson’s 2005 novel Divided Kingdom imagines an Orwellian Britain, ruled by an unelected despot and divided into four different groups for ease of authoritarian control. The groups are categorized on the basis of their mental ‘humours’, and once the classification is made, each group is designated a particular portion of the island in which to establish its homeland: Choleric people were known for their aggressive qualities. They led lives packed with action and excess. Melancholic people, by contrast, were morbid and introspective. What interested them was the life of the mind. Phlegmatic people were swayed by feeling. Empathy came naturally to them, as did a certain spirituality, but they tended to be passive, a little sluggish. As for sanguine people, they were optimistic, goodhumoured and well-meaning. They were often held up as an inspiration to others . . . Everyone in the country had been secretly examined, assessed and classified, all in strict accordance with the humours . . . Once the population had been split into four groups, the land was divided to accommodate them.2

Introduction

3

Members of each humour-group are assigned a colour: Blue for phlegmatics, yellow for cholerics, green for melancholics, and red for the sanguine. A map provided at the beginning of the novel suggests that the phlegmatic blue people who are spiritual and swayed by sentiment are the Celts of Wales and the southwest of England. The melancholy greens come from Scotland and the northeast. The northwest is the domain of the angry yellows, while the role-model reds come from London and the home counties. Of course this classification fails, since Divided Kingdom, like Orwell’s 1984, is the story of one man’s rebellion against the system. In other words, the novel is the fictional realization of the impossibility of assigning generic categories to the people in different regions of the British Isles. People in each region move, interact and change. There is then no united kingdom, any more than there is a common interest. The Killing Joke and Divided Kingdom share two notable characteristics. In each novel, a parodic re-structuring of the thriller genre opens up an ironic perspective on the loss of unity within the British state. Related to that, the British government is imagined as being somehow the enemy of the British people. This has been the case in a great range of popular cultural productions in the last decade or so. A disjunction between the British people and the British state has become something of a bedrock of contemporary culture, so that it has become, in Mark Garnett’s words, ‘quite possible to imagine a scenario in which Britain’s armed forces would be called upon to act against their fellow citizens’.3 Suspicion of the political state bears deeply on the issue mentioned above: that we have entered a period when the stable and united identity of the nation-state itself has begun to break up. How has this come about?

Origins of the Break-Up of Britain The Break-Up of Britain is the title of a political study published by Scottish commentator Tom Nairn in 1977. Its appearance must be understood in the context of a particular historical period. In 1969, the Kilbrandon Commission had been convened by Harold Wilson’s Labour Government to investigate constitutional affairs and the governance of the United Kingdom. The Act of Parliament passed as a result of the Commission’s report of 1973 recommended that Wales and Scotland be governed by their own autonomous elected bodies on matters relating to domestic policy, with only foreign affairs and overall global matters remaining in control of the

4


Westminster Parliament. Accordingly, referenda were held in 1979 in each country, asking the people of Scotland and Wales whether or not they wanted this form of home rule. The referenda were defeated – strongly in Scotland, and overwhelmingly in Wales, where, on St. David’s Day 1979, fewer than one in five of the electorate came out in favour of political devolution. It was to be 18 years before the Labour Party would govern Britain again. Labour had been traditionally strong – almost at times dependent – on support from the industrial areas of both Scotland and Wales. Accordingly, as soon as the party returned to power in May 1997, within six months it again held referenda on devolution in Scotland and Wales. This time, the result was quite different. Home rule was fully embraced in Scotland, and also won a narrow victory in Wales. Within only 18 years, the resounding and apparently final ‘no’ of 1979 had become a tentative but clear ‘yes’. The apparent rapidity of these transformations is one of the important factors in understanding contemporary British public culture. There are two considerations which mitigate the margin of the original failure in 1979. Nationalist movements had already existed for a considerable time in both nations. Tom Nairn suggests in The Break-Up of Britain that Welsh nationalism had been strongly associated with the Welsh language (which had in turn been in numerical decline for decades), and hence with a cultural rather than a political nationalism. ‘It would be exaggerated to say that Welsh nationalism was culturist in outlook while Scottish nationalism was philistine. But few would fail to recognize some truth in the contrast.’4 By referring to Scotland as ‘philistine’ Nairn refers to a nationalism based on material and political considerations, in contrast to the soft cultural nationalism of Wales. In Scotland, according to Nairn, the problem was almost exactly the opposite of the Welsh problem: the nationalist movement was mainly focused on political and economic factors, especially land reform and the vexed question of who precisely would profit from the discovery of North Sea oil. Scottish nationalism, in other words, did not include a sufficient cultural basis to allow it to pass into the popular imagination and gain momentum. Welsh nationalism, on the other hand, was excessively grounded in cultural matters, and so was unable to offer a substantiated political agenda capable of appealing to members of the Welsh electorate who were not Welsh language speakers. I have argued separately that during the period 1979–97, cultural figures such as writers, musicians, and filmmakers contributed to the increase in cultural confidence in both Scotland and Wales, and hence to achieving the ‘yes’ vote in 1997.5 Since cultural confidence is an important aspect in

Introduction

5

considering the two sets of referenda, it is not necessarily appropriate to draw such a strict line between the domains of politics and culture, as each informs the other. One of the premises of this study is that fiction is an appropriate place for the consideration of large matters of public political culture. The referenda defeats of 1979 might have been heavy, but the fact that they were staged at all represented a step forward for the previously dissipated nationalist movements in each country, and hence can be seen as staging posts on the historical path towards devolution in 1997, rather than totally at odds with it. Moreover, and of more fundamental concern for this study, is the fact that the break-up of Britain is not by any means uniquely concerned with political change in Scotland and Wales. Nairn writes at the start of his study that the original impetus for his work was provided by a series of cultural and political conflicts across Britain. These included nationalist movements in Scotland and Wales, but not necessarily in any central or leading way, compared to a whole series of other public conflicts. The 1970s, for example, were characterized by labour unrest and a series of industrial disputes. It was a period in which feminist activists were beginning to challenge the roles traditionally assigned to women within the bourgeois nuclear family. It was also a period of violent racial antagonism, as exemplified by the Ugandan refugee crisis. Each of these historical phenomena contributed to an overall situation in which the consensuses that had governed British public and cultural life for decades was gradually beginning to evaporate. With the loss of consensus in the public sphere went also the easy sense of a single national interest and even a single national identity. What Nairn calls ‘residual all-British consciousness’ thus ‘decays’ into a series of fractious subcultures, with overlapping and sometimes competing interests.6 Nairn’s overall point in The Break-Up of Britain is that political break-up is a response to the contradictions existing in an unequal and conflicted society, in which break-away political movements in Scotland and Wales are only one – albeit important – consideration. The domains of feminism, and of ethnicity, are at least as significant in asking how individual subjects perceive their relationship to the political state, and may be even more so. According to Nairn, the conflicts that give rise to the break-up of Britain are conflicts brought about by the economic inequalities of capitalist society. He thus wrote The Break-Up of Britain with, as it were, his socialist hat on as much as with his nationalist hat on. This was also the case with Nairn’s older contemporary, the Welsh socialist intellectual Raymond Williams. Williams (1921–88) belonged to that first generation of working-class children who received scholarships to study at Cambridge in the 1930s and 1940s, and

6


devoted his career to extending the educational franchise. He was enormously influential in bringing political questions into the cultural environment and hence in democratizing educational institutions and cultural practices. Late in his career, Williams increasingly came to see that implicit in the extension of the democratic franchise was the need for reform of political institutions across Britain. Like Nairn, he advocated reform of the House of Lords, and the establishment of certain regional political assemblies across Britain. In one of his important later essays ‘Are we becoming more divided?’, for example, Williams touched upon the relationship between the campaigns for devolution in Scotland and Wales, and the evaporation of a single consensual political community in Britain more generally: The central fact about Scottish and Welsh nationalism is perhaps this: that in Scotland and Wales we are beginning to find ways of expressing two kinds of impulse that are in fact very widely experienced throughout British society. First, we are trying to discover an identity . . . And second but related to this we are trying to discover political processes by which people really can govern themselves.7 By relating political change in Scotland and Wales to historical developments that were in fact ‘very widely experienced throughout British society’ Williams implicitly makes a connection between political devolution and the break-up of Nairn’s ‘all-British consciousness’ on other grounds. The goals of devolution, as Williams points out, were to discover new identities and achieve new forms of political representation. These also were the goals behind the feminist movement, and political and legal measures aimed at safeguarding the legal equality of members of Britain’s ethnic minority populations. This suggests that the political processes and the new identity politics at the heart of The Break-Up of Britain were not confined to devolution in Scotland and Wales. On the contrary, the break-up of pan-British social cohesion was occurring on all sorts of other terrains. As a result of these changes, the radical academic Anthony Barnett developed the Charter 88 movement in the run-up to the 1988 General Election. Charter 88 was tantamount to the beginnings of a Republican movement, and Tom Nairn described it as a manifesto demanding ‘a new state’.8 The charter called for the introduction of a written constitution and a bill of rights in Britain, capable of transforming its people from monarchic subjects into civic citizens. Tellingly, Charter 88 was signed by representatives of the home rule movement in Scotland, propoponents of the women’s movement, and important campaigners for racial equality.9

Introduction

7

Raymond Williams’s interest in political change included a commitment to devolution in Wales, for which he actively campaigned in the run-up to the 1979 referendum. At the same time, Williams was also an innovative novelist. His 1978 novel The Volunteers, for example, imagined a Britain set in the (then) futuristic world where political devolution had been achieved – and explored some of the challenges involved in that process. In other words, by writing a novel in 1978 giving fictional realization to the possibility of successful home rule in Wales, he was using his writing to try and contribute to that political end. Here again we can see that the rigid distinction between politics and culture does not always hold up. At the time of his death in 1988, Williams was working on a further novel entitled People of the Black Mountains. Initially, it takes the form of a realist narrative in which a young man goes out into the mountains on the border between Wales and England, in search of his missing grandfather. As he searches, rather than finding his lost relative, he sees a series of historical tableaux, showing him the myriad different people who had lived in and worked on that land, from the Stone Age, right up to the present time (although by the time of Williams’s death he had, alas, only got as far as the late medieval period). Each historical episode becomes, in effect, a separate story. Continuity is provided not just by the physical place, and the overall quest narrative, but also by important historical details. Characters in one section, for example, become the mythical figures of another section two hundred years later. The names of characters here become transmuted into the names of places there – so that each generation leaves its mark. Tony Pinkney says of People of the Black Mountains, ‘forgetting in this novel, across the long span of its history, is . . . a matter of having your history stolen from you – your buildings burned, your laws and traditions rewritten, your maps redrawn – by successive waves of invasion and domination’.10 He concludes that ‘even the reader is drawn into this process’ (ibid.). People of the Black Mountains is profoundly innovative, starting as it does in or around the year 23,000 B.C. and aiming to carry on right up into the present. This innovation invites the reader to ask two questions: What does it mean to write a historical novel that is ‘set’ across several vastly different historical epochs? Can we call a collection of stories linked thematically across time a novel – or simply a collection of stories – and why does this matter? Williams’s novel shows that this kind of writing probes the creation and the undoing of several different social and political orders, and this bears deeply on his notion of how different political formations, including national formations, are built up and challenged. That technique of using the trans-historical imagination can be described as a postmodern technique for engaging with existing genres, while also trying to contribute

8


something new to them. But before this point can be explored in detail, it is necessary to consider the emergence of the concept of postmodernism.

Origins of Postmodernism The postmodern movement arose in architecture during the 1960s and 1970s when a number of architects in the United States of America and Britain became dissatisfied with the practices they had inherited from architectural modernism in the public sphere. The modernists in turn had been inspired by the opportunities for innovation that the interaction of culture and advanced technology seemed to offer. The leading figures of modernist architecture, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and above all Le Corbusier integrated technological precision and geometrical accuracy into their plans for public buildings, transforming the traditional concept of a home into a machine for living in. Half a century after the work of Le Corbusier, however, it had become apparent that combining technology with art in such a manner would not necessarily create a harmonious living environment. The emphasis on urban standardization, for example, led to an apparent lifelessness in the buildings themselves. Moreover, the buildings were cramped, unable to be adapted for a variety of purposes, and ecologically highly unsound. They were tantamount to so many creepers choking the life out of an urban jungle. Charles Jencks, one of the early postmodern architects, emphasizes that the machines for living in envisaged by Le Corbusier had become places where ‘citizens’ became ‘incarcerated’ in ‘modernist anonymity’.11 Le Corbusier had dreamed of the city of technological modernity, in which problems of social space and inequality would be answered by man’s dominance over science and by the resulting designs for new urban and civic built environments. An early American postmodern architect like Jane Jacobs, by contrast, entitled her critical study The Death and Life of Great American Cities to refer to the need for regeneration of the urban environment following the failings of modernism. The modernist machines for living in, rather than helping to combat society’s ills, actually contributed to exacerbating them. The realization that the interaction between human beings and their landscape played a formative role in shaping human society was an important stimulus to the postmodern movement. The possibility that an innovative architectural postmodernity might be mobilized to challenge some of the inequalities of a society divided into rich and poor was one of its early insights.

Introduction

9

According to Charles Jencks, postmodernism is characterized by a particular form of double coding: ‘the combination of modern techniques with something else . . . to communicate with the public and a concerned minority’ (What is Post-Modernism? p. 29). When Charles Jencks talks about the importance of double coding in understanding the origins of postmodernism, this applies in a number of different ways. The postmodernists, like the modernists, believe in the interaction of culture with technology. Jencks believes that postmodern architecture can communicate both with a general public, and with a specialist body of other architectural professionals. The former might appreciate the elegance and outward appearance of a structure such as Robert Portman’s Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles, Norman Foster’s headquarters of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, or Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Skilled architects by contrast might be interested in the ways in which each of these buildings refers to others in the postmodern tradition, by means of visual echoes. Thus postmodern architecture is doubly coded in the sense that it can speak simultaneously to a highly specialized sector or professional elite, and to a willing general public, in terms appropriate to each. What all of this points to is the capacity of postmodernism to cut across and combine different styles, traditions, and even disciplines. This is precisely what we find happening in postmodern fiction. As Charles Jencks says of postmodern novelists, their work ‘cut across literary genres and combined such separated types as the historical romance, comedy, detective story, and philosophical treatise’ (What is Post-Modernism? p. 32). Novelists such as Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Umberto Eco, E. L. Doctorow and Carlos Fuentes all combine different genres, and integrate different historical moments into the present, combining the intellectually highbrow with the populist and even the kitsch. By now, though, these writers have already been the focus of several critical studies of postmodernism. It is with a younger generation of British postmodern novelists that this study is concerned.

Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain Critical concepts of postmodernity arose in late twentieth-century architecture. The break-up of Britain is a historical process, rooted in the movement towards home rule and devolved political power in Scotland and Wales. In other words, both postmodernism and the break-up of Britain are informed by an important spatial dimension. Since the 1970s, social scientists and

10


scholars across a range of disciplines have been increasingly aware that physical space is not value neutral. On the contrary, social space is thoroughly imbricated with public and hierarchical relationships, and ultimately, with different forms of power. The spatial turn that arrives with the moment of postmodernity lays bare the power nexus between individuals, peoples, and organizations at a range of levels. Accordingly, the portrayal of different kinds of social space is an important element in much postmodern fiction. In Chapter One I will argue that a new awareness of Britain’s relative decline in stature on the world stage since the Second World War and the end of the imperial period has provoked a range of fictional responses. In the decade immediately following the war, the dominant fictional response was to conjure away the problems faced by an encroaching exterior world reality, and offer fictional solace in the strongly delineated world of home. This technique can be seen occurring in some of the most emblematic British novels of the 1950s: Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, J. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die. By the 1970s, in contrast, an increasingly well-informed and critically-motivated segment of Britain’s intelligentsia had become aware that the nostalgia and return to the days of imperial rule and public decorum offered by so many novels in the 1950s was neither possible nor in truth desirable. Symptomatic of this new wave in Britain’s post-imperial fiction is J. G. Farrell’s empire trilogy: The Siege of Krishnapur, Troubles and The Singapore Grip. The earlier work of Amis and Tolkien had addressed the spatial turn with apprehension, allegorizing the encroachment of global forces for change into a series of fables in which Britain’s loss of global eminence could receive symbolic restitution through recourse to an emphasis on its own fictive continuity. Farrell by contrast embraces the spatial turn wholeheartedly. The Siege of Krishnapur, Troubles and The Singapore Grip cannot be considered a trilogy in the conventional sense of tracing one or more families across one or more generations of a life story. The narrative of each novel is discrete in that plot-based sense. Farrell portrays a structural congruence between the first attempt in India to gain independence from Britain in the 1850s; the sectarian troubles that have afflicted Ireland since partition; and Singapore on the brink of Japanese invasion. In other words, the linking theme of the trilogy is space, and how different constructions of public space make manifest certain power relationships. The spatial turn reveals that what is happening at one point on the globe might be informed and even directed by events at another entirely separate point. For although The Siege of Krishnapur, Troubles and The Singapore Grip

Introduction

11

are historical novels, they are imbued with a peculiarly modern and even contemporary idiom, which has the effect of focusing attention onto the moment at which they were written, rather than the different moments at which their action is imagined to occur. In other words, history itself is revealed in postmodern fiction to consist of a series of overlapping and ironically recurring scenarios, each of which has an important relationship with the present. At the conclusion of Chapter One, I suggest that the perpetual movement towards a ubiquitous present has become even more accelerated in a series of novels in which the period from the 1970s to the present day is imagined as being both a separate historical period, and an important moment of the present. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club is an important example of this. J. G. Farrell’s three novels comprise a historical trilogy which ends up in the present. This opens up a second perspective on postmodern fiction and the spatial turn, whereby the presence of the past is revealed in a striking and sometimes surprising number of spatial locations. This is probed further in Chapter Two, which analyses a series of novels that have drawn an implicit parallel between the end of the British empire overseas, and political devolution domestically. For example, Rachel Seiffert’s novel Afterwards portrays the aftermath of political violence in colonial Kenya, and pre-Good Friday Northern Ireland. As with the Farrell trilogy, the implication seems to be that certain historical scenarios recur with specific variations across a range of societies and periods. Afterwards thus sets off as a historical novel, and ends up in the present. This is also true of Andrew Greig’s In Another Light, where Malaysia on the brink of independence from Britain in the 1940s is juxtaposed with Scotland, struggling to define its political constitution in the first decade of the new millennium. Greig, like Seiffert, seems to suggest that the power nexus that exists between different global spaces is important in understanding contemporary Britain. Moreover, this can only be done through recourse to the history of each society, and an understanding of how the past comes to be operative in the present. Philip Tew has suggested that the work of recent novelists contributes to a general reconfiguration of concepts of Britishness and narratives of British identity. In commenting on the ever-increasing diversity of British authors, he writes, Since the 1970s not only has fiction become more ‘multicultural’ or ethnically diverse in authors and subject matter . . . but when considered with the emergence of a strongly working class oriented literature in Scotland after the 1980s because of devolution and the strengths of local

12


publishing opportunities, overall a shift in the focus of British literariness can be traced.12 The diversity of British authors in ethnic terms has certainly increased significantly since the first period of relatively wide-spread immigration from the Commonwealth during the period of decolonization. The coming to maturity of a large number of second and third generation immigrant authors coincides in time with political devolution in Scotland and Wales, and a changing political landscape in Northern Ireland. Immigrant British ethnicities and devolution politics both contribute to the new kind of British novel that has emerged since the 1970s: both are aspects of the postcolonial predicament and the need for new narratives of identity. Chapter Two concludes with an analysis of Desmond Barry’s Cressida’s Bed and Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place, where the implicit parallel between the end of empire overseas and the phenomenon of political devolution in Wales is pointed out. If social space is an important medium for the reification of power relationships, then the capacity to contest its meaning is at least potentially transformative. Chapter Three looks at two fictional responses to the spatial turn, exploring the imbrication of space with political change and hence with the break-up of consensus in Britain’s public sphere. Andrew O’Hagan’s Our Fathers imagines the spatial turn very explicitly as a matter of transforming social relationships through the construction of egalitarian social spaces. In his portrayal of the aspiration to meet the need for high quality public housing in post-war Scotland, O’Hagan conjoins two distinct kinds of space: the nation, and the home. Our Fathers portrays a society in which unwholesome or unsanitary housing manifests power relationships through economic inequality, literally imprisoning subjects within their own poverty. To engage in a public programme of housing is in this sense to offer to build the nation anew. By extrapolation, the failure of such a programme bears heavily on the dissolution of the unitary state, just as the incongruities and injustices of the past weigh heavily upon the present. Our Fathers can be seen as a symptomatic novel of British postmodernity in that it explores the relationship that exists between critical concepts of space and political processes of change – leading ultimately to devolution. Economic inequality is one of the areas in which the power-space nexus becomes particularly visible. Another such area is that of gender. In literature, public spaces such as courts, castles, palaces and prisons have been ascribed to men for five centuries, while private places such as homes, schools and hospitals have been ascribed to women. If the power-space nexus imprisons low-income families in their own poverty, then it is also

Introduction

13

true that it imprisons men and women in their gender. This imprisonment is physically instantiated by the different spatial domains in which they operate. To explore these domains, Chapter Three concludes with an analysis of Shena Mackay’s novel Heligoland. Mackay, like O’Hagan, symbolically commits herself to the rebuilding of the nation through a fictional portrayal of a public housing programme. Mackay is however more attuned than O’Hagan to the particular dictates that associate home with woman. As she is interested in inverting the patriarchal hegemony, she creates in Heligoland a novel that is part-realist and part-fable. Her female protagonist Rowena has survived orphanage in India and servitude on a country estate in Scotland. The names of her masters, Lord and Lady Grouseclaw, indicate that the novel is to be read as an allegory of traditional power relationships and the ways in which they might be opposed. Although she becomes imprisoned by the traditionally feminine role of housekeeper in a communal estate in London, she also achieves a hard-won truce for herself. Heligoland bears many of the features that have been described as postmodern. In the portrayed connection between India and Scotland, there is an embedded awareness of the co-presence of different points on a global terrain, and of how actions in one impact upon events in the other. This opens up a dialectical relationship between space and time, where the affinity that exists between different kinds of place in a connected system is symbolically repeated by the relationship between different periods of time. What happens in one time period may be ironically repeated in another, just as what happens in one place might have a particular impact in another. The presence of the past, and of past locations, are both important elements in Heligoland. Mackay’s flat, two-dimensional portrayal of Lord and Lady Grouseclaw as characters from a fable suggests that there is a third element in Heligoland that can properly be called postmodern: the commitment to parody. By parodying a didactic fable in an otherwise realist novel, Mackay creates a fictional form capable of registering opposition to the masculine hegemony over social space. This becomes even more strongly the theme in Chapter Four, which provides analysis of A. S. Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden and Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum. As feminist writers and experimental novelists, Byatt and Atkinson are aware of the power-space nexus that exists, and of the impact it has in the specific domain of gender. Accordingly, each writer undertakes a subversive parody of monarchic culture, in which monarchy is associated with patriarchy and hegemony. In The Virgin in the Garden, Byatt imagines a pageant commissioned to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953, written on the theme of the earlier Elizabethan golden age of the sixteenth century. Byatt allows

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her pageant to disintegrate into farce, thereby drawing attention to the disjunction between pompous and undemocratic state-authored rituals, and their incongruous human realization in the nation at large. Behind the Scenes at the Museum too takes the 1953 coronation as an important climax. The protagonist’s family gather in a living room above a shop to watch the event on a television especially purchased for the occasion. In other words, the patriarchal masquerade of state power is brought directly into a private social space that would more traditionally be ascribed to women. As with The Virgin in the Garden, Behind the Scenes at the Museum emphasizes the lack of fit between male authority and female experience. In addition, Behind the Scenes at the Museum is set in the flat above a pet shop, which turns into a scene of carnage when a fire breaks out, the animals perish, and the family are compelled to move home. The image of the expulsion from the garden of Eden had been a mainstay of patriarchal culture and authority for two millennia. In her ironic refrain of the expulsion archetype Atkinson mobilizes the power of parody in order to demonstrate her opposition to patriarchy. In other words, through the politics of parody, and the parody of politics, Byatt and Atkinson reveal that feminist critique it capable of making an important contribution to the break-up of consensus in Britain’s public and cultural life and hence to the symbolic break-up of Britain that occurs in much postmodern fiction. Just as A. S. Byatt parodies the myth of an Elizabethan golden age, and Kate Atkinson parodies the expulsion from Eden motif, I suggest at the start of Chapter Five that Jeanette Winterson is another feminist writer capable of accessing the politics of parody. Winterson’s Boating for Beginners is a feminist re-coding of the biblical narrative of Noah’s Ark, in which Noah becomes a tyrannical despot and the women around him are the longsuffering heroines. Biblical narratives of this kind are in many ways ripe for the plundering by parodic postmodern writers, though, and feminist critique is by no means the only grounds on which such work has been carried out. Chapter Five goes on to explore in more detail Julian Barnes’s novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, which is a series of short fables, each of them a different re-conceptualization of the narrative of Noah, and each occurring in different societies during different historical periods. The linking theme of each fable is the oceanic feeling, expressed through a series of sea voyages undertaken by the different protagonists and capable when read cumulatively of generating a sense of the ocean itself as being the main highway and connecting force in the world. The ocean in this sense generates a feeling of the globe as such, undivided by national, political or cultural frontiers.

Introduction

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A similar portrayal of a borderless world is explored in David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas. There, five linked short stories set in radically different time periods from the pre-historic to the space age invite the reader to cultivate a mental image of the world when looked at from a point outside it. Mitchell, like Barnes, portrays a world as a single unbounded entity, free from borders and where the concept of a nation-state has ceased to be operative. Mitchell’s portrayal of the world without borders can be read positively or negatively. Negatively, it gives rise to a dystopian fantasy in which nations have ceased to exist simply because the power of transnational capitalism has enabled corporations to transcend the boundaries of individual nationstates in the scale of their operations and the reach of their power, obliging every human being on Earth to bow down before the capitalist system. Positively, it suggests a form of cosmopolitanism, whereby different peoples, different cultures, and speakers of different languages are not precluded from social association with each other by a pre-conceived boundary or frontier. Cosmopolitanism is the theme of the final chapter, which explores the contribution made by writers from specific ethnic communities to the imaginative process that has been described as the break-up of Britain. Presenting Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses alongside Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Andrea Levy’s Small Island helps to elucidate the double encoding characteristic of so much postmodern fiction. All three novels are firmly embedded in one particular place which is also a point of intersection with other spaces and other cultural practices. Again, all three novels speak of one particular time, while successfully conveying the presence of the past in the present. Kazuo Ishiguro goes a step further than this, deploying a range of intersecting linguistic codes to achieve a precise effect. It is with an interpretative reading of Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day that this study concludes. In setting his historical novel in an English country house of the 1930s, Ishiguro appears to have decided to fashion a plot and a novel out of a cast list of characters that is exclusively white and European. That the Japanese-born Ishiguro should make such a choice seems startling. The new analysis presented draws strongly on the different linguistic codes employed by Ishiguro and argues that in effect, the language in question is the language of a contemporary, urban, cosmopolitan society. This after all is the society in which Ishiguro writes. To read this cosmopolitan sense back into The Remains of the Day is to realize that all of its characters must speak Ishiguro’s language. Yet Ishiguro’s language is the language of

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a multicultural, ethnically varied and linguistically complex society. In other words, because they are fashioned through such a language, all of the characters of The Remains of the Day can be imagined and read as members of a cosmopolitan society, and ultimately as members of different ethnic subcultures. This is the case not because Ishiguro explicitly tells us that his characters are Indian, or African. On the contrary, he says no such thing. Yet Ishiguro’s compound linguistic heritage, fashioned out of the blending of myriad different varieties of English, makes them in the postmodern imagination the proper inheritors of a global multicultural reality. The complex linguistic heritage with which Ishiguro’s characters are endowed belongs to the period in which the novel was written, rather than that in which it is set. In other words, his characters are historical characters imagined into being in the present. In this sense, Ishiguro, like so many other postmodern novelists, reveals the presence of the past in the contemporary, just as J. G. Farrell had done by endowing his historical characters with a thoroughly modern consciousness. Farrell’s Empire Trilogy makes an implicit parallel between the end of the period of empire, and the break-up of unionist politics in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. His imaginative reach is global, but the precise focus of each novel is firmly local, fixed in particular places at particular times. In global terms, the nation-state appears to have become superseded, a unit now too small and too bounded for the generation of useful cultural and imaginative analysis. In the postmodern imagination, the borders between nation-states are thrown open, allowing the nation itself to be transcended by larger ethnic and linguistic categories, even as it is breaking up into smaller competing and conflicting units. The contemporary nation-state, in other words, is a dialectical entity, negated and superseded even at the moment of its own assertion. This has important implications for the work of fiction. In British postmodern fiction, portrayal of the break-up of a coherent, unified or consensual national culture brings in its train an opportunity to pay particular attention to the contemporary make-up of Britain itself.

Chapter One


Forms of Fiction in 1954 I keep thinking about those twenty months, in 1953 and 1954, in which these novels were published: Hurry on Down, Casino Royale, In the Castle of My Skin, Lucky Jim, Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Flies, Live and Let Die, The New Men, Under the Net. What was it just then that emerged in England?1

As Raymond Williams was aware when he published his analysis of the ‘forms of fiction in 1848’, the mere fact of publication of so many major novels in one year cannot alone be taken as evidence of a sudden and thoroughgoing historical change in society. On the other hand, the coincident publication of so many major novels – Dombey and Son, Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, Mary Barton, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – was enough to suggest to Williams that this rich and varied novelistic explosion could be interpreted as both symptom and cause of a wider historical change much longer in the offing. The forms of fiction produced in 1954 can be approached in a similar way. Again, the coincident publication of the first novels of John Wain, Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch; of the first two James Bond novels by Ian Fleming; and of significant novels by C. P. Snow, J. R. Tolkien, William Golding and George Lamming, is suggestive that this was a period of significant innovation in literary form, which might in turn have been brought about by broader historical change. This change, while undoubtedly of longer genealogy than the mere two years of publication, can be understood quite strikingly from an examination of the field of fiction produced in those years. The mid-1950s occupy a moment of considerable importance within the history of Britain in the twentieth century, just as Williams argued that 1848 was of central importance in relation to the history of the nineteenth.

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In each case, the important fictional exploration of historical and social change hinges quite sharply on the condition of England. In the mid-nineteenth century, this was primarily a matter of a growing impoverished urban proletariat, born of a rapid process of industrialization, giving rise to an unequal and socially divided society. In the mid-twentieth century, the condition of England was still one of class division. This had been complicated by the historical transformation of Britain, from dominant imperial power to island nation. This transformation culminated in the mid-1950s with the crisis of Suez, prompting Robert Hewison to argue that 1956 was a watershed year in terms of Britain’s global standing and cultural self-imagining.2 Kingsley Amis’s 1954 novel, Lucky Jim is often taken as a novel symptomatic of 1950s Britain: a novel in which and a time when the social mores of an earlier period were beginning to be questioned and challenged. In this sense, it has often been suggested that the 1950s novel anticipates the social liberation and the moment of the 1960s. Lucky Jim’s bête noire, Bertrand Welch, is portrayed as defender of a certain kind of cultural Englishness. Jim Dixon buys in to his sense of cultural identity, in which national interest becomes imbricated with sexual desire through the operation of a particular code. Jim’s academic and intellectual life is orientated towards recruiting students to study his special subject at the university and justifying his employment. He does not want to attract too many students in case the number attending Welch’s own class falls, thus provoking animosity. He concludes, ‘with an honour’s class of nineteen and a department of six, three students seemed a safe number to try for. So far, Dixon’s efforts on behalf of his subject . . . had been confined to aiming to secure for it the three prettiest girls’.3 These three pretty girls are barely present in the novel. Only one of them appears as a character. Yet they form the decisive patriarchal unconscious on which the novel’s structure is founded. The names of the girls, we are told, are ‘Miss O’Shaughnessy, Miss McCorquodale, Miss ap Rhys Williams’ (Lucky Jim, p. 97). They are respectively Irish, Scottish and Welsh names. I suggested in the ‘Introduction’ that the one about the Irishman, the Scotsman and the Welshman is at least as old in English literature as Shakespeare’s Henry V. Claire McEachern has shown that in that play, Shakespeare symbolically employs a fantasy of a united army of Irish and Scottish, Welsh and English soldiers in order to dispel any doubt about the – fragile – state of the union of Britain at the time the play was written.4 Shakespeare conjured a fantasy of united British identity to reassure contemporary doubters about the strength of British unity only two generations


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after the Act of Union in 1536. Four hundred years later, Amis employs the same technique at the moment when the British empire began to collapse. It is possible that when the empire began to fall apart, so did the desired national unity. When Jim Dixon fantasizes about attracting Miss O’Shaughnessy, Miss McCorquodale, and Miss ap Rhys Williams to his class, he is also fantasizing a particularly masculine and imperial version of a united British identity. The union imagined as a sexual relationship between Jim and the three passive women is staged as a similar union of national identity performed between different nations to give access to a wider political union. Through this fantasy of sexual penetration, a fantasy of penetrative imperial identity is also enacted. It brings the Celtic otherness of Ireland, Scotland and Wales within the fold of Jim Dixon’s sexual and social desire, thus symbolically recapitulating a version of continuing British united selfidentity at the time when the British empire was being fragmented. In other words, for all its overt posturing towards sexual emancipation, Lucky Jim is not the anti-establishment novel that it was once hailed as. Like many novels produced during the 1950s, it can be interpreted as a response to contemporary problems of frustrated desire and nationhood. As such, the novels in question should more properly be seen as the remnants of an old social and cultural order, rather than the harbingers of the new. Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott have argued convincingly that Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, first published in 1953–54 work in a similar way.5 Bond is made to stand for the source of England’s signifying power and ease of action in the world. The twin dangers against which Bond must struggle are the generic Bond ‘girl’, and the evil scheming villain. Usually at some point the villain captures Bond and confiscates his weapon, thus leaving him symbolically castrated and temporarily unable to exercise that symbolic power which is his wont. Meanwhile Bond’s sexuality itself has important implications for the condition of England. For not only this symbolic castration, but also the distracting seduction of a beautiful girl, invariably threaten to distract Bond from the task in hand and leave England at the peril of the villain. Bond must overcome this seduction, resist symbolic castration, and penetrate the girl in order to ensure that his own power and virility are fully operational and hence that England’s symbolic authority can be recapitulated. The novels end with Bond up, the girl down, and the villain defeated. The historical challenges facing England during the 1950s are symbolically resolved in this way. Alan Sinfield has reminded us that during the Cold War period, not only was deviant sexuality a criminal offence, it was also interpreted as being

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harmful to public morals and hence the national interest. In a paper analysing a series of Times articles inveighing against the combined threat of ‘communist homosexual treachery’ Sinfield points out how deviant sexuality was ‘witch-hunted close to the heart of the high-cultural establishment . . . linking welfare-capitalist economic and social policy with a “homosexual culture”, “the cult of personal relations”, and . . . treason’.6 If the Bond novels represent a particularly clear instance of the allegorical association of hegemonic masculinity with conservative national interest, then it is worth remembering that in Lucky Jim too, there is a hint that Bertrand Welch has an effeminate half-brother, who will only be ‘cured’ if he is recalled from a long period abroad. Here too, a perceived threat to British strength is allegorized in terms of a sexual relationship in which Britain’s virility conjures away the threat of dissipation offered by spurious foreign temptation. Many of the best known novels of the 1950s offer symbolic resolution to the conflicts that had come over the British empire during the 1930s and 1940s. Raymond Williams has suggested that the allegories of J. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy offer a ‘country-based fantasy’ capable of compensating for the threatening forces faced by Britain immediately before the trilogy was published.7 It could be argued that the anthropological experimentation contained within William Golding’s Lord of the Flies portrays a microcosm of British society torn apart by conflict and disorder, only for the pre-existing social and political structures to be re-affirmed and ratified at the conclusion. The political satire of C. P. Snow’s The New Men similarly enacts a series of challenges to Britain’s national unity and social order, only to contain those challenges and return the original order to the status quo ante. In other words, far from anticipating the social and political revolutions of the 1960s, the novel in Britain in the 1950s falls back on a kind of comforting nostalgia. Time and again, the 1950s novel seeks to console its readers for the political changes that had come over the world with the end of the war, and from which Britain could not remain insulated forever.

Cynicism and Sinecure: The Empire Trilogy As Raymond Williams has pointed out, ‘nothing in the British perspective’ had prepared its people for the relative speed of change that would come over British society during the period of decolonization following the Second World War.8 Lucky Jim and the early James Bond novels are symptomatic of the period. By seeking to conjure away some of the challenges facing Britain on the world stage, they proffer a combination of anger and denial as the


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main strategies for dealing with the changes brought about in British society by decolonization. One of the significant facts about Britain’s post-war history is that there is now too much of it for it to be usefully considered as a single period. The changes in British society after 1945 were rapid, and initially the dominant form of fiction in Britain was one in which malign or threatening influences were castigated, absorbed, or symbolically conjured away. Though it took some time for a new fictional form to emerge, less orientated towards carrying out the kind of symbolic holding job that we find in Lucky Jim, and more geared towards making a positive resource out of political change, by the 1970s, such a form had begun to emerge. Philip Tew relates the new kind of writing that emerged during the 1970s to a series of shifts in the political, economic and cultural climate of the nation: ‘In terms of culture, politics, world affairs, identity politics and creativity the 1970s represent both a watershed and period of fundamental change for Britain, one that in retrospect, can be seen to rival and not be simply an extension of the changes brought about by the end of the Second World War.’9 Tew goes on, To see the post-war settlement – arguably a historically unrepresentative ‘blip’ produced by unprecedented wartime spending and command economy structure even in liberal-capitalist economies – as either continuing or disrupting any settled social order is to diminish the conflicts of the working classes, the Victorian underclass, the servant class, the regions, the migrant labour of Scots, Irish, Welsh, Chinese, blacks and others within an emergent Britishness, as well as the politically unrepresented (and under-represented) including women.10 The post-war settlement to which Tew refers was reflected – and indeed partly constructed – by the dominant novels of the period, fictively settling old challenges to the hegemony of pan-British consciousness and re-inscribing a settled cultural and political order. Tew goes on to point out, however, that this settlement was a blip, historically unrepresentative of Britain’s post-war cultural history more generally. The political changes that had come over Britain during mid-century could not be kept out of British fiction forever, and once their presence was registered, there would be an important transition from out-moded settlement to political fragmentation, where the imagined political strength and unity of the earlier period would be approached with scepticism and cynicism. J. G. Farrell’s 1973 novel The Siege of Krishnapur can be considered an important example of the literary cynicism that emerged during the 1970s.

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The novel is set during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and yet the characters are endowed with a peculiarly modern consciousness and linguistic idiom. By expressing the imperial world of 1857 in an idiom that is external to it, Farrell wishes to draw attention to the incongruous nature of imperial rule, incongruous both to the India of the 1850s and to the Britain of the 1970s. Krishnapur is imagined to be an Indian plains city, with a small military cantonment and the standard tranche of colonial society: Hopkins the station collector, Willoughby the magistrate, the action hero Lieutenant Harry Dunstaple, and the reflexive intellectual George Fleury. When the first sepoy rebellion against British rule occurs, the general reaction is one of patronizing confidence. ‘Jack Sepoy may be able to cut down defenceless people but he can’t stand up to real pluck,’ explains the treasurer Burlton, and this is the general reaction.11 When the ‘native regiments’ begin to burn down parts of the cantonment at Captainganj, General Jackson attributes this solely to ‘the work of some malcontent’ and will not allow the collector, Hopkins, to implement any precautionary measures which might cause unnecessary fear to the women and children of the ganj (Krishnapur, p. 65). After this, it is ‘only the collector’ who ‘remained convinced that trouble was coming’ (Krishnapur, p. 20). The collector begins organizing a regiment of men to build large earthen defences around Krishnapur’s Residency – the official home of the local British officials, and seat of local colonial government. In a sense, from the beginning the collector must grapple against the colonial machine as much as he is engaged in defending the cantonment against local uprising. The Jacksons and Burltons of the colony represent typical colonial figures. Having entirely internalized the imperial ideology of moral superiority and practical skill, they are unable to believe that a sepoy rebellion can possibly pose any serious risk to their security. Farrell endues them with a confident world outlook that borders on racist discrimination: to them it is self-evident that the European officers cannot be undermined by the servile Indian sepoys. The collector has to rouse them from this excess of confidence in order to regiment an appropriate defence to the danger. Farrell also wishes to address the problem of assumed superiority in British society that was evident in Lucky Jim and the novel of the 1950s. The difference between the novel of the 1950s and the novel of the 1970s can be characterized as a difference between nostalgia and cynicism. Farrell wishes readers to see that an earlier, exaggerated self-confidence in British society was predicated on the imposition of colonial injustices overseas.


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To replace this kind of confidence with cynicism is to attempt to explore a British identity that avoids such constructs. The technique Farrell uses in The Siege of Krishnapur is one of simultaneous connection and distancing. He brings the world of the Raj directly into contemporary Britain, in order to show the lack of fit between the two. It is a technique that can be described as the deliberate use of anachronism. The portrayal of the characters in one historical situation is used in combination with the reader’s knowledge of subsequent history, in order to generate a specific trans-historical understanding. This trans-historical understanding is common in much recent postmodernist fiction, partly because it enables the novelist to draw attention to the constructed nature of each ‘character’ in a novel; and partly also because it enables an ironic interplay between modern understanding and historical portrayal. In John Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman, for example, there is a continual ironic interplay between the Darwinian ideas of nature expressed by the characters, which modern readers have no difficulty in recognizing, and the fact that the novel is set in a historical period before the work of Darwin was published and when such ideas were not officially available for discussion. The Siege of Krishnapur mobilizes a similar ironic contrast between modern scientific ideas and their location in a historical period before they are presumed to have become current. In a debate with the Residency Padre over the relative merits of belief in scientific creation as opposed to the traditional Christian myth of creation, Fleury is told that everything on Earth, ‘from fish’s eye, to caterpillar’s food, to bird’s wing and gizzard’ bears ‘manifest evidence of the Supreme Design’ (Krishnapur, p. 151). Fleury does not speak in reply, but his thoughts are interpolated by Farrell. ‘Could it not be, he wondered vaguely, trembling on the brink of an idea that would have made him famous, that somehow or other fish designed their own eyes?’ (ibid.). By inserting his own brief comment into the debate here, Farrell brings modern scientific knowledge to bear on the scenario that is otherwise located in the nineteenth century. The suggestion that the idea of evolution would have made Fleury famous hints at the fame (and notoriety) achieved by Charles Darwin for precisely the same thing. In other words, Farrell, like John Fowles, endues his characters with a trans-historical understanding that springs from the dialogue between characters located in the nineteenth century, and readers located in the late twentieth. Another example of this occurs when Fleury is shown a daguerreotype picture taken by Hari, son of the local Maharajah, and wonders, 50 years before the Lumiere brothers invented modern cinema, ‘Could one have

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a series of daguerreotypes which would give the impression of movement?’ (Krishnapur, p. 231). A third example comes when the doctors Dunstaple and McNab discuss different causes of cholera. The old-fashioned Dunstaple believes in an invisible ‘cholera-cloud’ around the patient, the inhalation of which causes the disease. As a result, when the collector becomes ill, he is moved to a place ‘where cholera clouds would be less likely to hang (if such things existed, which of course they had been proved not to . . .)’ (Krishnapur, p. 301). By inserting an authorial commentary on the beliefs of the characters in parenthesis, Farrell uses the trans-historical understanding of the reader to highlight important differences between the two societies in question. A further technique used by Farrell for highlighting the lack of fit between modern Britain and colonial India is to put into Fleury’s mouth a series of speech patterns that reflect the contemporary reality of the reader, rather than the imagined historical period of the character. When Fleury first arrives in India, for example, he visits the grave of his mother who is buried there. He does not stay too long, however, as ‘one does not want to overdo the lurking in graveyards’ (Krishnapur, p. 36). The elevated linguistic and literary style derived from the use of the third-person is at odds with the comical description of Fleury, where the tone is irreverent. This juxtaposition of incongruities strengthens the combination of farce and peril that typifies the novel. Later, Fleury invents a new machine, the ‘Eradicator’, that enables the cavalry standard bearer to fight with weapons as well as carrying the standard. When this device is easily dismantled by the enemy, Fleury is left to reflect that it has ‘certain flaws of design’ (Krishnapur, p. 185). The idiom employed is drawn from modern scientific and technical discourse rather than the age of imperial adventure. The juxtaposition of the two hints at a deeper incongruity. By placing a modern, cynical idiom in the mouth of a supposed hero of empire, Farrell is able both to bridge the century and a half that separates modern Britain from imperial India, and re-assert a distinction between them. In effect, Hopkins and Fleury are contemporary British citizens transported back to the era of the Raj. Their inability to fit into the heroic requirements of the empire indicates precisely why it is appropriate to embrace the end of empire, rather than mourn it. It is often suggested that the period since the 1970s is an age of apathy and disillusionment in the political and cultural spheres. For almost three decades after the Second World War, a high material standard of living for the average Briton enabled a general belief in the continuing prosperity of the earlier period, and this prosperity generated a certain quiescence in


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the political sphere. With the economic crisis of the 1970s, however, there developed what Mark Garnett calls a ‘well-founded cynicism’ towards that very quiescence in the public sphere.12 Cynicism in post-imperial Britain has a precise historical location: it is what emerges when the confidence of an earlier, more powerful era, has evaporated. Cynicism, moreover, is not just the absence of cultural confidence. Cynicism is a particular kind of sinecure. It can be defined as a cultural strategy of distancing. Cynicism in the literary context is a technique for addressing the cultural and political changes that came over Britain during the drift from empire to small island, without becoming caught up in nostalgia or defensive obfuscation. Literary cynicism is a means of re-examining the aesthetic and moral values of an imperial period that during the 1970s was coming to a rapid close. It performs a specific kind of distancing by suggesting that just as those values were remote and incongruous with the colonized territories on which they were imposed, so too are they equally remote from the daily values of contemporary British society. The literary cynicism that has emerged since the 1970s offers a means of combining an interest in the structural changes in British society in terms of class, race and gender with a willingness to embrace a post-imperial definition of British society. It is, in other words, a means of coming to terms with the excesses of an imperial past, while also gesturing towards a non-imperial present and future. Chronologically, The Siege of Krishnapur was published in between two other Farrell novels, Troubles (1970) and The Singapore Grip (1978), to form a kind of ‘empire trilogy’. It is in the creation of this trilogy that we can detect Farrell’s greatest degree of innovation as a writer. Conventionally, a trilogy would explore the life of a particular person, or group or dynasty of persons, over several different moments in the course of one lifetime, and would feature recurring characters, themes and motivations. Farrell’s writing does not work like this. Indeed, his literary creation is not really concerned with the naturalistic concepts of character, or plausible behaviour, or consistency of motivation at all. Farrell is aware that all fictional characters are externally created constructs, and as such, emphasizes their constructed nature as literary types, rather than their naturalistic life stories as such. In this sense, he is more interested in historical situations than in characters. More specifically, he is interested in what happens when the kind of literary character specific to one form or genre is placed in the historical setting appropriate to another. In The Siege of Krishnapur, for example, he places a modern anti-hero in the setting of an imperial epic adventure and explores the disjunction that arises as a result.

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The Siege of Krishnapur, Troubles and The Singapore Grip are set in historical situations too remote from each other to allow a recurring set of characters or life stories to take centre stage consistently throughout the trilogy. What makes it a trilogy, rather than three discrete stories, is Farrell’s heightened sense of the recurrence of historically congruent scenarios. In the India of the 1850s, the Ireland of the 1920s, and the Singapore of the Second World War, he sees the stirrings of the beginning of the end of the British empire. In each case, he goes on to use a range of literary devices for juxtaposing the historical break-up of the empire with a contemporary interpretation of it. The tendency in colonial history for similar situations to recur in radically different societies enables Farrell to understand the history of the empire from the perspective of a single historical trajectory. The capacity of this trajectory to then tell us something about contemporary Britain is the unifying theme of the trilogy. There is a continual shuttling back and fore between the portrayal of the different societies in question, and the society in which the writing itself is carried out. Strictly speaking, Troubles was the first instalment of the empire trilogy, although its action is located considerably after that of The Siege of Krishnapur. In Troubles, Major Brendan Archer, recently retired from the British Army as a hero of the First World War, travels to the Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough, Ulster, to negotiate his way out of an engagement he had earlier formed with Angela Spencer, daughter of the hotel’s owner, Edward Spencer. The narrative parallels with The Siege of Krishnapur become apparent almost immediately. With stirrings of republican organization beginning to become converted into action, the Majestic, like the governor’s residency in The Siege of Krishnapur, comes to feel as though it is under siege. Neglected by its owner, and in a worsening economic climate, the very fabric of the hotel rapidly begins to disintegrate, and this dilapidation again recalls that of the residency in The Siege of Krishnapur. Unable to terminate his engagement with Angela until he has been drawn into the heart of the Spencer household, it becomes the Major’s lot to do what he can to maintain the physical up-keep and commercial acumen of the hotel. This is significant, for as political debates about the future of Irish republicanism are discussed by a procession of visitors to the Majestic, these inevitably become registered as matters of personal interest to Major Archer. As a former soldier in the British army, readers would naturally expect him to feel strongly opposed to any concession towards the Irish nationalist cause. What is interesting about Troubles is that this is not Archer’s opinion at all. As his experience in Ireland grows, so too does his interest in the republican cause, and his belief in its justice. In other words, Farrell locates


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the key historical developments within the mind of a character not a priori aligned with them. Just as George Fleury is an anti-hero placed in the age of heroism, so Major Archer too is placed in a situation incongruous to him. He is also in this sense an anti-hero: not because his values are questionable, but because as a literary construct produced in the 1970s, he expresses a scepticism towards the ideology of empire which would have been less readily available to characters in novels produced before this point. In Troubles, scepticism is portrayed as a personal perspective on public matters. It is through his personal relationships with Edward Spencer and the staff and residents at the Majestic that Major Archer expresses his scepticism of the imperial project. For example, when a crop failure and economic crisis reduce the local population to cutting down corn from the Majestic’s land, Edward Spencer’s reaction is to seek the maximum possible penalty. The Major in contrast responds, ‘Why not just let them cut it! They must need it badly if they come out to cut it at night.’13 Edward is unwilling to contemplate a change in the legal or economic structures which already govern Ireland to his advantage. The Major, though part of an army whose existence is devoted to the maintenance of those structures, is more able to think as a disinterested individual and see some justice in the cause of the poor. The Major says to Edward: I sometimes wonder . . . what would happen if one caught one of those little brats young enough, taught him how to behave, sent him to a decent public school and so on. D’you suppose one could tell the difference between him and the son of a gentleman? (Troubles, p. 187) Though it may not seem like it, this personal response is tantamount to a political orientation – and a radical one at that. This device of dressing up political attitudes in personal responses recurs throughout the novel. As news of Fennian activity reaches the Majestic, the spinster ladies who reside there circulate rumours expressing fear at the extent of atrocities being perpetrated by the Irish against the occupiers. The Major is at first ‘impermeable to the rumours that circulated,’ having ‘had his fill of them in the damp trenches where they grew like mushrooms. But now he found himself listening again, since the old ladies gobbled them up greedily’ (Troubles, p. 195). When he is assured by one of the old ladies that ‘[t]he I.R.A. had planned to assassinate His Majesty [King George], the Major is able to listen no more and responds with an impatient ‘Oh, what nonsense!’ (Troubles, pp. 195–96). In other words, the Major is shown to be more willing to downplay reports of criminal behaviour, and implicitly more willing to sympathize

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with nationalist activity, than the unionist members of the community he is theoretically present to serve. By placing such personal attitudes in the mind of a figure not wholly appropriate to them, Farrell is able to draw attention to the complexity of political matters in the Ireland of the 1920s, and to the process of political change that was getting under way. Indeed, it might be that the real period of change is not so much the one in which the novel is set, but that in which it was written: the mid-1970s, the period of the troubles in Irish paramilitary conflict and one staging post on a long journey that would see power-sharing finally come to Northern Ireland. Farrell’s novel, in other words, is consciously located at a historical moment that is also part of a much broader historical process. As a result, it is possible to read the novel in such a way as to see the historical connections between the period in which it was written, and that in which it was set. Moreover, Farrell is also at pains to point out the connections that exist between the early movement for Irish separatism, and similar anti-imperial nationalisms around the globe. Throughout the novel, the incidents are interspersed with fictitious newspaper articles read by the residents of the Majestic. The effect of these is to frame the Irish troubles in the context of global anti-colonial nationalist movements. Thus we hear from one of the residents reading an article that ‘the Connaught Rangers at Jullundar refused duty and laid down their arms upon receipt of a mail giving news of Irish events’ (Troubles, p. 189). In a moment that provides narrative continuity between Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur, we also hear that ‘[t]he Indian newspapers received by the Indian mail . . . contain further reports of the proceedings of the Hunter Commission which is inquiring into the Indian disorders of last year’ (Troubles, pp. 138–39). Events in India give the Irish nationalists accelerated momentum and vice versa. It is for this reason that every report of political action elsewhere on the globe is juxtaposed with some comparable activity in Ireland. Irish soldiers in India refuse to support the cause of the British empire once they have heard what is happening in Ireland. The same reports tell us that ‘[m]eanwhile, in Ireland, the troubles ebbed and flowed, now better, now worse’ (Troubles, p. 138). This use of the term ‘troubles’ in the 1920s (when it is much more commonly associated with the Ireland of the 1970s) shows Farrell accessing the trans-historical imagination: using the portrayal of a historical society to say something about his own present. The final instalment of the trilogy, The Singapore Grip, offers a recapitulation of some of the themes and scenarios presented in the earlier novels. Major Archer is present again, this time as a retired officer who retains the painful memories of ‘Ireland twenty years ago and of a woman who might


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have been his’.14 His presence in the novel of course offers narrative continuity to the trilogy, bringing the three-volume work back, as it were, to its origins in the first volume to have been written. Again, however, it is the historical society being presented, and its striking structural congruence with the earlier societies, that generates the main thread of continuity. Indeed, ‘Continuity in Prosperity’ becomes the standard ironic refrain of the novel, as its main character Walter Blackett seeks to celebrate the centenary of his rubber plantation business, Blackett and Webb, in Singapore, on the brink of the Japanese invasion. The Singapore of 1942, like the Krishnapur of 1857 and the Kilnalough of 1920, is a society under siege. As the siege tightens, the internal dynamics and contradictions of the society are brought to the forefront, so that as with the India of the Raj and the Ireland of the troubles, what finally pulls it apart is a combination of external pressure and internal conflict. As with the official residency of Krishnapur, and the crumbling Majestic hotel, the fate of the residents of the British quarters of Singapore is rendered both terrifying and farcical. As with the earlier portrayals of crumbling imperial rule in India and Ireland, this depiction of farce in peril is a conscious narrative tool. It prevents melodramatic sympathy from lodging too strongly with the colonizers, however dramatic their personal circumstances, and instead deflects the historic imagination onto bigger questions of imperialism and democracy. As the explicit coda to the empire trilogy, The Singapore Grip detaches the thematic problems that it raises from the historical society in which they are raised, and transplants them into contemporary Britain. One technique Farrell uses for achieving this is to contrast the opulence of modern exportrich Singapore with the dilapidation of war. He does not merely ask us to imagine what Singapore was like back then, he tells us that we can see for ourselves. But then again, no, he remembers, we cannot see the main warehouse of Blackett and Webb any longer, ‘for now it no longer exists’ (Singapore Grip, p. 500). Farrell employs the deliberate use of anachronism to shuttle between past and present in a way that makes the two almost indistinguishable. Describing his own visit to Singapore in 1975 to research the novel, Farrell tells us that the homeless urchins of the war period have now gone: Their place has been taken by prosperous-looking workers from the electronic factories out for an evening stroll with their children, by a party of polite Japanese tourists with cameras who have strayed here by mistake, and by the author of this book writing busily in a small red notebook and

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scratching his knuckles where some lonely, last-remaining mosquito . . . has not hesitated to bite him as he scribbles. (Singapore Grip, p. 500) Here is Farrell the novelist appearing as Farrell the character, situating his own process of composing within the finished composition. What finer technique for accessing the trans-historical imagination can be envisaged? The novel breaks off with the Japanese army arriving on the island and all British civilians being marched off to internment camps for the duration of the war. And yet the trilogy as a whole refuses to end there. Instead it leaps forward, not just through the internment, and the post-war years of reconstruction and political change, but directly up to the moment of writing: But more years pass and yet more. Let us suppose that Kate Blackett, now a woman with grown-up children of her own, is sitting at her breakfasttable in a quiet street in Bayswater . . . Opposite Kate at the table is a man reading The Times for 10 December 1976. (Singapore Grip, pp. 566–67) Farrell wants his readers to feel that the novel does not ‘end’ where its action ends. Rather the novel as a process of composition is only completed when the act of composing has been factored into the equation, and when the moment of consumption has also been brought to bear on the reader’s consciousness. In this sense, the whole trilogy, however historical, necessarily concludes in the present: ‘And so, if you have been reading in a deck chair on the lawn, it is time to go inside and make the tea. And if you have been reading in bed, why, it is time to put out the light now and go to sleep’ (Singapore Grip, p. 568). By insisting on the present, and on the presence of the past, Farrell is able to turn the attention from the colonial societies of the past to Britain’s domestic society in the present. In The Siege of Krishnapur, Farrell uses the technique of endowing his characters with a peculiarly modern idiom and consciousness to connect the India of the 1850s with his own contemporary Britain of the 1970s. Similarly, in Troubles he deploys the highly-charged concept of political ‘troubles’ retroactively, using the term to describe the political situation in Ireland in a period much earlier than that in which the term itself became current. The Singapore Grip completes the trilogy by declaring the end of the period of empire in the Far East, and by jumping several decades at its conclusion, to situate its surviving characters in the London of 1976, at the precise moment of writing. In each of these novels, the different techniques enable Farrell to use a portrayal of anti-imperial action to provide a running commentary on his own contemporary Britain. By 2009, however, it is


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no longer easy to consider 1976 as part of our contemporary world view. It is logical, therefore, that the next step would be the emergence of a kind of novel that shows the recent past itself becoming part of history.

The Retrospective Novel David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, Sebastian Faulks’s Engleby and Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency are examples of the novel of retrospect. They cannot be called historical novels in the traditional sense, because of their degree of proximity to the present. As Philip Tew suggests, ‘[p]eriodizations, if mediated by a measure of scepticism, remain useful in placing texts and help reflection upon social and literary transformations as dynamic changes’.15 Each of these novels has a tendency to work from a point around the mid-1970s towards an ever-approaching historical present. It is significant that they are all coming of age novels, where a child-like or immature perspective is brought to bear on some of the main public and political questions of the period in a way that interrogates the founding assumptions of the dominant ideology. Jonathan Coe’s 2001 novel The Rotter’s Club is just such a work. During the mid-1970s, Ben Trotter and his friend Philip Chase suffer the trials and excitement of growing up, before coming to a hard-won truce with themselves. First, Ben must suffer the pain of seeing his sister Lois fall victim to the Birmingham public house bombings of 1974, in which her boyfriend Malcolm is killed and Lois is so deeply traumatized that she loses the ability to speak. This instils in Ben a caring imperative that he is both unwilling and unable to shake off. By basing the first section of The Rotter’s Club around the Birmingham bombings, Coe achieves a very precise effect. The changed relationships with his sister, parents and friends into which Ben is catapulted turn the local society in which he exists into a microcosm for the charged political currents that historically would start to flow through Britain during the period in question. The caring imperative makes Ben himself reluctant to socialize widely outside the house and he develops both a stutter and a stammer. His friend Philip Chase is supportive and helpful in the manner of an inarticulate schoolboy. Doug, with whom the other two boys collaborate on a music magazine project, is slightly more detached. When Ben tells him that he cannot work on the magazine at the weekend because he always visits his sister in the asylum on Saturdays, Doug simply says ‘that he was sorry’ and then ‘fell silent’ because ‘there could be no arguing with that’.16

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If the physical and emotional difficulties afflicting Ben’s family cause some of his friends to become more distant from him, this is true to an even greater extent of the girls with whom Ben attempts his first romantic intrigues. Cecily Boyd, star of the school dramatic society, strings Ben along for most of the novel without ever inquiring about his family circumstances. The novel concludes in 1979, on the day when Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party was elected to office, and in Ben’s vexed relationships it is possible to detect a small-scale version of the uncaring society which retrospectively might be said to have typified Thatcherite ideology. Another consequence of Coe’s having located The Rotter’s Club in Birmingham as opposed to London is the panoptic perspective that this enables him to generate vis-à-vis Britain as a whole. The geographical location in question does not generate a sense of being the beating heart or control centre of the nation, but it does contribute to a microscopic effect. Coe generates the impression that his novel and its characters are situated just above an imaginary position at the geometric centre of the country, and that we as readers are looking down from this viewpoint at the United Kingdom as a whole, rather than at a narrow section of it. Philip Tew has pointed out that ‘in The Rotter’s Club Birmingham becomes a site for contestation and desire, often obliquely understood, but confirming a need for location and cultural significance.17 It is one of the strengths of the novel that Coe is able to dramatize the connections that existed between different aspects of life in Britain during the 1970s and since. Labour unrest and economic uncertainty, the growth of Irish paramilitarism, the press for separatism in Scotland and Wales, a rapidly accelerated process of immigration leading to difficulties of adjustment and conflict but also to multi-cultural enrichment, and the changing roles of women in society all complicate a series of class relations. Indeed, as Tew observes of The Rotters’ Club, ‘for Coe one predominant theme, central to his intricate and affectionate portrayal of the provincial landscape of 1970s Britain, is the wariness of the different classes of each other, despite their social and workplace proximity’.18 The advantage of narrating the novel from the viewpoint of an inarticulate schoolboy is that the connections between these things can be portrayed in a light, impressionistic manner, without the author having to commit his ideas in the manner of a political manifesto or a history textbook. To Coe, the 1970s was a period in which consensus in Britain’s national public and cultural life began to break up, and the crisis in capital, problems of racism, the altered roles of women, and alternate nationalisms in the different nations of Britain are all elements of the general loss of consensus.


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The Rotter’s Club is an attempt at demonstrating the connections between them empirically, rather than theorizing the historical processes at work. At times, Coe even seems to step out of the period in which the novel is set, as if to look back over it with a deeper historical perspective: People forget about the 1970s. They think it was all about wide collars and glam rock, and they get nostalgic about Fawlty Towers and kids’ TV programmes, and they forget the ungodly strangeness of it, the weird things that were happening all the time. They remember that the unions had real power in those days but they forget how people reacted: all those cranks and military types who talked about forming private armies to restore order and protect property when the rule of law broke down. They forget about the Ugandan Asian refugees who arrived at Heathrow in 1972, and how it made people say that Enoch had been right in the late sixties when he warned about rivers of blood . . . They forget that in those days, the National Front sometimes looked like a force to be reckoned with. (Rotters’ Club, p. 176) The National Front were particularly strong in the urban areas of London and Birmingham during the 1970s, using members of Britain’s first and second generation immigrant populations as scapegoats for the economic difficulties of a disaffected working class. Mark Garnett confirms the reality of this racial backdrop, pointing out that the ‘Birmingham by-election, held on 18 August [1977], came five days after fierce clashes in Deptford, south London, where the black and Asian population was more than 10 per cent and racist candidates had recently shared almost half the vote in a local election’.19 Writing at the start of the twenty-first century, Coe knows how labour unrest, racial tension, Irish paramilitarism and class conflict all relate to the tensions thrown up by a capitalist society. He is aware, however, that at the time they were happening, the connections between these things might very well have been less clear to an observer living through them – especially if the observer in question happens to be a rather unexceptional school boy. As a result, Coe chooses to hint at those interconnections without being able to tie them down. The sense of connection is sharpened during the middle section of the novel, set in the year 1976, when Bill Anderton, the father of another of Ben’s school friends, gets drawn into a long and protracted labour dispute at Grunwick, outside Birmingham. This rapidly escalates into a large-scale strike, with accompanying protest demonstrations and conflict. Indeed, Mark Garnett has referred to the Grunwick dispute as the ‘most important’

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of a ‘string of crushing defeats’ for the political Left during the 1970s.20 In The Rotters’ Club Ben witnesses for example, A teenager being lifted by two policemen and smashed headfirst into the bonnet of a car. A press photographer having his camera seized and stamped to pieces. An elderly West Indian being rammed up against a low garden wall and then levered over it, his legs contorting as he landed in a twisted heap. (Rotters’ Club, p. 263) The portrayal of the violence at Grunwick, like the earlier overview of the 1970s, is again impressionistic rather than precise. Coe’s writing even breaks down into disjointed fragments rather than coherent sections, as if this is what Coe feels was happening at Grunwick and across contemporary Britain. It is like a montage of different elements of contemporary British society: the factory owners; the workers; their families; immigrant workers; the strikers; the police with whom they clash. Each is knitted into a patchwork picture of the overall problems, and through this means, Coe is able to point beyond the local dispute at Grunwick, towards the larger process of dissolution that was beginning to affect Britain’s public sphere. Coe integrates personal drama and public activism. The general sense he creates is of an indeterminately sensed series of connections between what is happening to Ben and Philip and their families, and the wider world. In other words, he paints a picture of a society utterly divided, and it is our retrospective knowledge that enables us to fill in the interpretative blanks, and see that the divisions exist along the lines of Irish paramilitarism, the crisis in capital, labour militancy and incipient racism. There is also an attempt to demonstrate how Scottish and Welsh nationalism are part of this overall unravelling of Britain’s social fabric that occurs on all of those other terrains. The Trotters’ family holiday to North Wales has the side effect of bringing Benjamin back into contact with Cicely, who has retreated there to stay with her uncle, Glyn, and hence escape from her own recent disappointments. Uncle Glyn is thus an important mechanism in the novel and much hangs on the way in which he is portrayed. Coe allows the conclusion to the romantic plot to be deferred by the obtrusion into the novel of this additional character, with a wholly separate agenda, that of Welsh nationalism: Personally, I don’t like the English. And funnily enough, neither do the friends I was just talking to . . . the Welsh have hated the English for as


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long as anyone can remember and they’ll carry on hating them until the English leave them alone and stop interfering in their affairs. They’ve hated them ever since the thirteenth century, when Edward the First invaded Wales and his armies slaughtered the women and children and Llewellyn the Second was slaughtered too and laws were passed which banned Welsh people from holding positions of authority and English lords were put in place to govern them and Welsh law was suppressed and replaced by English law and castles were built over the whole country and Welsh people weren’t allowed to live anywhere near them . . . (Rotters’ Club, p. 350) Uncle Glyn’s monologue on the theme of English imperialism continues in this vein for twenty pages, and is tantamount to the entire thematic contribution made by the North Wales interlude to the novel as a whole. Where the matters of labour unrest, racism and its discontents, and Irish troubles are portrayed through characters with a level of dignity corresponding to the seriousness of the issues, the portrayal of Uncle Glyn is different. Bill Anderson, for example, approaches the trade union strikes that he organizes and the problems of race relations that accompany them with a blend of integrity and solidarity. Uncle Glyn is not portrayed like this. He is made to seem like an over-zealous extremist, almost a lunatic. Where the causes embodied in Anderson are depersonalized and given their own consideration in the novel, the issue of Welsh difference is made to seem as if it is merely the petty rant of an over-wrought individual. As a result, Uncle Glyn is only able to articulate Welsh nationalism in personal terms that deny it the same level of seriousness afforded to those other concerns, and that in effect trivialize it. ‘Does it surprise you that the Scots distrust you and the Welsh despise you? Do you think the native Indians of America . . . will ever forgive you for exterminating them with murder and famine and disease?’ (Rotters’ Club, p. 352). This personal, demonic approach to a historical situation is at odds with the more subtle, and more successfully integrated, portrayals of labour unrest and social and racial inequality. The mid-1970s was a period in which the Kilbrandon Commission was set up to investigate the constitutional governance of the different nations of Britain, culminating in the Act of 1976 and referenda in Scotland and Wales in 1979. It was also a period in which racial, class and gender antagonism erupted into often quite violent public conflict, with the result that the different stitches of Britain’s social fabric began quite rapidly to become unpicked. Sitting as it does as the climax of The Rotter’s Club, the portrayal in Uncle Glyn of a demonic version of Welsh nationalism constitutes Coe’s attempt to explore how alternative nationalisms in Scotland, Ireland and

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Wales relate to the more general public conflicts that he portrays with greater restraint, and arguably greater sympathy. That Coe fails to afford the alternative nationalisms the same measure of seriousness that he extends to those other problems is a weakness of the novel, but not necessarily a disabling one. For in making the attempt to see how all of these different social phenomena might be related, Coe’s novel is part of a broader historical process, in which those nationalisms would become more visible, and more clearly related to the wider conflicts generated by capitalist society.

Chapter Two

Voyages In

J. G. Farrell’s empire trilogy makes an implicit conjunction between the break-up of the British empire and the dismantling of the unitary, multinational state into its component elements. This conjunction does not inhere in any one of the novels any more than any of the others. Rather, it is out of the spaces between the novels, that is, the historical spaces, that the reader’s knowledge of global postcolonial developments obtrudes. The effect of this excursion beyond the text and into narrative history is to invite the reader to collude in the identification of a structural congruence between the two phenomena. In other words, far from being intrinsic to the texts of the trilogy, the interpretation offered in the foregoing chapter is drawn from extrinsic cultural and historical factors. In this sense, we might say that the interpretation offered reveals the trilogy to carry more weight than the sum of its parts. It would take a very substantial and skilfully integrated novel to address the complexity of such historical issues internally. Since Farrell’s trilogy was published in the 1970s and 1980s, two new kinds of novel in Britain have begun to address this challenge. First, there has started to be a kind of retrospective writing, in which the 70s and 80s are themselves seen as historical moments, viewed from a historical perspective. Those decades are themselves revealed, in the retrospective novel, to be moments of significant flux and political change. It was suggested in Chapter One that Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club is an example of this kind of novel. Sebastian Faulks’s Engleby and Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency are further examples. The historicization of the contemporary novel highlights what had taken a long time to be recognized in recent British history: that the post-war period has now become too long and multi-faceted to be considered as a single period, and has instead to be understood as comprising many different cultural and political conflicts, constituting a series of different periods in flux. The entry of this complexity into the contemporary British novel has had the further effect that historical processes previously considered

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discrete are now revealed to have a great deal of overlap and commonality. Thus we find on the one hand, a gesture towards diversity, in history, culture and especially in the proliferation of new British identities; while on the other hand, we can identify a simultaneous movement towards narrative unification. This conflict between unification and fragmentation has been a driving dynamic behind much recent writing. The totality of Britain’s postcolonial cultural experience is too vast to be included in any one epic novel. At least, the novel capable of expressing in human terms the relationship between guerrilla war in Malaysia, independence in India, concentration camps in Kenya, immigration and race rioting in the post-imperial Caribbean, and a power-sharing executive in Belfast or Cardiff has yet to be written. What has begun to emerge instead is a series of novels where the structural congruence between the demand for political freedom in one of those former colonies is juxtaposed with one of those internal provinces. In this chapter, I will analyse Rachel Seiffert’s novel Afterwards alongside Andrew Greig’s In Another Light and Desmond Barry’s Cressida’s Bed to explore a commonality of cultural experience being expressed in those novels that transcends the location chosen as setting for each. It is through this extensive, comparative and historical reading that we are able to sense the important conjunction that all of these novels in their various ways attempt. A conjunction, that is, between the break-up of the empire and the break-up of the unitary state.

Writing and Trauma In the ‘Introduction’, I argued that Raymond Williams was one of the important early theorists of the break-up of Britain. Towards the end of his career, Williams began to focus his attention on the ways in which the single-purpose unitary state might be superseded by different forms of political representation. The main insight of Williams’s cultural materialist practice was that forms of signification, and especially writing, have the power to generate or renegotiate certain ideological structures. In Williams’s sense, to create a new kind of narrative is to make a tangible contribution towards making a new world. Thus it is no coincidence that one of his last novels, The Volunteers (1978), is set among a group of potential political adversaries of the unitary British state. In accordance with Williams’s own interests, it has a special emphasis on class warfare, and on the emergence of a cultural nationalism in Wales that is rather distinct from the nationalist government portrayed as in office at Whitehall.

Voyages In

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The Volunteers is a thriller in which a supposedly radical journalist, Lewis, investigates the shooting and wounding of the Secretary of State for Wales, Buxton, on an official visit to Cardiff. Buxton had earlier authorized the use of military force to break a strike during a protracted labour dispute in the economically depressed town of Pontyrhiw, in which a worker had been killed. Resentment over this is the assumed motive for the shooting of Buxton. As Lewis’s investigation gathers momentum, he discovers that it was carried out by a covert revolutionary group known only as ‘The Volunteers’, whose mission is to smash capitalist society. The first surprise is that Lewis then decides to risk his whole career by joining this underground group. His reasons for this only become clear with the revelation of the second surprise: that years earlier, Lewis’s father had died in Kenya while fighting in the British army against the Mau Mau uprising. This has caused Lewis to bear a deeply felt but repressed resentment against the British state, not only for allowing his father to die, but also because the manner of the death travesties Lewis’s own egalitarian principles. Much later in the novel, the juxtaposition between political violence in Wales and in the former colonies is made more acute. Following the criminal trial of one of the ‘Volunteers’, Lewis travels to Pontyrhiw to see for himself the scene where the original worker had been killed, thus setting in motion the whole chain of events: A street in Pontyrhiw. A dirt road in Kenya. I must have gone silent looking at them.1 In the context of the novel, this fragment of first-person narration comes across in a way that is stark and moving. Raymond Williams does not for a moment wish to cancel the differences that exist between complex colonial societies and a mainly culturally-based Welsh nationalism. On the other hand, he does want readers to sense that the process of winding up the empire is a complicated and ongoing one, with important implications for the unitary British state, and concepts of Britishness themselves. The basic elements of The Volunteers are reconfigured in Rachel Seiffert’s 2007 novel Afterwards. Seiffert transforms the thriller into a romance, while also recapitulating the dual movement performed in Williams’s earlier novel. Seiffert, like Williams, juxtaposes the use of political violence in Kenya during the late stages of empire with the authorization of the use of violence to serve political ends back in the unitary kingdom. In Afterwards, however, Wales is replaced by Northern Ireland. Arguably one of the effects of this is to blunt the radical focus of The Volunteers. The covert need to cancel out the whole of capitalist society through active oppositional action

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has no direct equivalent in Afterwards. On the other hand, invoking Ulster as a counterfoil to Kenya strengthens the comparisons Seiffert wishes to make. These are comparisons between the British army as an occupying force in both Kenya and Ulster – which could have found no direct counterfoil in Wales, where the political and cultural alignments are quite different. At the emotional level, Afterwards also offers a greater degree of complexity in terms of the human response to trauma. In other words, Afterwards is able to explore the relationship between the experience of violent conflict and the subsequent narration of it in more complicated ways than The Volunteers. The thematic juxtaposition of violence in Kenya and Ulster is developed subtly, through the portrayal of two different relationships involving Alice Bell. One is with her new boyfriend, Joseph Mason, and the other is with her recently bereaved grandfather, David. The death of Alice’s grandmother, David’s wife, is one of the pivotal events to have occurred shortly before the action of the novel begins. The grandfather, David, has always been a stern, taciturn and even cantankerous figure, uncomfortable in social conversation. ‘He was never good at making friends, didn’t socialize at work any more than he had to.’2 Alice wonders why her grandmother, his wife, had allowed him to behave in this way, and even seemed to condone it: Alice had been so critical of their relationship. The way her grandmother allowed him to retreat behind her conversation, tolerated his rudeness as though she were blind to it. (Afterwards, p. 320) It gradually becomes apparent to readers that there is a deeper meaning for this surface pugnacity than mere unfriendliness. David’s wife, it begins to seem, had tolerated her husband’s difficult ways because she knew, as no one else did, what trauma he had suffered in the past to render him so maladjusted. In other words, to Alice at the start of the novel, her grandfather is something of a mystery. Delving into his past necessitates an examination of a particular period in history. In Seiffert’s schematic portrayal, the death of his wife creates in David a vacuum, for now he has nobody to share his past experiences and shelter him from the emotional anguish associated with them. This in turn gives rise to the need for a new confidant, someone to take the place of the grandmother Isobel and continue to assist David in his life-long rehabilitation from trauma. That confidant is Alice’s new boyfriend, Joseph. David and Joseph have much in common. David had served in the Royal Air Force during the anti-British agitation in Kenya in the 1950s. Joseph had also been in the

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armed forces, serving more recently in Northern Ireland. Each man has a troubled past, a need to come to terms with that past, and nobody to aid them in that process. Thus when Alice introduces Joseph to David, even though ‘Joseph wasn’t even sure if David knew he’d been in the army’, the relationship between them rapidly becomes symbiotic (Afterwards, p. 144). This creates a certain exclusion zone: David will recount his experiences in colonial Nairobi only to Joseph, and this distances Alice from both men. She can only wonder ‘about Joseph’ and ‘what her grandad might have told him’ (Afterwards, p. 273). In other words, there are two levels of mystery. Alice is compelled to inquire what it is about David’s past that he is so appalled by that he feels unable to share. At the same time, she must also examine what it is about Joseph, a relative stranger, that causes David to open up to him. This forces her to re-evaluate her relationship with Joseph, asking herself, ‘What did she know about him? . . . It didn’t add up to much’ (Afterwards, p. 73). In trying to confront what makes Joseph a suitable listener but apparently not herself, Alice quickly comes to the main thing that the two men have in common: their military experience. She questions Joseph about this, for she can’t ‘believe Joseph had nothing worth hearing’ (Afterwards, p. 180). When Joseph is as evasive about his time in Ireland as David is about his service in Kenya, she is left frustrated, knowing that Joseph ‘hadn’t been straight with her’ (Afterwards, p. 188), but unable to proceed. Although Afterwards is not set up like a thriller in the way that The Volunteers is, by setting up these mysteries, Seiffert like Williams establishes the possibility of exploring the individual past in the context of a more general history. The collective past opens on to a deeper notion of collective guilt, and its relationship to individual action. Readers know from the beginning the one thing that Alice is unable to discover about Joseph: that when stationed as a soldier in Ulster, he had shot and killed somebody. The trauma of this experience has rendered him unable to express his past verbally, so that when Alice begins to ask questions, he ‘[w]anted to be straight with her, but he didn’t think he could be’ (Afterwards, p. 194). Because Joseph’s victim was an armed gunman, the investigation into the matter had cleared him of any wrongdoing, and in fact concluded that he had protected certain colleagues of his. This official verdict however does not stop him from feeling remorse and responsibility for years afterwards, making him disorientated, confused and even estranged from himself. Lacking natural confidants among their contemporaries, Joseph and David gravitate towards each other as sympathetic correspondents. As a fighter pilot over Kenya during the Mau Mau, David too had been responsible for the perpetration of violence. Like Joseph, he is officially exculpated

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from all responsibility, but like Joseph, he cannot shake off the horror of his actions, even years later. It had taken him ‘months or even years’ before he had even been able to describe the atrocity of the bombings to his wife (Afterwards, p. 274). Her death leaves him without a sympathetic listener, and in need of the opportunity to go over the old wounds again. When he begins to tell Joseph about his time in Kenya, he mentions the fact that he only ever obeyed orders, and the fact that ‘most people agree . . . that we were responsible for very few deaths’ (Afterwards, p. 248). He goes on, however, But I wonder whether I repeat these things to console myself... I’ve read about monkeys, their fur scorched, down to the flesh. Craters, thirty feet deep, trees splintered and torn up by the roots. Elephants and rhino with holes ripped in their ears, deep gashes in their flanks. (Afterwards, p. 248) The vivid, graphic nature of this recollection, and its horrifying exposition of suffering life, underlines the extent to which David remains as damaged by his own past as Joseph, no matter what official solace might be available. Official conclusion is at odds with personal experience. David recalls a rumour of two hundred Mau Mau dead or wounded after one series of raids. Although this rumour was officially ‘discredited’ he is only able to assert, ‘I can’t believe we never hit a human being’ (Afterwards, p. 248) and ‘I know what kind of damage the bombs we used can do, when they explode’ (Afterwards, p. 249). This again prompts an inability to comprehend the meaning of the experience, an inability expressed by the question, ‘What should I say about all this? I have never known what it is that I should say’ (ibid.). The horror of violence has opened up a space within both men that no outside force is able to penetrate. The trauma of guilt has been so effective as to leave each man unable to understand what he has done, or to relate that experience to the lives of others. Thus Seiffert carefully constructs a delicate comparability between the experiences in Kenya and Ireland, and between one generation and the next. Joseph asks himself if he really thinks he can ever recover from the guilt, even by invoking David’s experience: Cry long enough and loud enough and you’ll be a better person for it? Better than the man you were when you dropped the bombs or fired the bullet? Joseph didn’t believe in that. Just a way to get yourself off the hook. Didn’t think it worked either. Look at David: years of it, over and over, until you’re an old man and you’re still no closer to an easy conscience. (Afterwards, p. 292, emphasis in original)

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At the conclusion of the novel, the congruence between Ireland and Kenya is made explicit through the personal experience that connects David to Joseph. Consistent with the pattern of the novel, this structure leads not to answers and closure, but to more questions and problems. In Joseph, David has at least found an outlet for his feelings of shame and remorse. Joseph, by contrast, finds no such channel, and ultimately becomes enraged after hearing too much of the older man’s recollections. This rage is tantamount to a violent breakdown in which he vandalizes the old man’s house, and abandons his relationship with Alice. There remains to the end a carefully constructed portrayal of the impossibility of narrating the aftermath of guilt and trauma. By appearing to steer the novel to this conclusion, Seiffert attempts to speak about what cannot be spoken. It could be argued, also, that she veers away from following up the interesting comparison that she has created between colonized Kenya and militarized Ulster. Afterwards, however, concludes with just a hint of the importance of following up this historical conjunction. Alice’s mother concludes that rather than making David try to speak the unspeakable, a more effective means of adjusting to the aftermath of horror might be to re-visit their old locations in Kenya. As a result, when Alice meets Joseph for the last time, following the end of their relationship, they come to an uneasy truce with each other. This encourages Alice to confide in Joseph her plans for the future, including the fact that, ‘My Mum’s got this idea of us going to Africa. To Kenya. See the places Gran lived . . . She’d love my Grandad to come with us’ (Afterwards, p. 326). The hope is presumably that undertaking a voyage of symbolic rediscovery will enable David finally to lay his guilty ghosts to rest. The implication, possibly, is that Joseph might be advised to undertake a similar voyage back to Northern Ireland, and by revisiting the old terrain, adjust his own emotional make-up. In this way, the choices of Kenya and Northern Ireland are not just mere background settings. They tell us something more important about the legacy of politically orchestrated violence in the colonial past and the domestic present.

The Voyage In Afterwards concludes with a tentative suggestion about the undertaking of two different voyages: one to a former colony, and one to a part of the United Kingdom noted for sectarian violence. This idea of the voyage has significant implications for how we understand the ongoing relationship between postcolonial cultures and contemporary Britain.

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In an extremely influential work of postcolonial theory, Edward Said has referred to the voyage in as that stage in colonial history which heralded the emergence of opposition to imperial rule. Said emphasizes in particular the importance of cultural work in generating an oppositional consciousness as the pre-requisite for revolutionary action. The voyage in for Said is a moment in intellectual history as much as it is a political process. Indeed, the role of the public intellectual is in Said’s account of the voyage in paramount. He analyses C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938); George Antonius’s The Arab Awakening (1963); Ranajit Guha’s A Rule of Property for Bengal: An essay on the idea of permanent settlement (1963) and S. H. Alatas’s Myth of the Lazy Native (1977) in such a way as to suggest that these works provide the formative intellectual paradigm for revolutionary anti-imperial action in the Caribbean, the Middle East, India and the Philippines respectively. Said’s analysis points towards a historical integration of the seemingly disparate societies which he examines. It is the common historical experience of colonization that provides this integration. His analysis is not carried out in the interest of blandly flattening precise cultural differences between different societies. Said wishes to indicate the commonality of historical process that exists between Trinidad and Bengal, or between Palestine and the Philippines. During the colonial period, and also in an increasingly globalized cultural economy, the flow of peoples, ideas and cultural practices is neither circular nor, as it were, unrestricted. The flow of peoples around the globe during the colonial period and since has been hierarchical, tending from the peripheral areas of Africa and Asia to the economic centres of Europe and North America. Said’s starting point in his essay ‘The Voyage In’ is the assumption that colonial and economic migrants must by their very nature have made an important impact on the culture of those metropolitan societies into which they moved and continue to move: ‘Most histories of European aesthetic modernism leave out the massive infusions of non-European cultures into the metropolitan states during the early years of this century.’3 The global movement of cultural practices on Said’s reckoning is directed from the periphery towards the centre. At the same time, it is nevertheless an exchange or an encounter, in which the elements mix and are mutually transformed, rather than remaining hermetically sealed. In other words, cultural workers in the formerly colonized societies had the capacity not only to transform the consciousness of members of their own societies, but also of the societies in the European and American metropolises. ‘A huge and remarkable adjustment in perspective and understanding is required

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to take account of the contribution to modernism of decolonization, resistance culture, and the literature of opposition to imperialism’ (‘Voyage In’, p. 293). The intellectuals whose work Said analyses each make important contributions to the developing anti-imperial cultures of their societies. At the same time, they also expand and enlarge upon the cultural practices of the colonizing societies, revealing the imperial culture itself to be more diverse and fragmented than it might previously have seemed. Not only the European capitals, but also the outposts of empire were involved in modernist cultural production. Exile, for example, and unfamiliarity, are common themes in the work of the great modernist writers and painters. For a colonial migrant, exile becomes not only a theme, but a positive material resource for cultural production. In a related essay called ‘Travelling Theory’ Edward Said draws attention to the tendency of similar theoretical ideas to give rise to different material outputs when operative in radically different societies.4 In ‘The Voyage In’ Said gives a good example of this variation when he analyses the work of C. L. R. James. The contribution to modernism of an intellectual and a novelist like C. L. R. James was possible precisely because modernity was being experienced everywhere but in different ways. Said suggests that James’s contribution to anti-imperial cultural practices was that he overhauled an inherited evolutionary model of world societies, in which certain non-European societies were figured to be at an earlier or more primitive stage of development, therefore by their very nature inferior, therefore in need of the civilizing mission to help them catch up with cultural practices in the developed societies of the West. Or as Said himself puts it, The voyage in, then, constitutes an especially interesting variety of hybrid cultural work. And that it exists at all is a sign of adversarial internationalization in an age of continued imperial structures. No longer does the logos dwell exclusively, as it were, in London and Paris. No longer does history run unilaterally, as Hegel believed, from east to west, or from south to north, becoming more sophisticated and developed, less primitive and backward as it goes. Instead, the weapons of criticism have become part of the historical legacy of empire, in which the separations and exclusions of ‘divide and rule’ are erased and surprising new configurations spring up. (‘Voyage In’, p. 295) The idea that history becomes more primitive the further east it goes is a legacy of the colonial project. During the period of aesthetic modernism,

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the great thinkers began to realize that time itself does not move as it were at a steady pace. The insight that time can only ever be recorded retrospectively is a highly important Bergsonian argument informing much of the culture and literature of European modernism. It is an insight that enabled a recapitulation of the construction of eastern societies as backward, having developed at an uneven rate with regard to the West. Thus, to expand an account of modernism to include greater aesthetic contribution from those societies is to overhaul the model of assumed temporal disjunction, and implicitly to disavow the temporal premise on which western hegemony was based. That is not to say that Said sees no value in maintaining a distinction between discrete historical periods. On the contrary, the work of James and Antonius is explicitly contrasted with that of Guha and Alatas precisely because the former pair are intellectuals working inside colonized societies, whereas the latter pair worked after the moment of decolonization and in a period when the cultural and political challenges had changed. The surprising new configurations which Said mentions spring up precisely because the voyage in is a multi-faceted process, involving the constitution of different cultural alignments at different times: If these ideas of counterpoint, intertwining, and integration have anything more to them than a blandly uplifting catholicity of vision, it is that they reaffirm the historical experience of imperialism, as a matter first of interdependent histories, overlapping domains, second of something requiring intellectual and political choices. (‘Voyage In’, p. 313) The advantage of considering the work of public intellectuals from both sides of the independence divide is that Said is able to generate a sense of the voyage in as an ongoing, rather than historically finite, action. To consider imperial domination and resistance to it as ‘a dual process evolving towards decolonization, then independence’ is largely ‘to align oneself with the process, and to interpret both sides of the contest not only hermeneutically but also politically’ (‘Voyage In’, p. 313). James and Antonius, on the one hand, and Guha and Alatas on the other, belong to distinct phases of the dual process to which Said refers. Moreover, the process is not only multi-faceted historically, but also geographically, in the sense that the voyage in constitutes the ongoing encounter of peoples, cultures and practices, and the ongoing opposition to economic imperialism, that exist in the global market economy. Thus Said concludes that

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‘[t]here is . . . an overlap and interdependence that cannot theoretically be described as only the reactive assertion of a separate colonial or native identity’ because ‘these voyages in represent . . . a still unresolved contradiction or discrepancy within metropolitan culture’ which ‘partly acknowledges and partly refuses’ the mutual transformations brought on in each society by the encounter (‘Voyage In’, p. 295). That is to say, the voyage in is more than just a suggestive metaphor for the early-stage emergence of opposition to empire. It is also capable of telling us how the legacy of empire impacts upon cultural identification in the metropolitan centres. This double focus can be explored in a number of recent novels that dramatically instantiate the voyage in, both literally and metaphorically.

In Another Light Andrew Greig’s 2004 novel In Another Light is the story of a tragic love affair, played out against the exotic setting of colonial Penang. Young and ambitious Scottish doctor Alexander Mackay accepts a position in the gynaecology department of a Malayan hospital, and travels out to take up his post. On the ship, he meets all of the people who will constitute his circle of acquaintances in Penang. These include the intelligence expert Philip Marsden, the affable American Alan Hayman, and the two sisters Adele and Ann Simpson, with whom Alan and Alexander begin a series of flirtations. This leads to a four-day love affair between Alexander and Adele, even though Adele is married to Alexander’s immediate superior, John Trent, and culminates in Alexander’s dismissal for ‘gross moral turpitude’.5 He is forced to leave Malaya, and tries to smuggle to Adele details of how to contact him in his new practice in Vienna, by writing them on a note hidden inside a domino. In tragic fashion, however, this message is intercepted by Adele’s little sister, Emily, and is never relayed. The details of Alexander’s life are not relayed through the device of a third-person narrator; neither do they appear in some putative realist mode. On the contrary, they are narrated 70 years later by Edward Mackay, Alexander’s grown-up son by a marriage entered into years after the adventure in Penang. After a medical emergency, Edward discovers a new zeal for life and wishes to discover everything possible about who he is and where he comes from. That includes hunting up details of the scandal which had led to his father’s dismissal from a promising post in the Far East before he had met Edward’s mother. The narrative oscillates between Alexander’s

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adventures in Penang in the past and Edward’s life and work in present-day Scotland, where he is a scientist working to generate electrical power from the sea. Edward receives guidance in his research from an elderly lady named Mrs Cunningham, who responds to an advertisement placed by Edward, looking for survivors from the period of colonial rule in Malaya who might be able to help him. Finally it transpires that Mrs Cunningham is in fact, Emily, Adele and Ann’s younger sister. Further, she confesses that she had resented Alexander’s affair with Adele, because she believed that it had destroyed her family. This resentment had provoked her to intercept Alexander’s final message to Adele, concealed inside the domino, and so put an end to the affair. Over the intervening seven decades she has come to think that perhaps her actions were cruel or unjust and helps Edward as a way of making some kind of amends for the past. In this sense, In Another Light resembles Ian McEwan’s Atonement or A. S. Byatt’s Possession. Alexander Mackay leaves Penang not even knowing whether or not Adele received his final message. Just as Alexander sets sail for a new position in Vienna, so 70 years later his son Edward’s work for the Orkney Tidal Streams Power Generation project is completed by the end of the novel, and Edward too is poised to leave Orkney and carry out his future scientific research in London. Edward Said uses the concept of the voyage in to refer to that point at which a colony begins to gather momentum towards independence. Greig uses the symbolic portrayal of the different journeys undertaken by the protagonists to suggest a comparison between colonial Penang and postdevolution Scotland. In Another Light follows a tripartite structure, with each of its three sections oscillating between events in Penang and Orkney. Part One reaches a climax with Edward established in his research in Orkney, and concludes with Alexander’s arrival in Penang. In Part Two, Edward gets into a love affair with Mica and is punished by Kipper Johnson, just as he is in the process of learning about his father’s affair with Adele and the likelihood of serious ramifications of that affair. The section concludes with Mica’s departure from Orkney, bearing Kipper’s unborn child. At exactly the same point in the narrative, it is announced that Adele is also expecting a child – miraculously, since her husband is infertile. As the novel goes on, Greig seems to suggest that the emergence of opposition to colonial rule in Malaya is somehow comparable to the push for some degree of self-rule in Scotland. Ania Loomba has pointed out that the assumption of a virgin territory awaiting penetration by a civilizing

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European male explorer was highly pertinent to the period of colonization.6 This assumption is partly upheld and partly subverted by Alexander’s affair with Adele. Since Adele is married to a member of the colonial authorities, the affair is also a kind of rebellion against the system. The voyage in, as we have seen, is an analytic concept that is capable of telling us not just about the emergence of oppositional cultures in the colonies, but also about the fragmented and precarious cultural identifications that exist back in the home country. Thus Greig generates a strong identification between Penang on the verge of Malayan independence, and Scotland at a similar point. Edward explains to his lover Mica that the importance of his scientific research is ‘[l]ike this country since Devolution – too soon to say’ (Another Light, p. 51). The parallels between Alexander’s life in Penang at the twilight of colonial rule and Edward’s at the inception of post-devolution Scotland are programmatically highlighted throughout the novel. In structural terms, events that occur during Alexander’s voyage to Penang seem to be replicated or thematically recreated by Edward, as he sets about investigating his father’s life from his base in the Orkney Islands. For example, as the ship carrying Alexander nears land, there is a ‘farewell cocktail party and dance before landfall in Penang tomorrow’ (Another Light, p. 110). This is replicated shortly afterwards in the narrative – although 70 years later in history – by the ‘party night at the Flying Dutchman [public house]’ which Edward attends with his work colleagues, Ellen and Ray (Another Light, p. 222). These occasions are significant in plot terms, for it is the farewell party that provides an opportunity for Alexander to dance with Adele for the first time, and it is the party in the Orkney Islands that draws Edward into a sort of love triangle with Mica and ‘Kipper’ Johnson, thus reinforcing the structural similarities between the two different societies in question. In wider thematic terms, the moments of departure and arrival which litter the novel have a particular importance, as these are the points at which borders between the different societies are momentarily erased, enabling a dynamic exploration of the similarities and differences between them. The ballroom on the ship, and the dance floor of the Flying Dutchman each melt into the other. Each is a kind of liminal zone, a point of transition between one world and another. At the Flying Dutchman party, Edward reflects, Islands are different. The water round them lays down clear boundaries. Within them, everything is intensified. Me, I could come here as a rank outsider, make it clear I was happy to be included, to buy a round,

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go fishing, play music and . . . disregard the complications under that surface. (Another Light, pp. 222–23) It is precisely the boundaries laid down by the water between the islands that Edward’s entanglements in Orkney break down. It is highly symbolic that the next party that Edward attends takes place on the Holms, a chain of semi-islands that are joined together by a series of narrow causeways, flooded by the incoming tide twice a day leaving each island temporarily isolated before being bound back on to the mainland by the departing sea, so that ‘no one could leave this party till the next low tide’ (Another Light, p. 284). It is in just such a liminal space, a space between borders, a space that is not quite any particular place, that the normal rules of society begin to break down, revealing only a fraught and turbulent core. The Holms recall another island which is not quite an island: Penang. The chain of islands that are not quite islands seems to provide a visual echo of the straits and causeway that connect Penang to Malaya, and hence to the wider British empire. Penang itself is ‘a small island, roughly turtleshaped and only fifteen miles by nine. A good deal smaller than, say, Orkney Mainland, with five times its population’ (Another Light, p. 349). If the boundaries between different human societies are erased on the Orkney Islands, this is also true of Penang itself. By allowing each chain of islands to melt into the other, Greig is able to make a subtle juxtaposition of the two societies which cuts down the geographical, historical and political boundaries between them and opens onto a space beyond such constructs. After being beaten up by romantic rival Kipper Johnson, Edward is only able to leave the Holms by wading through the ocean, prefiguring his later departure from the Orkneys, just as Alexander’s foray into the Malaysian interior for a secret rendezvous with Adele prefigures his later enforced exile from Penang. These moments of arrival and departure repeatedly flag up those moments in the narrative at which the boundaries between different worlds, different ways of life and different historical epochs are on the brink of being dismantled. This sense of culmination and completion is expressed in a very poignant scene, where Alexander attends another dance, in the ballroom of the sumptuous E. and O. Hotel, favoured nightspot of Penang’s colonial elite. There, he witnesses only one person dancing – the hotel’s Armenian owner Arshak Sarkies, plus imaginary partner: In a year the bankrupt hotel will be sold, and he’ll be dead, but for now Arshak Sarkies dances on, brandy glass balanced on his head and his eyes

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tight shut, lightly embracing the partner only he can see. (Another Light, p. 383) Greig endows his characters with a historical foresight which functions as a kind of trans-historical understanding. Although Sarkies cannot know that within a year his hotel will be bankrupt, and he himself dead, he is able to sense the general historical currents on which he is moving. ‘The penniless planters have gone home, the tin men can no longer afford it, even the Civil Service is cutting back its staff, their wives no longer flock to the fashion shows’ (Another Light, p. 381). These are the historical currents that Sarkies – and through him, Alexander and Edward – accesses as he dances, alone and world-weary, in the decaying grandeur of the hotel. ‘A tide is going out, he can feel it,’ and this tide will wash the British out of Malaya forever, and drown Alexander’s brief hope of happiness with Adele (Another Light, p. 381). The relationship between Alexander and Adele functions as a historical allegory. At the end of the dance, Adele’s father, Simpson, announces to his family that they have ‘seen the best of it’ and that it is time for an ‘orderly retreat’ (Another Light, p. 382). These words could apply to the imminent departure of the British ruling class from Penang as much as to the individual characters themselves. All that remains are a few occasions of public ceremony, such as the annual horse racing meeting, or the final of the billiards competition, before all official business in the colony will be concluded. Significantly, in the billiards final, Alexander is defeated by the man he had cuckolded, Dr. Trent, while at the race meeting, Trent’s father-in-law warns Alexander starkly: ‘exit with dignity, young man’ (Another Light, p. 373). Again, it is possible to note a metaphoric conjunction between Alexander’s existence and the precarious state of colonial rule in Penang. This opens into a wider allegory, whereby the figure of Alexander serves as a pivot, or point of intersection, between the two different societies, European and Asian, in which he operates. In other words, the structural similarities between the societies highlighted by the symbolic departures and arrivals are cemented through the allegorical figure of Alexander. When he goes on leave for his secret liaison with Adele, Alexander is careful not to reveal his precise destination to her father, Simpson. Upon his return, Simpson jokes, ‘I expect you’re missing the cool of the Highlands’ (Another Light, p. 370). Alexander’s guarded response is to claim that he has not travelled as far as the Malayan highlands – where Adele is known to have been travelling – and that he ‘spent most of my leave in Singapore’ (ibid.). For Alexander, it is natural to assume that Simpson should be referring to

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the Malayan highlands, as this is the region of the world that they all administer. Yet Simpson’s riposte – ‘I meant the Scottish highlands’ – seems to imply a comparability between Alexander’s sojourns at home and in the Malayan jungle. Alexander boards his final ship still forlornly hoping that Adele will arrive at the last moment and set sail with him. Edward, 70 years later, symbolically throws the domino in which his father had concealed his final desperate message to Adele down a well at the Broch of Gurness, tidies his desk at the Orkney Tidal Streams Power Generation project, and sets off for his next assignment in London. In both cases, there is much more coming to an end than simply a job of work. As Alexander stares out from the deck of his departing ship, he sees the island ‘sinking back into the haze’ (Another Light, p. 497), and with it, the very foundations on which the era of imperial rule had been built seem to be sinking too. The sinking island could just as easily refer to Edward’s departure from the Orkneys, as he soon finds himself ‘off island’ and ‘back in the big world’ (Another Light, p. 352). In other words the voyage in tells us both about opposition to imperial rule in the colonies in the past, and about the changing configurations of British cultural practice in the present.

Shipboard Romances The metaphor of the voyage in has also been used as the basis for two significant novels from post-devolution Wales. Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place and Desmond Barry’s Cressida’s Bed again dramatize the voyage in, as a cultural and political process that relates the former colonies to the domestic kingdom, and they again relate the dissolution of the British empire to important changes in the format of the unitary state. Cressida’s Bed (2004) is based upon historical events in Calcutta and Bhutan in the early 1930s, when Bhutan’s religious leader, the Shabdrung, became embroiled in a turf war with its political leader, the Maharaja Jigme Wangchuk. A high-ranking British officer, Colonel Devenish, developed a close relationship with the Shabdrung, whom he had visited to study the texts of Bhutan’s ancient Buddhist scriptures. This places him at odds with official British policy, which was to support the pro-British Maharaja in his dispute with the Shabdrung, whose spiritual leadership and condemnation of violence naturally align him with Gandhi’s anti-British agitation. Another officer, Major Owen Davies, is dispatched from Calcutta into the Himalayan

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kingdom tasked with bringing Colonel Devenish home. Like Alexander in In Another Light, he has a love affair with the colonel’s daughter, Doctor Christina Devenish: a ‘shipboard romance’.7 Christina wishes to visit her father in order to recuperate from the shock of seeing her friend Lakshmi killed in an anti-British attack on the pioneering women’s health clinic that she ran. Davies’s men smuggle the Colonel back to British India, and murder the Shabdrung so that the Maharaja can rule Bhutan as a British puppet. This alienates Davies from Christina utterly and the novel concludes with his being hacked to pieces in another anti-imperial demonstration, while Christina coldly walks away. Cressida’s Bed is a historical romance, in which the English upper-class Christina and Davies, the working-class Welsh boy made good, seduce each other before realizing that their ideological beliefs are incompatible. The novel provides an interesting insight into the historical relationship between England, the empire and Wales. Unlike Afterwards or In Another Light, there is no parallel offered between the colonies in the past and the post-devolution nation in the present. The complicated differences of history between India and Wales legislate against too easy a comparison, as Owen Davies’s thoughts within the novel suggest: He was in India serving his country. His country. It was his country, wasn’t it? He was British. Had always felt British. Even if he spoke Welsh. Of course, he could understand the Fenians in a way. The Irish were Catholics. Hadn’t ever accepted British rule. But the Welsh had been entangled with English government for seven hundred years . . . There was a rebel Irish Republican Army and an Indian Republican Army, but he could never imagine a Welsh Republican Army. (Cressida’s Bed, p. 50) Wales had been penetrated by the English feudal system during the reign of Edward I in the twelfth century, and formally subsumed within Britain by the Act of Union of 1536. This long experience of absorption and interaction with the culture and politics of England had the result that the hegemony of a single state received nothing comparable to the violent opposition that was carried out in Ireland, where attempts at annexation had been more recent, and less deeply grounded. The fact that British unionism may have seemed more of a historical fait accompli in Wales than Ireland gives rise to a key difference between Afterwards and Cressida’s Bed. In the former, there is a recent experience of political violence available for comparison with the political violence in the colonial past. In a novel set in Wales, this

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is not so much the case. As a result, Owen Davies in Cressida’s Bed is tempted to conflate the terms Welsh and British – although he too questions this conflation. The entire action of the novel takes place in the past, so that any comparative understanding is generated by the reader’s subsequent knowledge of historical events rather than by the narrative itself. Barry knows that having written the novel after the year of devolution in 1997, his novel belongs to a Wales that might be considered a postcolonial society. Indeed, he more or less takes this point for granted, and projects that awareness into the past, exploiting his reader’s knowledge of the postcolonial present to construct a narrative of a colonial past that would provide a historical lead-up to such a present. In other words, history itself has changed. It is hard to imagine a novel before devolution in Wales being devoted to exploring the extent to which Wales’s own history is that of a colony. After devolution, the historical processes are retrospectively re-examined. Owen Davies is unable to pit his Welshness against the British imperial order. On the contrary, he places himself at its service. There seems to be an implication in Cressida’s Bed that by internalizing the ideology of British Union, Davies himself is as much a colonized subject as a colonizer. The more he reveals his enthusiasm for the British empire, the more he allows the dominant ideology to subsume his Welsh identity within the imperial order. Gauri Viswanathan has shown in Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India that colonial subjects were made to feel that their own cultures were inferior to those of the colonizers, and so to defer to British ‘moral and intellectual suasion in matters of governance . . . in the consolidation of power’.8 The irony of Cressida’s Bed is that this is true not only of the Indian subjects, but also of the Welsh colonizer Davies. His Welsh mentality, like that of the Indian population, has been colonized. Barry includes certain pointers in the text to aid readers towards the interpretation of Wales – like India – as a colony. For example, after picking Christina up at the railway station in Calcutta to embark on their journey to Bhutan, Davies surprises the other officials by attending a church service. The service is High Anglican, even though Davies’s own father was a ‘Methodist minister’ (Cressida’s Bed, p. 91) who ‘preferred the pulpit to the playing fields’ (Cressida’s Bed, p. 35). None of the other officials attend, so that in effect, Davies is allotted the role of being more English than the English. As he tells Christina, ‘my father would probably say that I’ve been seduced by all the pomp of the High Church’ (Cressida’s Bed, p. 97). This reveals the extent to which he has assimilated the ideology and the practices of the empire and its civilizing mission.

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Similarly, a discussion between Christina and Davies on the anti-British agitation in India leads to each character expounding different views on India’s long-term future. Ironically, it is the English upper-class Christina who appears to believe in Indian independence contra Davies who does not. This can again be taken as a measure of the extent to which Davies wishes to replicate or reproduce the attitudes of the officials who ran the empire from London, and is therefore also a measure of the extent to which he has internalized the imperial ideology. In response to Christina’s suggestion that more autonomy might be conceded to the Indian people, Davies argues that many in government would rather grant less autonomy in the future. When pressed for an example, he refers to Winston Churchill: ‘Churchill,’ she said. ‘I’m surprised that a Welshman would have any sympathy for him.’ He blushed. She was pleased that she had managed to embarrass him, make him feel uncomfortable. ‘My father was outraged when he sent in troops against the miners in Tonypandy. Methodist minister, the people’s preacher.’ (Cressida’s Bed, p. 91) The historical reference Davies makes is to the time when Winston Churchill, as Home Secretary, had authorized the use of military force to break a miner’s strike at Tonypandy – something that was no doubt in Raymond Williams’s mind when he wrote The Volunteers as a way of revealing his solidarity with a whole tradition of opposition to officially sanctioned authoritarian violence. As another Welshman, we might expect Owen Davies to be more contemptuous of Churchill, rather than affording his words a scriptural status. Instead, Davies admires Churchill’s ruthlessness and pragmatic use of violence in maintaining a certain political order. Davies deflects historical bitterness away from Churchill and away from the British army, by suggesting that the ‘whole Tonypandy business was tremendously exaggerated on both sides’ and that reports of excessive violence and police brutality were ‘just not true’ (ibid.). As in his attitude to the Anglican church, Davies’s attitude to military violence directed from London, even though it was against the Welsh, is quiescent and even apologist. This underlines the extent to which his mind is colonized by the assumed supremacy of empire. In other words, Owen Davies may not feel himself to be a colonized subject, but we as readers are quite capable of feeling that he is. In that sense, for all its limitations, a novel like Cressida’s Bed could not have been written before devolution in

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Wales was realized in 1997, because the cultural confidence of the Welsh people – including the Welsh reading public – was not yet high enough to allow for such subtle reading. Cressida’s Bed was published only 25 years since the Welsh public had overwhelmingly rejected self-rule in the 1979 referendum, in effect declaring themselves unable to run their own nation and therefore in effect also recapitulating the colonial mentality of the 1930s: unable to ‘keep a grip’ on its own affairs (Cressida’s Bed, p. 91). By failing to align himself with Welsh non-conformism as opposed to the Anglican church, or the Welsh workers as opposed to soldiers who were sent to break their strike, Davies reveals for us his identity as a colonized subject. To avoid confrontation with Christina on these topics, he deflects them onto another: ‘But the fact is, I feel so removed from it all out here: the war, the Welsh valleys. And I like it. In India I can be whatever I choose’ (ibid.). Confrontation can only be deferred for so long, however. When it comes, it is powerful and violent. Christina allies herself with her father and the Shabdrung, against the Maharaja, against Owen and against the might of British India. In no time, the Shabdrung is dead, the Colonel removed from Bhutan, and Christina left with the feeling of her ‘shipboard romance falling apart under the impact’ of the conflict (Cressida’s Bed, p. 189). Owen himself is killed in an anti-colonial riot, trying to protect Christina, who no longer needs nor desires his protection. This can be seen as a metaphor for the end of Britain’s mandate to rule India. Owen Davies achieves a deeper understanding of how the empire was constituted at the cost of his life. Where Cressida’s Bed projects the potential understanding of Wales as a postcolonial society backwards into the colonial past, Trezza Azzopardi’s novel The Hiding Place (2000) performs almost the opposite manoeuvre. It is set among the Maltese immigrant community of the Bute Town Docks, 30 years before the area was taken over by property developers and became gentrified as Cardiff Bay. Frank Gauci has escaped the boredom of rural life on Malta and exchanged it for ‘the glamour of the sea’.9 Upon landing in Cardiff, he meets Mary Jessop, herself in the process of exchanging the languor of a rural existence for the excitement of the big city. He opens a café with Salvatore Capanone, and this enables him to provide a decent living for his daughters Marina, Celesta, Rosaria, Francesca and Luca. On the day that the sixth daughter, Dolores, is born, Frank loses his share of the café in a bet to the petty gangster Joe Medora. As a superstitious gambler, Frank blames this loss on the baby, whose inauspicious failure to have been a boy he interprets negatively, and physically assaults the children. With the share in the business lost, Frank, Mary and the girls are obliged to move out

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of their comfortable home above the café and become Medora’s tenants in a ramshackle slum. Thereafter the losses mount up. Marina is sold to Medora in order to settle the Gauci’s debts and is never heard of again. Celesta is forced into an arranged marriage with the much older Maltese businessman Pippo Seguna for a similar reason. The neglected Fran develops a horrifying tendency towards pyromania which results in her being taken into the care of the social services, while Dolores’s left hand is permanently disfigured in a fire started by Fran. Mary suffers a complete mental collapse and is interned in Whitchurch hospital. The remaining children must then also be taken into care, because Frank abandons his family, taking advantage of an arrangement with Medora to buy a passage on a ship back to Malta. Frank’s old friend Salvatore is murdered by Medora as he tries to prevent this from happening, his body lying undiscovered for 30 years in the sludge of Cardiff Docks. It is only years later, after much time has separated them from their suffering, that the daughters are re-united at their mother’s funeral. The Hiding Place functions as a kind of parable, with the early departure from a comfortable home standing in as a figurative re-writing of the primordial departure of Adam and Eve from Eden. Just as much effort has been concentrated historically on debating the extent to which the Old Testament text ascribes the burden of original sin uniquely to womankind via Eve’s lapse in eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, so too The Hiding Place explores power relationships between men and women. It does so through a specific coding of particular kinds of space and particular domains of place. Space in The Hiding Place is associated with power and is for the most part coded masculine. The novel inverts a misogynistic stereotype of the inner domain, the home, being a female space centred on the domestic family. This inversion implies that there is no inner family life at all, and the gradual removal of the family members one by one seems to symbolically enact the dissolution of the nuclear family and hence of the bourgeois society which is structured by that unit. The stripping away of her children leaves Mary powerless, laying bare the domains of privacy traditionally assigned to women and suggesting that space is something that women cannot control at all, whether in private or public. Space is the ‘yard behind the hut’ in which the young Mary had been obliged to labour for her father ‘chiselling at the ice on the water-butt’ (Hiding Place, p. 70), a de facto slave. Space is what separates Marina from

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her family when Frankie sells her to Joe Medora, and what enables Frankie to abandon his family and go in search of her. It is the box room which ‘stays locked’ while Fran is being taken away by a social worker, forbidding the girl to ‘come back upstairs to say goodbye’ (Hiding Place, p. 120); or the ‘chest’ in which ‘newborn’ baby Dolores is hidden so that her father might not be able to assault her (Hiding Place, p. 199). It is the ‘never-ending’ area of airport floor which an immigrant woman must clean daily for her living, as witnessed by the grown-up Luca when she flies home from Vancouver for her mother’s funeral (Hiding Place, p. 217). Space ties women to bondage and allows men mobility. The more the women struggle against this brutal arrangement of space and power, the more they confirm the dissolution of the nuclear family and the consensual community. The flashbacks through which readers learn of Frankie’s and Mary’s early lives are framed by dream sequences. Even while falling deeper into Joe Medora’s criminal hold, Frankie can still feel a ‘film running in his head’ of the day 12 years earlier when he had first met him – to share a room in an immigrant area of the docks (Hiding Place, p. 38). For Mary too, a bus ride in Tiger Bay sparks a recollection of her first bus ride into Cardiff, which ‘seeps into her dreams’ (Hiding Place, p. 71). These dreams are like gateways or portals that allow the women to travel back and fore in time, soothing or escaping the injuries that they suffer. Similar reveries signal the adult Dolores’s recollection of the chest in which she was hidden as a baby (Hiding Place, p. 199), and Luca’s memories of being beaten as a child (Hiding Place, p. 218). In a sense, by controlling her memories, Luca is also able to control the portals on the roadmap of her own remembrance, so that when she decides that she will have ‘no more’ dreams (Hiding Place, p. 219), this signals a refusal to go on being hurt by wounds inflicted in the past. In this sense, the hiding place of the title is not a place at all, but a hiding time. The structure of the novel creates a spatio-temporal dialectic whereby Dolores is able to keep something of herself back from the narrative in which she seems so ruthlessly unable to conceal anything. The majority of her lifetime becomes framed as a series of missing years, the 30 years between infancy and adulthood where Dolores lives out her whole life and which are not made available for examination. In Chapter Six, I shall explore the extent to which this losing of years between voyages out and back in is typical of narratives of exile, especially in relation to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Catherine Cundy has said, comparing Rushdie’s work to V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival that ‘forgetting becomes a crucial part of Naipaul’s narrative of arrival’.10 In The Hiding Place too, a whole lifetime is concealed in the interstices between two portions of

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narrative: childhood and maturity. The interim period of Dolores’s life evades our attention, and refuses to be laid bare, as if the fashioning of a new immigrant identity is predicated upon the sloughing off and forgetting of the old. The Hiding Place differs from the structure of Rachel Seiffert’s Afterwards. The latter makes an explicit comparison between military violence in the colonies in the imperial past, and authoritarian violence in the unitary British state in the recent present. Seiffert does this in order to open up a thematic exploration of the relationship between writing and atrocity, or rather, between the experience of trauma and the inability to express that experience verbally. Arguably, this thematic of horror displaces some of the larger political issues of imperialism and sectarianism that lie at the heart of the novel. In Andrew Greig’s In Another Light, the configurations are congruent with those depicted in Afterwards. The emergence of opposition to colonial rule during the imperial period is juxtaposed with the emergence of opposition to British single state-ism more recently. Where Seiffert concentrates predominantly on the personal effects of violence, Greig focuses more on the political processes of dissolution that occur in each case. This is partly because the process of claiming home rule in Scotland has not been accompanied by anything like the scale of violence that has afflicted Northern Ireland during the same period. Cressida’s Bed and The Hiding Place are different again. Instead of juxtaposing the break-up of the British empire in the past with the relative fragmentation of the unitary British state in the present, Barry makes a conjunction between comparable colonial pasts in Wales and India. Although he does not say it, Barry constructs the novel in such a way as to suggest that the history of Wales can be seen as a history of a colonized society, as can that of India. Here, the portrayals of violence and of political processes at home and abroad are importantly different from the situations portrayed in the other novels. The different conjunction of historical and cultural forces in Wales compared to Scotland and Ireland is the reason for this. By deflecting his action into the past, Barry leaves open the question of what kind of postcolonial society might emerge in contemporary Wales. Azzopardi, by contrast, measures post-devolution Welsh society according to a contemporary immigrant experience in that society. The similarities and differences between the novels could be characterized as follows. Seiffert compares the violence of a colonial past with the violence of a domestic present; Greig compares the political process of a colonial past with the political processes unfolding in the domestic present;

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Barry compares a colonial past with a domestic past in order to suggest that there were such things as internal colonies during the colonial period; and Azzopardi compares immigrant culture with domestic experience in the present. All four writers in their different ways imply that the formation of a unitary state in Britain was one stage in the process that would culminate in the establishment of a British empire overseas. One consequence of this insight is the realization that the break-up of the unitary state is also a process analogous with the break-up of the empire. That is to say, for every voyage out, there is also a voyage in.

Chapter Three

High Rise

The Spatial Turn The voyage in refers to the connections that existed between Europe and its colonies around the world during the age of imperialism, and to the connections that continue to exist between those societies in the new global system of organized capitalism. The concept of the voyage in draws attention to how policies and practices in one place affect and impact upon societies and individuals in another. In other words, the voyage in points to the realization that place and space themselves play an important constitutive part in developing social relations and hence impact upon people’s lives. In the work of the social and urban planner Edward Soja, this realization is elevated to the status of a ‘spatial turn’. According to Soja, modernity originated with the Industrial Revolution and by definition had an important spatial definition. The carceral city and factory are the locations par excellence of modernist experience, and in the important novels, paintings and subsequent cinematic images of modernity these locations feature prominently as constitutive elements. It was not a coincidence that technological advances in transport and communications gave rise to the cultural moment of modernity at the same time that they enabled western states to gain control over a greater and greater number of colonies around the globe. The societies that were colonized provided the raw material for use in capitalist production and consumption; they also provided an exotic series of images and ideas for distillation in the great modernist novels, paintings and poems. In other words, the moment of technological advance is the moment of cultural and urban modernity which in turn is also the moment of imperialism and capitalist expansion. In this global sense, as well as in the urban and carceral sense, the passage towards modernity brought with it new considerations of social space. The rise of international capitalism and imperialism meant that some societies were developed at different stages, with Europe markedly more

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developed than other societies. For a time, this caused critical theorists to see the unevenness as a result of time lags or gradual trickle down not yet allowing undeveloped societies to become modern. Their temporal (historical) consciousness thus became entrenched over a spatial understanding of how the world is structured. As Soja puts it, At every scale of life, from the global to the local, the spatial organization of society was being restructured to meet the urgent demands of capitalism in crisis – to open up new opportunities for super-profits, to find new ways to maintain social control, to stimulate increased production and consumption. This was not a sudden development, nor should it be viewed as conspiratorial, completely successful or entirely unseen by those experiencing it. Many of the avant-garde movements of the fin de siècle – in poetry and painting, in the writing of novels and literary criticism, in architecture and what then represented progressive urban and regional planning – perceptively sensed the instrumentality of space and the disciplining effects of the changing geography of capitalism. But within the consolidating and codifying realms of social science and scientific socialism, a persistent historicism tended to obscure this insidious spatialization, leaving it almost entirely outside the purview of critical interrogation for the next fifty years.1 In his overview of the history of the social sciences, Soja suggests that history occupied a privileged place above geography in understanding power relations between different social groups. This was partly due to the strong influence exerted over the social sciences by Karl Marx, in whose work historical materialism is much more operative than political geography. Soja is at pains to point out that geography can tell us at least as much about hierarchical relations as history. His point is not that space was less important than time during the Industrial Revolution, merely that it has taken longer for the impact of space on social relations to be recognized. Soja traces out four different phases in the onset of modernity, and tracks the fortunes of spatial understanding across these phases. He argues that technological advances first gave modernity a global, that is, a spatial dimension in the late nineteenth century, and this was retained into the global economy of the late twentieth. Thus in the first period of modernity, spatial awareness was an active component of critical consciousness. An example of this imbrication of spatial awareness with political consciousness is the Paris commune of the late nineteenth century. The Communards, Soja suggests, had a sharply different view of space, ownership and enclosure from

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that endorsed by the French imperial government of the time, and this shows that conflicts over space were an important social element of the first phase of modernity. With the defeat of the commune, however, critical spatial awareness can also be said to have been defeated, so that critical theory became much more interested in history than geography. The period of 1848–1917 represents an initial activation followed by a gradual sloughing off of spatial consciousness. The privileging of historical understanding over geographical awareness became strongly entrenched in critical cultural investigation between the end of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth, culminating in what Soja calls the ‘annihilation of space by time’ (Postmodern Geographies, p. 31). His point is not that space ceased to play an important constitutive role in generating social relationships between these periods; rather that the extent to which this was the case went unrecognized. Soja defines modernity as the ongoing restructuring of society. For ideologues of the modern, this gave rise to a teleological view of history that posited inequality as the result of lags in development, as if every society was heading towards the same point in history, at different rates. Again, the imbrication of western modernism with imperial thought can be readily discerned in this emphasis on the backward or primitive nature of some societies compared to others. The teleological mode of world history collapsed together what was specific and different about the – spatially different – societies. In effect it squashed them all together, onto the same path towards progress, without paying close attention to specifics of place. Such a model was implicitly therefore anti-dialectical, and disabling to any seriously critical approach to social and political relationships. Soja emphasizes that within the restructuring of society that modernization entailed, the spatial dimension was crucial, but ‘invisible’ (Postmodern Geographies, p. 34). The third period, following on from the initial activation and secondary evanescence of a critical spatial ontology came between 1918 and 1968. This stage in the development of a politically engaged human geography saw what would eventually be a productive encounter between western Marxism and spatial awareness. This uncovering took place against a backdrop where historical consciousness and materialism had become dominant. Meanwhile, Soja locates the passage from modernism to postmodernity in the 1960s – at the end of a long post-war boom in world capitalism. In his account, the spatial turn is a conjunction of post-historicism with postFordist economic and productive practices. This conjunction came about with the realization that increased material living standards in the western

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world did not necessarily lead to increased political power among its citizens. On the contrary, it left them vulnerable to sudden downturns in the global economic cycle, which revealed sharp differentials between those in power and those outside. This was very clear in Vietnam, in Cuba, in the protests over Britain’s nuclear submarine capability, and a host of others. A surrender of political strength is the price paid by the western consumer for a higher material standard of living. Seeds of resistance are sown when global recession reduces that material standard of living and leaves the consumer without political or economic power. These are the origins of a critical spatial postmodernity. Soja suggests that it was the sociologist Manuel Castells who made the spatial turn in the name of an emancipatory politics. Social scientists prior to 1968 had tended to assume that that global societies are differentiated on the basis of time lags and uneven temporal development. Marx’s dialectical view of historical materialism had suggested that time enabled capitalist practices to divide the world into functionally unequal societies, by consigning the violence and social injustices inherent in the process to the remote past and hence insulating the western consumer from revulsion to these things. Castells’s The City and the Grassroots implicitly re-wrote these modernist and Marxist assumptions. In the new sociology of Castells, the distancing of cause from effect that is typical of uneven economic development is associated not with time, but with physical space. The influential art critic John Berger made explicit what was implicit in the work of Castells when he wrote, ‘it is space not time that hides consequences from us’ (quoted in Postmodern Geographies, p. 22). What was new with the spatial turn in the human sciences was not the role played by space and distance in generating human relationships, but the recognition of that role. Distance enabled the hierarchical structuring of the world during the imperial period (which was also the period of modernity) by blinding the bulk of the western population to the cruelty and violence carried out in their name. This violence was hidden through time and space so that the physical geography of the world played an important part in generating the political relationships on which the imperial order was founded. To what extent, even today, are Britain’s concentration camps in Kenya, its racially supremacist education system in India, or its guerrilla wars in Malaysia common knowledge in Britain? It was the effective spatial distancing of these things, plus their ideological construction as necessary elements in the development of backward or out-dated societies that constituted the order of the period.

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The encounter between Marxism and geography would lead to a new kind of inter-disciplinarity capable of transforming both. Soja locates the founding of this new discipline around 1980. He argues that in the work of French Marxism of this time, especially that of Henri Lefebvre, there is an examination of the spatialization of consciousness within a capitalist urban environment, and an emphasis on the spatial dimension of urban planning that reveals how space itself is implicated and activated in the reproduction of power in hierarchical relationships. Lefebvre’s deployment of spatial metaphors were usefully suggestive for the early stages of a spatial critical consciousness. Soja also identifies this spatial significance in the critical journal Antipode, and the work of David Harvey. Urban geography and international development both began to be read as capitalist accumulation and class struggle, or as Soja puts it, ‘adding Marx to geography’ (Postmodern Geographies, p. 54). The reciprocal correlative of this was to add geography to Marxism. On Soja’s account, this encounter would result in the emergence both of a socio-spatial dialectic and a historico-geographical materialism, arising out of the conflict between Marxist orthodoxy and critique in the 1970s. A critical postmodern geography combines history and geography dialectically to demystify the empirical world. It locates transformative potential within a politically charged historical geography, a ‘spatio-temporal perspective’(Postmodern Geographies, p. 73), rather than in the rigid determinism of historicism or geographism tout court. The new spatio-temporal dialectic reveals how space itself is created as a process of human intervention in a pre-human landscape. Space and place are humanly constituted rather than natural. Accordingly, they are open to political intervention and change, and the same is true of the human relationships that they generate. Once the spatial turn had been taken, Soja suggests, the path was open to a critical postmodernity based on an understanding of how distance and place reinforce and contribute to deepening social injustice. If the moment of modernity is equated with political imperialism and injustice, then a politically active postmodernism might also be opposed to the central tenets of imperialism. But demystification and deconstruction are not enough. Soja notes how a restructuring of spatial power structures is also needed – in tune with the specific emancipation struggles of those oppressed by the geography of capitalism: workers, women, tyrannized peoples. Fredric Jameson has similarly suggested that a new cognitive mapping is needed to see beyond the spatial structures of power, and to create a radical political spatial consciousness.2

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What all this points towards, for Soja, is an identification of the human landscape as a text, which must be read according to a specific code. The capital process which creates the urban landscape is complex – full of contradictions – and a similarly complex mapping is therefore required in order to read it. In other words, to Soja, postmodernism is all about finding cultural modes of opposition to the major centres of political power. Thus the real fourth stage – the real postmodern geographies – are still to come.

Those Modernist Angels The interplay between socialist political ideal and nationalist geographic imagination is a very prominent feature in Andrew O’Hagan’s 1999 novel Our Fathers. Like Raymond Williams’s novel Border Country, Our Fathers is about the awkward reconciliation realized when the son of an old-fashioned labour family moves away to England to launch a career, and returns across the border when confronted with the death of a father. The son, Jamie Bawn, had moved from Glasgow to Liverpool following the break-up of the marriage of his parents, Robert and Alice. He returns when Robert’s father, Hugh Bawn, a retired municipal architect, suffers a rapid decline in health and dies. As in Border Country, the main focus of Our Fathers is on Hugh’s past life, career and political aspirations. Having been brought up by parents Euphemia and Thomas Bawn who were themselves active socialist campaigners for better housing and social welfare during the First World War, Hugh had devoted his career to building improved civic housing facilities in the poorest areas of Glasgow and had sought to improve the squalid conditions of life in the industrial areas by doing so. Hugh learns of these activities in flashback, upon returning to attend to the illness – and subsequent funeral – of his grandfather. In other words, Our Fathers instantiates Soja’s insight, that social space has a formative effect on social relationships, and that to contest the construction of different forms of social space is also to oppose the dominant political order of the time. What is striking about Our Fathers is how few characters it contains. Jamie, his parents Alice and Robert, and his grandparents Hugh and Margaret more or less populate the entire novel, with occasional references to the political heritage of his great-grandparents, Thomas and Euphemia. Yet this relative scarcity of people is in contrast to the overwhelming sense of urban density that the novel generates. Glasgow is unmistakeably a vast human conurbation, from the Gorbels estate to Booth’s Tower, from the

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British legion club to the Kirk of Allouay, built in 1659. The strong sense of the built environment, and its residue of architectural monuments from every stage of the city’s past, conflicts with a much less strongly expressed human geography. Glasgow is a ghost city, in whose crumbling tenements and dilapidated factories Hugh and Margaret Bawn are trapped – imprisoned in the failure of their social and political aspirations. The Glasgow of Our Fathers is a modernist city par excellence. Its population had rapidly increased during the machine age at the end of the nineteenth century, as greater and greater numbers of people migrated from rural areas in search of employment in the new modernist factories and housing in the new modernist tenements. Urban migration was greatly accelerated by the greatest modernist catastrophe – the First World War. ‘In Govan the wars came early, with all-night work in the shipyards, and massive cranes lifting high above the Clyde. And at every angle tenement streets, the buildings scarred and black as lungs, the buildings piled with ash’.3 The experience of war, and the need for improved social conditions, prompted Hugh’s mother, Eupehmia (‘Famie’) Bawn to begin a campaign for improved civic accommodation in the city. First she sought to prevent unscrupulous landlords from profiteering from the war by increasing rents for the limited number of tenements, and then she actively sought to replace the city’s vast slums with sanitary apartments. She took this campaign all the way to the Prime Minister: Lloyd George got the message of that day. And the Rent Restrictions Bill was not long in marking the books. Famie liked to say that they had given Lloyd George something to talk about. They gave him a subject: Housing . . . She carried in her purse a snip from a London newspaper. They quoted a speech in Wolverhampton. ‘What is our task?’ he said. ‘To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in. That is the first problem. One of the ways of dealing with that is, of course, to deal with the housing conditions. Slums are not fit homes for the men who have won this war, or for their children’. (Our Fathers, p. 103) Famie’s campaign for improved housing in Scotland was built out of a sense of entrapment: the ways in which people could easily become imprisoned in low quality, unsanitary and overcrowded accommodation, even during an age where modernization offered to solve these problems. Having been born into a family of strident campaigners for political reform, Hugh himself is virtually imprisoned in the same environment, unable to imagine any

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better way of devoting his life than to the mission for slum replacement. This is why Soja refers to the great cities of the modernist imagination as carceral, and why attempts at re-structuring forms of social space are also attempts at reorganizing power relationships. The Second World War enables Hugh to take his building project to a greater degree than had been possible for his mother, so that when Jamie looks up at a tower block constructed by Hugh years later, he is struck by the zeal, the political aspiration and the material possibilities that his grandfather’s work must once have seemed to offer: Once that block had been pure perfection. Made by those modernist angels: the engineers. And my granda Hugh was the local Saints Peter and Paul. He just wanted towers stretching all over Scotland. Tower after tower, a legend of progress. Most of the high-rises on the west coast of Scotland were made, or inspired, out of Hugh Bawn’s zeal, and his tireless days as a housing boss. A priest of steel decking and concrete was Hugh. (Our Fathers, p. 68) Hugh’s tireless work to improve the built environment was two-fold. His reforming zeal was aimed at reforming the quality and nature of housing available to the human populace. This in turn was attached to an equally passionate political zeal, whereby improved housing would lead to the overhauling of Scotland’s stratification of social classes, and create a more equitable human landscape through the interaction of the human population with its built environment. This is an extreme form of the political aspiration that Hugh inherited from his mother Famie, and others like her, who used to exchange slogans and phrases expressing their political goals: One of my granda’s oldest chums was an architect, a pipe-smoking man in love with those phrases. And he believed every one of them. He spoke of the blocks as social saviours, artistic wonders, a triumph of this over that. He once described some of the creations he fashioned on the slopes of Sheffield as looking like Tuscan hill villages in the half-light. To the housing committee he passed out postcards of St Mark’s Square in Venice. ‘This is our example of a mixed style’, he said. (Our Fathers, p. 191) O’Hagan recreates in the novel the genuine sense of optimism, aspiration and belief in progress that men such as this architect must have felt. Improved material conditions would lead to improved social conditions which would lead to improved political relations and the Scottish human environment as a whole would benefit. In this sense, the main character,

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Hugh, is the focus for a whole generation’s social and political aspirations. He embodies those aspirations because he typifies so many of them: Labour was made from men like Hugh. They came into their own after the war. My granda used his connections to attract thousands of new workers to the building industry. The time had come. Glasgow would build. Hugh’s plans seemed to embody all the lessons of the past: the gains of three decades, the losses of the war. He invented a motto for the City Housing Department: ‘The maximum number of houses in the shortest possible time’. (Our Fathers, p. 117) The political heritage and sense of possibility was inherited by Hugh from his mother and her generation of post-First World War reformers. They are not, however, shared by his grandson, Jamie. For Jamie, the words ‘The maximum number of houses in the shortest possible time’ carry two contradictory valences. To Hugh, they expressed an almost religious belief in the possibilities of the machine age, and how much it could achieve. That easy sense of purpose and possibility is not shared by a younger generation 50 years later, who have seen the aspirations of affordable civic accommodation and improved social relations come to nothing. Those words of Jamie’s grandfather have changed in value over time, so that they come to stand less for possibility and more for the confrontation of political hope with a cruel economic system in which that political hope will be dashed. There are more than a couple of hints in the novel that Hugh himself might have resorted to bribery and corruption in the fulfilling of his contracts. Certainly, the implication of maximum housing in minimum time at minimum cost speaks to Jamie more of compromised ambition and potentially botched workmanship than it would have to Hugh and his circle. The modernist experiment in civic re-generation was also an experiment in social engineering. If it really had starkly failed by the time of the generation of characters such as Jamie Bawn, what might those political ideals, and material architectural solutions, be replaced with? To answer this question requires an examination of the origins and development of a critical concept of postmodernity.

Charles Jencks and the Architectural Postmodern Our Fathers graphically portrays the relationship that exists between space and power. Hugh Bawn attempts to provide improved social housing as a way of accessing improved economic conditions and hence also of challenging

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the class structure of society. To attempt a new kind of building is, in this sense, a revolutionary act. It is of great significance that the concept of postmodernism arose in late twentieth-century architecture. The postmodern is not simply what replaces or comes after the modern, but more specifically, it is what arises from the experience of modernity and is rooted in it. In terms of civic and social engineering, concepts of postmodernity are rooted in the modernist experiment via political and social aspirations. Modernist and postmodern architects each believed that they could improve social relations by providing an altered built environment, but they sought to do so in different ways. There is thus a certain continuity of aspiration from modernity, but also a departure from modernity in the precise technical solutions employed. In other words, postmodernism arises in architecture out of a sense that the great tower blocks of modernity imprisoned their tenants in low-grade and socially unedifying accommodation in exactly the same way as did the slums that they were designed to replace. The social goal of amelioration remains constant; the means by which this is to be achieved begin to vary. Charles Jencks, one of the early exponents of architectural postmodernism, expresses the drift in the following way: Here was a role which was elevating and understandable – a mission for a social group that was fast becoming a patronless class. Artists, like architects, were often underemployed and at the mercy of a heartless economic system. Where before they had a defined relationship to a patron – the State, Church or an individual – now they related to a marketplace that was competitive and agnostic.4 The architects of modernity were freed from the patronage of monarchs, or aristocrats, or the church, and in this sense, were more genuinely able to address some concept of democracy in their work than almost all the public architecture that had preceded them for centuries. The only patron of the modernists was, Jencks suggests, a competitive economic marketplace. ‘Modern architecture is the overpowering faith in industrial progressivism and its translation into the pure, white International Style (or at least the machine aesthetic) with the goal of transforming society both in its sensibility and social make-up’(What is Post-Modernism, p. 23). Yet as with Hugh Bawn’s mantra-like insistence on building the greatest number of units of accommodation in the shortest time and at the lowest price, this can be seen as an ambivalent political development. Certainly, the freeing of

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public engineering from the prerogatives of an elite enabled modernist architects to work on homes for a greater number of the population, rather than on the palaces, castles, and churches which had been the preserve of all public architecture until the previous century. At the same time, the economic marketplace brought certain pressures of its own which would have a strong impact upon the possibilities for social amelioration. Inevitable compromise followed. The castles in the air of the modernist dream soon became sink estates, towering prefabricated structures where too many people lived in too little space, where cramped conditions gave rise to anger, disaffection, and violence and where a downward cycle of deprivation took hold. Charles Jencks expresses this cycle in more technical terminology when he writes, ‘lack of personal defensible space represents just one of the problems of this typology; scale, density and symbolism are equally questionable’ (What is Post-Modernism, p. 31). Examples of the kinds of modernist structure he references are those of the great modernist architects, Le Corbusier and Mies Van der Rohe. Jencks suggests that these men’s designs trap their inhabitants in an unsanitary lifestyle and vegetating social ambition. He notes that such figures ‘took the worship of machine evolution to a preposterous level’ in their belief that technology could be used to enable man to conquer nature and so provide an improved material standard of living all round (What is Post-Modernism, p. 25). In Our Fathers, Hugh Bawn is an example of such a figure: The paper called him Mr Housing. The paper called them Skyscrapers. Skyscrapers. Even the word made you feel part of a bigger universe. In the yellow room the Bawn group talked of Le Corbusier. ‘We’ve been slow to catch on’, said Hugh. ‘We’ve been working up to this’. He would thrill the councillors with talk of Berlin and Chicago and Copenhagen. (Our Fathers, pp. 119–20) Le Corbusier famously described his modernist houses as ‘machines for living in’ and in Hugh’s enthusiasm for technology, skyscrapers and progress, we can sense something of the seductive nature of this promise. In Our Fathers, however, Andrew O’Hagan uses the device of retrospective narration to plunge this enthusiasm into ironic and even cruel relief. By oscillating between Hugh’s childhood, when the ideals of his mother still held good, and his old-age, when those same ideals have come to utter travesty, O’Hagan steps over the entire period of Hugh’s working career, the period during which the dedicated urban planner is imagined to have

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been at the height of his work. Instead of focusing too greatly on Hugh as an individual, O’Hagan directs attention to a later moment in history, where Hugh’s personal aims, and the historical moment he typifies, have come to ruin. For the modern architects whom Hugh typifies, machines are antithetical to nature. It is machines that will allow mankind to subdue the natural world and erect the great technological cities of urban architectural modernity. Two generations after the work of Famie and Hugh, however, Jamie’s experience of the relationship between the natural and the built environments is quite different. The physical make-up of Scotland, its grass and mud, its granite and stone, are here imagined as an important receptacle or bearer of Scotland’s particular history and culture, and this recalls Iain Banks’s novel The Crow Road. When Jamie returns to Scotland in the opening section of Our Fathers, he looks at the physical landscape from the vantage point of a train window and notes his impressions: I thought of the carbon exhaled in the breath of those living. The stuff absorbed by those meadows outside. The atoms deep down, in the coal out there – pressure and time, pressure and time – which had gone from the tiny expanse of our lives. I thought of the carbon in crude iron ore – burning away, burning away – but keeping enough for to make it good steel. The train and the fields and the houses and me. (Our Fathers, p. 53) In a curiously cyclical pattern, the air makes Jamie think of grass and trees which inhale carbon dioxide, and exhale oxygen. This gives the trees a particularly human characteristic. ‘Plants are provincial and family-minded: they are made and shaped by immediate conditions; ten miles up the coast and the air might kill them off . . . But yes those flowerings were ones for the family. One-parent clones mostly staying near to home’ (Our Fathers, pp. 152–53). The human characteristics of the natural world are a significant facet of the novel, because Jamie’s impressions are all about how Scotland’s natural geological features exist in symbiotic relationship with the human population, so that there is no easy separation between the human and the natural. This is not simply an incidental observation; on the contrary, it is the very basis of the novel. For this reason, some of Jamie’s earliest meditations are on the interpenetration of the human and the natural landscape: The burr of reform still rolled in the Garnock Valley. Out there, in the dark places, men and women had died for Melville and Knox, and the

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ground was sewn with beliefs. And now it seemed but whispering grass. The old stories gone, of ministers and miners, of union men, of troops, and now the land had been cleared. Japanese factories would be coming soon. Those fields of blood and carbon. They became the sites for the newer wars, our battles for houses and redevelopment, fought by the likes of Hugh and his mother. (Our Fathers, p. 59) Human and natural world intermingle in a cyclical field which comes to represent the whole of Scottish history. To Jamie as he surveys the fields around Glasgow, he feels a strong sense of the continuing presence of those historical people who had fought political and military battles for the improvement of the place. These ghosts of the past continue to flourish just as the plants, trees, carbon and stone remain. It is significant that O’Hagan has not chosen to use the word ‘sown’ to imply the process of planting roots in the soil. Instead he employs the metaphor of sewing beliefs together like stitching together different pieces of cloth, just as Stella Duffy uses the idea of the ‘fabric of the place’ in her 2008 novel, The Room of Lost Things.5 The metaphor implies that Scotland’s physical landscape, like its human population, is the product of human intervention. Or rather, both Scotland’s natural world and its human population are in a state of flux, and the interaction between human activity and the natural landscape produces the Scottish environment. The greatest error of the modernist architects was to assume that they could somehow stand above the dialectic of man and nature and use machines alone to subdue the natural world. This mistake was undoubtedly well-intentioned but it had the effect of creating a false or damaging view of human relationships. As Charles Jencks puts it, ‘the erosion of the city and countryside, the force of economic growth, and the style of instrumental reason – these are the universals of modernity’ (What is Post-Modernism, p. 20). To assume that machines alone could subdue nature to the cause of improved social and political conditions was to overlook the ways in which the natural world itself is always already involved in a process of interaction with the human population. Jencks says of Mies Van der Rohe’s iconic Federal Centre building in Chicago, for example, that it embodies ‘one’s relation to the state and fellow citizens – all incarcerated in this modernist anonymity run amok’ (What is Post-Modernism, p. 22). The word ‘incarcerated’ expresses the entire human and political history that O’Hagan distils lucidly in novel form throughout Our Fathers. The tower blocks of Hugh Bawn’s imagining were envisaged as crucial components

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in an improved social environment and hence in a healthily functioning democratic society. Between Hugh’s childhood and his dotage, the two periods between which the novel continually oscillates, this faith has been shown to be misguided. Political defeats, economic compromise and above all the reassertion of society’s corporate class structure have all contributed to the failure of the housing dream. Far from the castles and palaces in the air that Hugh dreamed of, his Gorbels estates have become areas of poverty and deprivation – the very phenomena he had sought to overcome. As Jencks succinctly says of the general political failures of the period, ‘modern architecture had failed to remain credible partly because it did not communicate effectively with its ultimate users . . . and partly because it did not make effective links with the city and history’(What is Post-Modernism, p. 29). Jencks goes on to enumerate the social and economic consequences of the failure of the original housing project: In reality, the dramatic failures of modern housing had political and social implications far beyond architecture: they were a harbinger of later catastrophes to come – Chernobyl; Black Monday 1987, when five trillion dollars vanished from the global economy; the Exxon/Valdez oil spill; the deathly leak of chemicals at Bhopal; the hole in the Ozone layer and other growing ecological threats. In addition, the modernist destruction of the central city was almost as apparent to the populace as the failure of housing estates. Social realities should be stressed in architecture because they are not quite the same in other fields. There is no vivid ‘death’ of Modernism in art or literature, nor the same social motivation that one finds in post-modern architecture. (What is Post-Modernism, p. 31) In Jencks’s writing, we find a rather apocalyptic account of the imbrication of social inequality with environmental disaster on a global scale. In his account, the averting of such catastrophes and hence the generation of a healthier democratic society are the political goals of improving housing conditions. Jencks believes this to be specifically the work of architectural postmodernism. He seems to overstate the case when he avers that there is not the same ‘social motivation’ in postmodern literature. Our Fathers seems to indicate that there is a social motivation in literature too. Jencks goes on to admit that ‘even in post-modern literature there is a social motive for using past forms in an ironic way’ (What is Post-Modernism, p. 31). He also suggests that ‘postmodern fiction inscribes itself within conventional discourses in order to subvert them. It incorporates cultural realities in order to challenge them: a double coding as strategy’ (What is Post-Modernism, p. 32).

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The notion of double coding is extremely important in defining concepts of the postmodern. It is the capacity of a doubly coded edifice, or novel, or what may be, to simultaneously challenge existing social relations, while also having to narrate those relations in the first place and hence provide substance to them. Our Fathers presents a doubly coded challenge to the social and material fabric of Glaswegian society because it dramatizes the struggles for improved political equality while at the same time placing a full stop at the end of the failure of those same challenges. Jencks takes this to be typical of the work of postmodernist novelists who share a similar social motivation. ‘Characteristically,’ he notes, ‘they cut across taste cultures and time, they referred to past, present and future as an evolutionary chain, and they challenged categories of exclusion. These were [also] the attainments of architectural and urban post-modernism’ (What is PostModernism, pp. 39–40). The challenge to categories of social exclusion is the goal of Jencks’s work in social engineering, just as it is Hugh Bawn’s goal in Our Fathers. In O’Hagan’s novel, social space plays a strongly constitutive role in shaping people’s lives and the relationships between people out of which a society is built. By portraying some of the different kinds of social space in which the deprived and the powerless can be imprisoned, O’Hagan seeks to challenge these categories of oppression. Our Fathers instantiates the kind of literature which Jencks characterizes as postmodern. It is formed out of a dramatic interplay between past and present, in which, as we have seen, the aspirations of a past generation and the very words in which they are expressed come to stand, at a later period, for something quite different. This ironic introspection of civic ideals enables O’Hagan to dramatize the drift from modernity to a critical concept of postmodern engineering in which what is being manufactured is again both a set of concrete housing structures and an accompanying social transformation. Our Fathers in this sense is both accommodating and subversive in the way that Jencks suggests is emblematic of postmodern work. As a result, it is tempting to see the novel as a testament to the failure of old labour aspirations. Yet Our Fathers does not simply elegize the failure of one generation’s political hopes. For as we have seen, though their precise practices might have failed, the motivating political feelings remain constant. The novel reaches a climax with the death of Hugh but, significantly, it does not end there. It concludes with Jamie forming an uneasy reconciliation with each of his divorced parents. O’Hagan is certainly less confident, at the end of the novel, of the possibility that material engineering might give rise to real social engineering. Nevertheless he hints, against the weight of certain historical defeats, that this might still be possible.

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In this sense, the concluding words of the novel are more profound than they might at first seem. Jamie goes to empty out the home of his now deceased grandfather and comes across a poster displaying one of Hugh’s favourite mantras. ‘There are ruined buildings in the world, it said, but no ruined stones’ (Our Fathers, p. 282). The stones that constitute the Scottish nation can be aggregated together to generate the social spaces, the very buildings, in which the Scottish people live. By building civic accommodation, the new architects of postmodernity will also be building a new Scottish nation, properly able to take its place on the world stage. Our Fathers demonstrates the fragile possibility that this new stage of modernity, the properly postmodern stage, might give rise to the improved social and political conditions which are its constant goal.

Heligoland and Postmodern Geographies At the climax of Our Fathers, Jamie witnesses the destruction of one of his grandfather’s old skyscrapers to make way for improved development. In the following chapter, Hugh himself dies. The implication appears to be that to destroy the work is to destroy the man. Shena Mackay’s 2003 novel Heligoland, like Our Fathers, cultivates a metaphorical association between the urban planner and his or her work. In each novel, the destruction of a building represents defeat of political ambition and ushers in symbolic death. In Heligoland, an exploration of different kinds of social space is complicated by the relationships between power, race and gender. Heligoland is the story of Rowena Snow, an Indian-born orphan who had been shipped over to Scotland at a very young age following the death of her parents. There, she resides with Lady Grouseclaw, a distant relative, until a minor indiscretion with Lady Grouseclaw’s son Hamish results in her being sent away to an English boarding school, Chestnuts, where she remains until she moves to London. She works in a number of domestic jobs before finally settling at the Nautilus, an architectural and intellectual commune, as a housemaid to Celeste Zylberstein, widow of the building’s late architect, Arkady. As with Our Fathers, Heligoland makes a conjunction between projects to improve social housing and attempts at changing the political structure of the country. For Celeste and Arkady in Heligoland, construction of the Nautilus had been both an artistic project, and a political dream. The enlightened urban planners of the 1930s had believed that by providing improved social housing in the crowded urban areas, social relationships might be

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improved and through the amelioration of the physical living conditions of the most deprived, social inequality might be combated. Unfortunately by the time of Rowena’s entry into the Nautilus 70 years later, these social and political aspirations have been travestied by years of political failure and recurring economic inequality, so that in place of the modernist Utopia that Celeste had planned, the city is left with the deprived Belfairs estate. For Arkady Zylberstein, the failure of his project in social engineering comes more or less as a physical ailment blighting his health and welfare. We are told that when his building projects ran out of funding and began to be pulled down, he ‘had not lived to see the demolition of his last commission, a primary school in Croydon’ because he ‘had collapsed at an architectural conference at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-sea’.6 His vocational imperative to build a better country by providing improved physical structures and harmonious living space for the urban population was so strong that the failure of that mission is more or less what strikes him down, dying in the course of his work at an architectural conference. Mackay reinforces the point by telling us that when Arkady’s last work, the school, was being destroyed, ‘Celeste had chanced upon the school’s destruction, and it was like a second funeral service for Arkady’ (Heligoland, p. 25). All of the action of Heligoland takes place inside the Nautilus, or on expeditions back and forth to it by other residents: Celeste, her grown-up granddaughter Rachel and the poet Francis Campion. This sense of entrapment again replicates O’Hagan’s sense of imprisonment in the carceral city of Our Fathers. Everything that we learn about Rowena is learned through uneasy flashback. Her life story reveals a complex interplay between memory and forgetting, between time and place and between solidarity and solitude. It is rendered through the mobilization of a spatio-temporal dialectic. In order to find out who Rowena is, we find ourselves needing to find out where she is from, and also in a curious sense, when she is from. ‘Rowena associated snow, and also rhododendrons, with her childhood in Scotland; she had no recollection of the foothills in the Himalayas where she was born or of the ship that brought her as an orphaned baby from India’ (Heligoland, p. 3). The spatiality and also the temporality of her existence are both mysteries. Francis asks her about her genealogy and the answer is vague: She replies in an exhausted voice, ‘I come from a long line of orphans. My father was Scottish. He was killed on the Burma front’.

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‘So you’re half Burmese?’ Francis looks pleased, as if he’s been proved right. ‘My mother was Indian. I was brought up in Scotland by my aunt, until she died. Then I was sent to an English boarding school’. (Heligoland, p. 59) The extraordinary phrase ‘I come from a long line of orphans’ seems to ironically invert the conventional pride with which aristocratic families might inform their neighbours that they come from a long line of Grouseclaws. Physically, it seems impossible to come from a line of orphans, for to map the family lineage backwards through more than one orphaned generation appears to cut the branches of the family tree off to all other members. In the context of the novel, however, this seems strangely appropriate. Rowena is not an aristocrat, or an architect, or an intellectual. Compared to such people she seems to be a nobody, descended from a long line of nobodies. Her past appears not to be worth knowing about so that everything about her is written in the present tense. She ‘replies’ to Francis’s question about her background (present tense). We are not told how she ‘replied’ (past tense). The principal mode of narration Mackay employs is omniscient third person past tense, and yet in the case of Rowena this seems to break down in the face of the spatio-temporal dialectic, not allowing us to know where she has come from, or when. In this way, the central figure of Rowena, a racially mixed, uneducated, and unskilled worker is made to seem more enigmatic than the supposedly cosmopolitan intellectuals among whom she resides but who are for the most part dismissive of her. The spatio-temporal dialectic tells us that everything in Rowena’s life belongs to a different place and a different time. In the Nautilus she is sheltered from her own past and her own sense of place, but any attempt to think outside its walls requires knowledge of other times and other places. These memories are violent and often painful, as when she recalls the first Christmas after leaving Scotland: She remembers a parcel arriving at Christmas, blobbed with red sealing wax and addressed in Lady Ferguson’s writing. It contained a jigsaw puzzle of a map of Scotland. Lady Ferguson became Lady Grouseclaw the day she packed Rowena off to Chestnuts. Until then Rowena loved her, and had even stroked the pheasants’ feathers trembling on her hats, the foxes’ paws that clasped her neck, the brooches made from birds’ feet set with amethysts and tourmaline. From the bitter perspective of Chestnuts, the Castle bristled with rods, guns, traps and snares, the kitchen table was heaped with carcasses and an ashet full of blood stood on the draining

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board, birds hung in bunches from hooks and antlered heads mourned from the walls. (Heligoland, pp. 50–51) Again, the entire memory is cast in the present tense (‘she remembers . . .’), although this grammatical construction is curiously at odds with the distant past that she is remembering. Heligoland is a blend of fairytale or fable with a postmodern mapping of the human environment. When Rowena recalls the past, everything appears to occur in one ongoing sequence, without a sense of beginning or ending, like Walt Disney’s classic fairytale animations of Snow White or Beauty and the Beast. As in a fairytale, Rowena’s past is populated by hopes and dreams which are squashed and destroyed by drudgery and villainy. Rowena has dreamt of escaping these things, vowing ‘never to think about Hamish ever again . . . and specially not Lord Killdeer and Lady Grouseclaw’ (Heligoland, p. 51). These deliberately anti-realistic names are one of the mechanisms by which Mackay combines fable with postmodern narrative. Lady Grouseclaw and Lord Killdeer do not feel like characters in a realist narrative: they are cartoon villains. Like cartoon villains, they shut themselves up in a castle of darkness and blood, from which they plot Rowena’s downfall. Her crime – daring like Cinderella to dream of marrying their son Hamish – results in her being sent away forever, and this subsequently provokes another painful memory years later, from the sanctuary of the Nautilus: Once she had imagined Hamish and herself living in the Castle, but she recognizes that Graeme would have inherited it . . . What destiny had awaited Hamish, the youngest, landless son? (Heligoland, p. 52) In an instant we switch between Rowena’s past in Scotland and the present in London, with surprisingly little sense of the weight of accumulated years in between. In other words, as Edward Soja suggests, it is space, not time, that hides from Rowena the consequences of her own past. When she is sent away from Scotland, she is distanced from Hamish by place, rather than by time. She retrospectively realizes that her dreams of marrying Hamish and inheriting the castle were futile, since his older brother Graeme would have inherited it. This realization is once more cast in the present tense – she recognizes that Graeme would have inherited it – which undercuts the easy narrative structure of the simple past. All time seems to be present, but each place is distinct from every other. Hamish’s own landless fate is significant in this regard, because the continual scrambling and recasting of borders is one of the important facets of the novel. The jigsaw puzzle that Rowena received from Lady Grouseclaw

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represents Scotland being pulled apart and broken into fragments, and this is emblematic of what has happened not only to Rowena’s own past, but also to the places in which that past was played out. Although she cannot recover her past by physically travelling back to it, she can retrieve a sense of place by travelling to some of the places which have constituted her life. Heligoland itself, a mysterious island in the North Sea which Rowena has only heard about on the radio shipping forecast, symbolizes her movement back and forth between different times and different places. When she asks Francis where the island is, his reply is therefore ambiguous: ‘My dear girl, I remember nothing about Heligoland, and now less than I might have. It’s always sounded desolate to me. Always being traded off by some disreputable government to another. Why the fascination?’ ‘Oh, it’s just – a land that I heard of once, in a lullaby.’ (Heligoland, p. 97) Rowena is interested in Heligoland because it seems to symbolize her own cultural dislocation. Francis’s question about her fascination therefore is also a question about her own past. It results in an evasive answer that recalls a classic fairytale. Rather than discussing herself or her dreams, Rowena diverts attention onto the words ‘once in a lullaby’, taken directly from the classic film The Wizard of Oz, which is all about the encounter between one time and place with another. The only thing that Francis can say for certain about Heligoland is that it often changes hands from one national government to another.7 In other words, the island is physically there, yet as a politically constituted state it does not strictly speaking exist. Upon approach, it continually melts into air, and this is emblematic of Rowena’s own past: Political and metropolitan maps had been redrawn. Heligoland, or Helgoland, did exist, she knew from checking in an atlas, a small island in the North Sea belonging to Germany, off the mouth of the River Elbe, but the Heligoland of her heart was, as the imagination makes possible, both an island over unnavigable seas and a fairground roundabout. Her childhood world had been destroyed as if by a hurricane roaring out of blue skies, and so she could never hear the shipping forecast without becoming for a moment a child in a kitchen with her beloved aunt. (Heligoland, p. 7) Heligoland is both real and imagined, reachable and impossible. In fact, the world of Heligoland is one where borders constantly dissolve only to reappear again somewhere else. When Gus Van Sant is asked by his friend Rhiannon to help find her daughter, he drives out to one of the London City Council’s

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relatively deprived housing estates, ‘built by the LCC in a spirit of post-war optimism’ (Heligoland, p. 82). Readers attuned to the nuances of local government boundary changes will observe the fact that the London City Council itself had ceased to exist by the moment at which Heligoland was written. As Mark Garnett points out, writing about the campaign waged by predominantly Labour local councils to retain their autonomy from an increasingly right-wing Conservative government during the 1980s, ‘another defensive struggle, to keep the Greater London Council (GLC) and other metropolitan councils in existence, was equally unsuccessful. In 1985 the Tories simply used their parliamentary majority to abolish these institutions, which had tried to resist the rise of the ideological right.’8 Mackay’s trick, in other words, is to conjure up a place that no longer existed by the time at which it was being imagined, right in the heart of London. The same trick is employed in Sebastian Faulks’s more recent novel, Engleby, where the jack-of-all-trades title character works as a journalist and goes to interview the council’s out-going leader (and subsequent mayor of London) Ken Livingston, about the replacement of the London City Council by a new Greater London Council.9 As with the island of Heligoland, the Belfairs estate which Gus visits is physically real, but in a location that no longer officially exists. It, like Heligoland, is both there and not there, so that the shifting political boundaries make it difficult to gain a sense of location. We know precisely where the limits of the London City Council had ended in the past, the novel suggests; it is the present boundary demarcations that make its spatial definition more slippery so that present definitions of place are again rendered curiously elusive or absent. The inability to locate a firm sense of place seems to be Rowena’s experience of the whole of Britain. The longer she stays in the Nautilus, the less certainty she feels towards the physical land outside. Celeste goes on a political march opposing the tightening of immigration laws, and we are told that ‘the Home Office headquarters of the Immigration and Nationality Directive’ to which she marches has the provocative name of ‘Lunar House’. Inside it, ‘some fifteen miles of shelving sag beneath the weight of 200,000 case files bulging with a backlog of heartbreak, lies and truths lost in translation’ (Heligoland, p. 44). It is as if the miles of boundaries that constitute the nation-state have been transformed into so much paperwork, waiting to be filed, classified and reduced. This is made almost explicit when Celeste explains to Rowena the early days of the Nautilus: Celeste loves the Essex coast and she had been intrigued to learn that Gus’s mother was the daughter of Plotlanders, the people who had bought

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their marshy strips of real estate for a song and set up home there in hand-built shacks and old railway carriages, cultivating their gardens and constructing permanent dwellings. Communities of all sorts fascinated her, from the individualistic settlements of Plotlanders and Dungeness to benevolent dictatorships and philanthropic democracies. Port Sunlight, Bournville, Portmeirion, Hampstead Garden Suburb, Welwyn Garden City, Letchworth, all the new towns, Celeste and her husband Arkady had visited them, in pleasurable research for their own housing schemes. (Heligoland, pp. 24–25) The coastline that Rowena took to be stable and secure is suddenly revealed by Celeste’s account of the Plotlanders on the Essex coast to be anything but constant or reliable. This sense of physical threat from the shifting landscape draws her to the sanctuary of Celeste’s Nautilus. ‘During the Chestnuts years, Rowena longed for a room of her own . . . At her first sight of the Nautilus, it was [sic] as if the lustre of the building filled her heart and ran through her veins’ (Heligoland, p. 22). The long-lasting influence of Virginia Woolf on British women writers can be discerned in Rowena’s dream of a room of her own. That influence is given a strong spatial turn in the face of Rowena’s flight from the shifting boundaries of the country to which she (like Woolf) does not feel she belongs. It was after all Woolf who had earlier written, ‘as a woman I have no nation. As a woman I want no nation.’10 The Nautilus is a haven for Rowena, but it is also something else. It is emblematic of the spatial turn in the human and social sciences, and of the realization explored by Edward Soja that space and place play fundamental constitutive roles in determining social relations which are also class relations and political relations. This realization gradually dawns on Rowena throughout Heligoland. The Nautilus is a carapace, a shell that protects her from the world but in which she is herself trapped. It is only when she realizes this that she is able to sally forth and find out who she is. By the end of the novel, Rowena has made two critically informed spatial decisions. One is to travel to Scotland to investigate her heritage at that end of the country in more depth than she has previously dared. Secondly, it occurs to her ‘that if she could face going into a travel agent’s, she might as well pick up some brochures about travelling to India some day in the future. It would be the first tentative step on the long journey to find her family’ (Heligoland, p. 199). The spatial turn reveals that Scotland and India have an important living connection in Rowena’s life that transcends the political boundaries of any individual nation. In Edward Soja’s terms, it is

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distance, not time, that conceals consequences. Having realized this, Rowena decides to travel across those distances, and explore the decisions that have shaped her life. Only then will she be able to face the rest of the world on equal terms, valuing herself as much as the artists and intellectuals for whom she works, as a fully developed citizen of it. Shena Mackay’s Heligoland has much in common with Rachel Seiffert’s Afterwards. In both writers, a woman’s rebellion against the existing domestic order carries implicit political connotations which are never fully expounded, so that the politically oppositional tendencies of both novels become transformed into private and personal adventures, rather than public or national agendas for reform. This is very much in the tradition of women’s writing handed down from Virginia Woolf. The fact that Mackay’s protagonist is the daughter of an Indian mother implies that her social exclusion is partly due to her gender and partly to her race. In the long history of western literature, public spaces are associated with male power and authority, whereas domestic spaces of home and hearth are associated with women and family. Edward Soja and Charles Jencks both draw attention to the extent to which social spaces shape and inform hierarchical relations. Yet neither of them have anything to say on matters of power and space as these things are made manifest in the specific domains of gender or race. It is to these areas that the following chapters will turn.

Chapter Four


In Heligoland, Shena Mackay portrays the process of decay within a communal housing project, and the failure of the social and political aspirations that lie behind that project. These political dreams and conflicts are complicated in the novel by the fact that the protagonist is part-Scottish and part-Indian. She is a working-class incomer to a London that seems alien to her. And she is a woman. Her subjectivity is divided along all of these axes, so that her life consists of a series of internal conflicts, and an attempt at self-definition. This is a common strand in much recent women’s writing. The goals of feminist cultural practice are to explore received notions of gender identity and role, and to develop alternatives. Among the techniques available for this in the visual arts are the politics of mimicry and parody. Linda Hutcheon has pointed out how feminist photographic portrait artists such as Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman use their work to contest or subvert received notions of beauty, femininity and hence of women’s roles and identities. As Hutcheon says, ‘construction of the female self, fixed by the masculine gaze, is both presented and ironized . . . the subject and object of . . . woman as sign, of woman as positioned by gender – but also by race and class’.1 The ironic subversion of received ideas of womanhood operates as a kind of mimicry. The work of Levine and Sherman upholds the long history of depicting women as fetish objects for the scopophilic pleasure of the male gaze, at the same time as they parody and subvert such images. If this is true of feminist visual art, it is particularly true of feminist film. Mary Ann Doane has drawn attention to how film organizes relationships between characters on screen and viewers outside the box, with the result that the relationship between viewer and object helps constitute the subjectivity of the viewing subject. Mainstream cinema, Doane suggests, organizes female subjects into a series of hierarchically encoded relationships with regard to the dominant male characters of the films, and hence also with regard to male society outside the cinema. In a sense, Doane implies,


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women thus have their femininity inflicted on them by the long history of received concepts of womanliness. As with the visual artists Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman, Mary Ann Doane implies that one of the techniques by which feminist filmmakers can resist that long history is to mobilize it against itself: simultaneously portraying received images of femininity and subverting them. Women filmmakers, like the colonial subjects of the imperial period, can mimic the dominant ideology by taking it to an even greater extent than its own practitioners: ‘a woman might flaunt her femininity, produce herself as an excess of femininity, in other words, foreground the masquerade’.2 Doane refers to this kind of mimicry as ‘masquerade’ because it is a feminist technique for appearing more feminine even than the role of femininity assigned to women on screen. ‘Masquerade . . . constitutes an acknowledgement that it is femininity itself which is constructed as a mask’ (ibid.). Like mimicry, and like parodic self-portraiture, the masquerade of femininity provides an excess of the very imagery it is seeking to subvert, thereby simultaneously reinforcing and contesting that imagery. This notion of the masquerade, or pageant, is highly operative in the work of contemporary women writers. In the pageantry of power, contradictions in the dominant ideology are performed before the eyes of the spectator, bringing the audience to an awareness of how inherited ideas about women’s roles and identities might be both contested and subverted. The masquerade of femininity is mobilized in two important British feminist novels for precisely this effect. A. S. Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden parodies the courtly pageants held to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, in order to question the relationship between female subjects and the apparatus of the political state. Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum similarly satirizes the pageantry of national holidays, and the relationship between male-authored public culture and the reception of that culture in the places traditionally assigned to women. For both Byatt and Atkinson, the pageantry of power is a technique by which women are able to contest received ideas about a woman’s place.

The Pageantry of Power The pageant was the archetypal form of official, or courtly, entertainment during the first Elizabethan age. From Walter Raleigh’s poems idealizing Queen Elizabeth as a semi-mythical being named Cynthia, through Ben Jonson’s court masques and the stage settings of Inigo Jones, right up to

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Milton’s Comus, the pageant was the dramatic form that most readily allegorized the social structures of renaissance England, converting an aristocratic class structure into a spectacle of natural idyll, often with an associated invocation of moral teaching and didacticism. Jed Esty has suggested that throughout the post-war period too, the community pageant was an important part of English culture’s self-definition. This is because, Esty argues, the pageant form occurs at local level within specific communities, and was therefore a cultural form appropriate to a national culture whose scale and perspective were being slimmed down during the period of decolonization. The pageant, by its very nature, is centred on local village green and church hall, containing recognizable local figures both as actors and as characters. The pageant is quite a different cultural form from the imperial or war adventure story, with which the reading public may have been saturated during the 1930s and 1940s. The pageant is part of what Esty calls an ‘Anglocentric revival that directed attention from tribal and tropical rituals to homespun and folkloric ones, and that shaped a number of important features of literary culture’.3 Esty suggests that J. C. Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, which are both novels about the politics of pageantry, tap into the popular cultural form of the pageant. Esty associates the politics of pageantry both with the moment of decolonization and with a particular stage of literary modernism. The point of the pageant, he suggests, was ‘not just to rehearse the tropes of Merrie Englande but to gauge the vitality of native rituals’.4 In other words, the pageant in post-war Britain was a cultural form capable of aiding Britain’s transition from global superpower to island community. By taking the place of the global and exotic imperial adventure story, the community-focused pageant was able to extrapolate aspects of England’s indigenous culture and hence assist in the reassertion of a new kind of British identity during the period of decolonization, in which the role of global leader was no longer available. One of the modern writers whom Esty suggests was most intrigued by the pageant form in general, and by the revival of the renaissance pageant in particular, was T. S. Eliot. Eliot himself was interested in the continuity of experience between Britain during the renaissance and the early twentieth century, and found evidence of this continuity in a linguistic heritage crossing the centuries. The organic language of Shakespeare and Jonson, Eliot believed, could be heard not only in Jacobean England, but also in modern Britain, so that in order to hear the poetic language of that period, it is necessary only to imagine Shakespeare and Jonson ‘in our London’.5


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Eliot’s belief in the contemporary presence of Shakespeare and Jonson in twentieth-century Britain indicates a strong commitment to the public modes of drama and to the rituals of social cohesion that public drama can provide. Thus it is no coincidence that Eliot himself penned a pageant, The Rock, which helped assert cultural continuity between the two periods. In the 1950s, the accession of a new Queen Elizabeth lent itself to cultural echoes of the earlier Elizabethan age and the pageant form was readily available for redefinition as part of that process. A. S. Byatt’s 1978 novel The Virgin in the Garden is a parody of events that took place in 1953 to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The Yorkshire country house Long Royston Hall is the venue for a play written by Alexander Wedderburn about the life of Elizabeth I. One glorious Elizabethan age is then juxtaposed against another. Yet Byatt’s novel is no simple celebration of the poetics of nation building. On the contrary, it is a sharp parody of that whole process: In 1952 history took a grip on the world of Alexander Wedderburn’s imagination. When the King died Alexander’s play was in fact largely finished, although later he had perpetual difficulty in establishing, in other people’s minds, the true chronological order of his own choice of themes and the accident of death. His play was frequently misinterpreted as a Pageant, commissioned for the Festival which celebrated the handingover of Long Royston Hall to the still insubstantial new North Yorkshire University. The Festival itself was certainly timed to coincide with the spontaneous outbursts of national cultural fervour in parks and gardens all over the country in celebration of the Coronation.6 Byatt’s opening cultivates an imaginative association between Wedderburn’s play and events of national and historic importance – although the narrative as a whole seems to undercut that association in important ways. Throughout The Virgin in the Garden, an attempt to resuscitate versions of a prior golden age is deliberately flawed by an incompatible sense of alienation from it. This alienation in turn arises from Byatt’s feeling that an understanding of the fate of the nation cannot be gleaned simply from the pageantry of power. Her narrative of the staging of such a pageant employs a convention of parody in order to raise the political consciousness of the reader/audience. The Virgin of the title refers both to Queen Elizabeth I as she is played in the pageant, and to the schoolgirl, Frederica Potter, who is playing her. The narrative is then far more concerned with Frederica’s amorous pursuits of the playwright Wedderburn and actor Edmund Wilkie

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than it is with the celebrations of nationhood that might otherwise inhere in the pageant form.

Feminist Satire The Virgin in the Garden reaches three distinct dramatic climaxes. These are: the opening of rehearsals for Wedderburn’s play; the opening night of the play and the end of show party that follows the final performance. On each of these occasions, Byatt uses a technique to highlight the masquerade of femininity as such. On the closing night, for example, we are told that ‘Frederica, prowling in the bushes at the beginning of the second act, unwilling to put off the lovely dress for the last time, met Anthea, in her white diaphane, tinsel crown, and silver-dipped laces, vomiting amongst the laurels’ (Virgin, p. 390). By means of such comic devices, readers are supposed to gain pleasure from the failure of the play. This becomes a gesture towards non-communion in the ceremonies of monarchic culture, and even, ultimately, towards a republican aesthetic. Readers are naturally supposed to develop a mental picture of the dramatic events occurring on the festival stage. The mental picture formed by the reader is not, however, the same as the view of the stage available to the imagined audience of the play. On the play’s opening night, [p]eople were underacting and overacting, roaring out sage counsels as though they were news of an imminent day of doom, reacting to the production of the death warrant of Mary Queen of Scots as though they had been offered a tepid cup of tea. (Virgin, p. 318) Where the audience are invited to look at a tableau of well-known Elizabethan characters in their historical and institutional milieu, our focus is directed instead onto the non-identity of the performers with the characters they are portraying. When there are dark clouds on the opening night, making it difficult for the audience to view the stage, ‘the light on Marina Yeo had to be reinforced with an arch light from the house . . . contributing considerably more chiaroscuro than Elizabeth I herself would have thought proper’ (Virgin, p. 392). This action draws attention onto the identity of Marina, rather than that of her role, Elizabeth, literally highlighting the lack of fit between the two. This highly playful and parodic novel has a strong element of autocommentary built into it. It is not merely a novel about a play celebrating


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the new Elizabethan age; it is a novel about the failure of a play to live up to such heroic ideals. Reciprocity suggests that it is also about the failure of the nation to be worthy of such a play, in an era when epic drama and deeds of heroism no longer seem the most appropriate means by which to measure the human make-up of the nation. On the occasion of the opening of rehearsals, for example, we are told of the costumes that Alexander prepares for his cast: Alexander had given some of the small figures the faces of their originals, and some of those of the actors who were to play them. Raleigh in his black velvet rayed with pearls was Raleigh. Leicester, for all his patchy pale beard, peered under Max Baron’s anxious brow. The Queen’s costumes were inhabited by shifting faces and figures. Over a ceremonious ruff glared the chalky, beaked worn face of the white and gold Queen who bestrode England in the thunderstorm portrait. Above the pleated nightgown appeared a hybrid face with Marina Yeo’s huge mouth and serpentining neck under Elizabeth’s high plucked brows and piled wig. Frederica found her own gowns, which pleased her; a white and gold dress to be imprisoned in, a green and gold dress to run in Catherine Parr’s orchard. She was put out to see that the face above the dresses, in these drawings, was an empty oval. (Virgin, p. 136) The discrepancy between the picture on stage as viewed by the audience, and as imagined by the reader is revealed here. The narrative again and again insists on the non-identity of the actors with the characters they portray. Thus we cannot form a picture of the Duke of Leicester; we develop instead an image of the character Max Baron struggling to portray the Elizabethan aristocrat. Or again, in place of a fully realized conception of Queen Elizabeth, we are confronted by the novel’s insistence on her lack of fit with the actress, Marina Yeo, whose protruding mouth and neck seem to stick out from her costume in such a way as to draw attention to the corporeal reality of Marina’s – as opposed to Elizabeth’s – being. In order to highlight the contrast, Byatt places Frederica’s sister Stephanie within the audience. Stephanie serves as an ideal viewer, willing to see in her mind precisely what the director and the actors ‘had meant people to see’: She saw the young Elizabeth sit white and stump-like outside Traitor’s gate and refuse to go in: she saw the dying Elizabeth sit white and stumplike in a nightgown on a cushion placed felicitously on the identical patch of terrace and refuse to lie down and die. She saw the intervening white

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vision of Astraea and the palely fluttering Graces weave circles under dark eternal forest boughs and golden fruits of light. She saw patterns and broken patterns: Raleigh superbly spinning terrestrial and celestial globes in sunlit audience with a youngish queen: Raleigh incarcerated in the Epilogue, spinning the same globes in his dark tower. Catherine Parr offered apples to the young girl in the orchard, Virgo-Astraea in courtly masque offered golden apples to painted Gloriana, Robert Cecil coaxed the old queen to [sic] munch just a small bite. (Virgin, p. 362) Where readers cannot see the wood of Elizabethan England for the trees of the cast members that make up the pageant, Stephanie is credulous and fully willing to immerse herself in the period of the drama. She believes in Raleigh, Leicester and Elizabeth and is able to suspend her knowledge that these figures have only temporarily been realized in the bodies of Max Baron and Marina Yeo. The joke is on her though; for it is precisely the lack of fit between historic ideal and contemporary reality that Byatt most wishes us to sense. Thus she construes the final rehearsal in such a way that the plot of the acted drama (but not the plot of the novel) falls into disarray. Jenny Parry has been playing the part of the mythical heroine Astraea, companion to Elizabeth I’s fantastic alter ego, Cynthia, the Fairie Queen. Jenny’s husband Geoffrey tires of being duped by his duplicitous wife, who has been using the rehearsals to carry on a secret love affair with a fellow cast member, and at a key dramatic climax, comes bursting onto the stage to denounce her: Between posed Astraea and furred Baron Verulam, driving furiously onto the terrace and excruciatingly in need of oiling, came a swaying perambulator, and behind the perambulator, Geoffrey Parry. He halted in the gold light directed on to the tiered Bevy, peered owlishly through hornrimmed glasses for his wife in the shadows, and advanced on her, wearing above his heathery tweed and folded flannels, an unnatural rational smile. ‘I have had enough,’ he said pleasantly, taking Wilkie’s hand and plucking it abstractedly out of Jenny’s bosom. ‘I have done more than my share, and now enough. You can come home or take your baby. I have work to do.’ (Virgin, pp. 318–19) Geoffrey then proceeds to leave Jenny’s baby, Thomas, in the custody of his mother who is still in the guise of Astraea. This physical action of handing her the baby jolts Jenny out of the part that she has created within the


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drama and insists on the here and now of the action, as against the historical portrayal of the drama. Moreover, the chaos that ensues from the incursion onto the stage of an irate husband and a helpless child militates strongly against any understanding of gentility, heroism or civilization that might otherwise have been generated by cultivating a sense of congruence between the Elizabethan age and the contemporary world. This is the specific aim of Byatt’s novel. Her England is not heroic or genteel and does not contain the trappings of Elizabethan civilization. These are all categories of which she is suspicious and which she does not feel are appropriate for the depiction of a national culture. The suspicions that she reveals in the novel are couched in terms of a feminist cultural politics and are replicated in Angela Carter’s later novel Wise Children. The gender dimension is important throughout The Virgin in the Garden. Byatt’s masquerade of femininity directs attention onto the lack of fit between members of the acting company and the characters portrayed. By this means, the real plot of the novel becomes focused on the lives and loves of Frederica and Marina, and ceases to centre on the coronation of a monarch. Romance is traditionally seen as a women’s genre, and as such, has attracted critical opprobrium in the past. But a recent critical re-evaluation has led to our being able to view the genre more positively within the confines of English literature. Annette Kuhn, for example, has suggested that ‘the most significant developments in film and television theory are currently taking place precisely within such areas of feminist concern’.7 Film and television are two areas where the masquerade of femininity has enabled female cultural producers to question dominant assumptions about womanhood. This is precisely what happens in the pageantry of power depicted in Byatt’s novel. Byatt herself actively transforms the romance genre so that, far from containing trivial or unimportant matters, it becomes endowed with biting social and political satire and hence enables readers to open a new perspective, beyond the home and hearth (traditional settings for women’s writing) and onto the broader political arena. The greatest irony of the novel is this: by writing about a pageant staged to celebrate the inauguration of a new Elizabethan age, Byatt appears to engage in a piece of political and historical mythologizing. By undercutting the pageant so that attention is directed away from the coronation and onto the romantic lives of the actresses, she appears to then veer away from the political arena. The pageant is a portrayal of Elizabeth I – a woman famous for her supposedly manly qualities of heroism and strength. By portraying Elizabeth as it were in masquerade, Byatt directs our attention away from these decorous qualities associated with powerful men and throws attention

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instead onto the correspondingly feminine aspects of romance and passion. By emphasizing the non-identification of the actress with character, she ‘unmans’ the manly Elizabeth and emphasizes instead the corporeal figure of Marina Yeo. The gesture is aimed at raising the consciousness of the readers of the novel. In other words, far from retreating away from the domain of (male) politics, The Virgin in the Garden performs a distinctly political disavowal of monarchic culture and of the pageantry of nationhood. This disavowal takes the form not only of the parody of a national celebration, but also occurs through the rejection of a national literary tradition. Accordingly, Byatt makes Frederica express a complicated extrapolation of the relationship between national pageantry and a national literature: [a]s she acquired age, she came to associate her obsession with the Four Quartets with the Coronation, with the Coronation’s gestures towards England, history and continuity. It had tried and failed to be now and England. There had been other worse failures. In the sense in which all attempts are by definition not failures, since now is now and the Queen was, whatever the people made of it, crowned, it was now, and England. Then. (Virgin, p. 242) Throughout the Four Quartets, especially ‘Little Gidding’, T. S. Eliot again and again enacted an introspective poetic drama about the fate of England and the divine right of kings. For Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic sensibility, the execution of Charles I in 1649 had been a kind of primal sin, an act of violence directed against the natural order of things from which the nation would never entirely recover. It may be that in Eliot’s appreciation of Elizabethan and Jacobean metaphysics, we find a hankering after a time before this catastrophic event, when England might still be whole and healed. This is more than a matter of personal sensitivity, however. It is a question of how a whole strain in post-war British society would define itself. Writing a generation later than Eliot, A. S. Byatt consciously eschews the melancholy and cultural nostalgia of her grandiose predecessor. For Eliot, it is not quite possible that the pageant form will enact a symbolic healing of England’s damaged national culture. By the time of The Virgin in the Garden in 1978, this is not even desirable. Hence the parody of Eliot’s Four Quartets placed by Byatt on the lips of her heroine Frederica, as an integral aspect of the wider parody of official culture that is taking place in the novel. As part of this reaction against highbrow literary modernism, Byatt directs Frederica’s attention to the post-war generation of Kingsley Amis and the so-called ‘Angry Young men’:


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The Coronation was not only not the inauguration of a new era, it was not even a contemporary event. A year later, when Lucky Jim came out, Frederica wept with hysterical glee over Jim Dixon’s bludgeoning animosity towards Merrie England, although she was, also, quite shrewd enough to see that Amis and Dixon would have shared her ambivalence about Matthew Crowe’s public festivities that evening. (Virgin, p. 242) In parodying a pageant of monarchical culture and in enacting a rejection of the dominant literary aesthetic of the period from the end of empire onwards, Byatt performs a fictional critique of the two assumptions from which her novel departs. To reject the nation state as identified with its ruling class and to reject an associated sense of national literary tradition is to reject the dominant institutions of cultural nationalism and to carry out a re-examination of them. Her tactic takes the form of the negation of a negation: she puts into the mind of her protagonist attitudes which conflict with the lofty national affairs of state that are being performed. By distancing Frederica from both Merrie England as portrayed in the coronation, and from Lucky Jim’s distaste for it, she opens up a third point of view which reveals her stance towards the monarchy to be inflected by subtle questions of gender. Frederica cannot celebrate the coronation culturally, ethically, morally or politically. Yet neither can she share Jim Dixon’s savage attack on it, for Amis’s protagonist lacks awareness of how gender complicates one’s stance towards nation and national culture. The discrepancy was rendered more explicit in Still Life (1985), the sequel to The Virgin in the Garden. Still Life follows the subsequent life of Frederica Potter as she goes away to study English at Cambridge. It again takes the form of an explicit rejection of the dominant fictional mode of the period in which it is imagined to be set, for Frederica reads Amis’s Lucky Jim at Cambridge and rejects its chauvinistic and jingoistic tone: On all four readings Frederica felt a simple sexual distaste for Lucky Jim. There was a nice girl, whose niceness consisted of big breasts and a surprising readiness to find the lunatic Dixon attractive and valuable, and a nasty woman, who was judged for bad make-up and arty skirts as well as for hysteria and emotional blackmail . . . She might have accepted this accurate description of the cruelties of the frustrated imagination but was amazed that so many of her friends found Dixon to be some kind of moral hero.8 Frederica at first gains ‘hysterical glee’ from reading Amis’s Lucky Jim and finding kinship with the ‘bludgeoning attack on Merrie Englande’

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contained there. However, as her reading deepens, and as she herself develops from a schoolgirl into a sexually self-aware woman, she becomes unable to sympathize with Dixon’s chauvinistic attitude towards women. This points to the phenomenon explored in Chapter One: the tendency of Amis in Lucky Jim, and other authors of Britain’s last days of empire, to use the figure of woman to attempt an allegoric resuscitation of wholeness, aimed at conjuring away the fragmentation into which the British empire and state were gradually sliding at the time. Lacking political affiliation with the trappings of monarchy and official culture on the one hand, but lacking also any sympathy with the widely accepted forms of cultural opposition to them, Frederica is left with nowhere to go. She cannot participate in the pageantry of nationhood, but neither can she bury herself in a contending literary aesthetic which offers no refuge to her. Accordingly, by the end of Still Life, there is little sense of closure. Frederica is directed away from the successful university and career life on which she had embarked because these things are not compatible with an oppositional feminist antiestablishment aesthetic that has found no outlet.

The Three Kingdoms In The Virgin in the Garden, A. S. Byatt satirizes the pomp and pageantry of monarchic culture from a feminist perspective. The same is also true of Kate Atkinson’s 1995 novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a novel that lampoons concepts of nation, national identity and political culture in several interlocking ways, again from the viewpoint of a female narrator. Behind the Scenes at the Museum is the life story of Ruby Lennox. The novel performs the trick enamoured of postmodern novelists since Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children of beginning the life history of the protagonist well before his or her birth, and hence of demonstrating how the individual is aligned by cultural forces much greater than him or her. In Midnight’s Children, Salim Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on the day of India’s independence from Britain. His life thus mirrors and allegorizes the progress of the fledgling Indian nation. When Salim enters moments of personal trauma, these are replicated by national crises. The complications that arise invite readers to ask questions about the suitability of understanding national culture through the life of one individual, even while inviting us to do so. Atkinson’s protagonist Ruby Lennox is also conceived at ‘the beginning of a new era’:


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It’s the third of May and later on today the King will perform the opening ceremony for the Festival of Britain and outside the window, a dawn chorus is heralding my own arrival.9 Ruby is endowed with the almost magical power of narrating her own life and progress in the present tense, as it occurs, even from the point of conception and before she is born. ‘In fact, my gestation has neatly spanned the old and the new, for I’ve arrived just after the King’s death, making me one of the first babies born into the new Queen’s reign. A new Elizabethan! I’m surprised they haven’t called me Elizabeth’ (Museum, p. 40). As with The Virgin in the Garden, from very early in the novel we are given a sense of interconnection between events of national importance and personal action. This connection is gradually complicated and satirized. Ruby is born to George and Bunty Lennox, the youngest of three daughters, after Patricia and Gillian. George is a pet shop owner, and the whole family lives in quarters located above the shop. This setting takes on the properties of a self-contained world, with its own borders and inhabitants, whose cultural structure appears to ironically mimic the greater nation of which it is a part. ‘As well as being a geographical location, “Above the Shop” is also a self-contained, seething kingdom with its own primitive rules and two contenders for the crown – George and Bunty’ (Museum, p. 10). Each chapter of Behind the Scenes at the Museum is followed by a ‘footnote’ describing some item or object that has been mentioned in the foregoing chapter and fleshing out a human history of the object in question. For example, during the course of Chapter One, Ruby draws our attention to a photograph of her great-grandmother Alice, taken when Alice was pregnant with Ruby’s grandmother Nell, and in which Nell’s brothers Albert, Tom and Lawrence, and sister Ada, are all children. The footnote explains that this photograph was taken at a period when Alice’s marriage to the farmer Frederick Barker had turned ugly and when the travelling photographer Jean-Paul Armand arrived at the family’s Yorkshire homestead in the 1880s, offering a little pleasure and diversion from the toil of everyday life. In fact, we are told in the footnote, Alice herself was subsequently to elope with Monsieur Armand, leaving her children in the custody of Frederick and a cruel stepmother, Rachel, whose lack of interest in their welfare would lead to Tom’s running away from home to join the navy, Ada’s dying of tuberculosis, and Albert’s death in the First World War . The structure of the novel presents us with two separately unfolding timeframes: one in which Ruby progresses from conception through infancy and a series of family crises to young adulthood; and another charting the

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fate of Alice, her children and her children’s children. Ruby’s crises include a temporary separation of her parents George and Ruby during George’s affair with ‘Aunt’ Doreen; the death of Gillian; the death of another mysterious twin sister, Pearl, in which Ruby herself is implicated and which results in Ruby being temporarily sent to live with Aunt Babs and Uncle Sidney; and a fire in the shop which kills all of the animals and causes the family to move to a new suburban home. Other familial crises include Bunty’s disastrous affair with the new neighbour Mr Roper, when the Ropers and the Lennoxes were on a joint holiday in Scotland; the death of George due to a heart attack incurred during the exertions of sexual intercourse with a waitress at Uncle Kenneth’s wedding; and Ruby’s own final relocation to Scotland. In a parallel series of histories, Alice’s son Albert is killed in the First World War, as is his football team mate Percy Sievewright, leaving Albert’s sister Nell to marry a third team mate, Frank Lennox, and hence give birth to Ruby’s mother, Bunty. Meanwhile, Nell’s sister Lillian emigrates to Canada and starts another branch of the family, whose roots snake out into both timeframes of the novel when Lillian’s son, Bunty’s cousin Edmund, is sent from Canada to be stationed in Yorkshire during the Second World War. This structure of separately existing timeframes presents time itself as malleable, and progressing in unequally sized pulses which are capable of suddenly leaping forward a dozen years, or even a hundred, or of veering backwards onto themselves. We are told very early on that it is the fate of Ruby’s sister Gillian to die young, in 1959, but this is told to us at a point in the novel located during the festival of Britain in 1951. Similarly, in the alternate timeframe, we have barely had an opportunity to discover that one of Alice’s sons was named Tom before we are told that in time, he was fated to leave Britain forever and die at sea. This ironic provision of knowledge in advance of the event militates against a simplistic reading of the national history being narrated, as if to show that really history is not unilinear, but flexible and messy, always interrupting the tendency to interpret it in any grand over-arching way. The lack of coherence portrayed in family life appears to mirror and replicate Atkinson’s portrayal of national cultural events during the post-war period, especially her conflicting and overlapping concepts of a united kingdom. At the time of the coronation, the concept of a kingdom is subtly modified and transformed so that its referent ceases to be the nation of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, becoming instead the Kingdom of God – as in the symbolism of the coronation sword, whereby ‘the power of the State [is]


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placed at the service of God’ (Museum, p. 81). The climax of the ceremony invokes a supposedly divine provenance for the monarch as head of state, with the words, ‘God bless all the peoples of the United Kingdom!’ (Museum, p. 91). Atkinson exposes the sleight of hand whereby the trappings of monarchy transform Great Britain into an ethereal realm, governed through the monarch as if by God’s will. Indeed, the political thrust of the novel might have been even stronger at this point if Atkinson had chosen to make the obvious point: that the kingdom lacks a king, and that it has been in effect transformed into a queen-dome. Although womanly power and authority are effaced from the state machinery through this conflation of Elizabeth with king, Atkinson does not allow the episode to pass without allowing the women of the novel to have some sort of riposte. For the most part, the domain of home, hearth and kitchen are coded feminine: they are women’s places and the activities that take place there are assigned as the work of women. Rather than allow her women to accept this kind of domestic entrapment without a word, though, Atkinson wishes to demonstrate that her women are as important in their own kingdoms as Queen Elizabeth is in hers. Hence the apartment above the shop is continually referred to as its own kingdom, with its own rulers and power struggles. Hence also, at the very climatic point of the coronation, Bunty’s daughter Gillian barges into the living room and disrupts the spectacle: ‘Gillian bounces back into the room at this moment, desperate to show everyone her pirouettes and flashes in front of the Ferguson just as the crown is being perched on the queen’s head so that a resounding shout goes up of, “God Save the Queen!” and “Get out of the bloody way Gillian!”’ (Museum, p. 85). When Atkinson follows the popular postmodernist path of associating fictive events with national-world-historical ones, it is the fictive events that come to seem more strangely real than the historical ones. As Britain’s postwar history enters the Cold War phase, Ruby naturally feels tempted to locate the struggle for control of the shop within a broader global framework. Judie Newman has shown that in feminist writer Alison Lurie’s The War Between the Tates, ‘the domestic battle’ between a married couple ‘provides an analogy to larger conflicts’ in the global political arena.10 In Atkinson’s novel too, a cooling of the relationship between Ruby’s parents George and Bunty stands as an allegory for broader militaristic history: George keeps sizing up for a real ding-dong and then backing down because he doesn’t really want to risk the consequences of an

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argument . . . I haven’t discussed with anyone this new phase of the Cold War (more of an Ice Age really) between our parents but then Gillian and I rarely discuss anything . . . (Museum, p. 175) The identification of George and Bunty as rulers struggling for control of their own kingdom is located within the context of wider geo-political struggles on which it provides an oblique ironic commentary. When the Cold War phase of British history appears to ease, this phase of the relationship between the two of them also slips into the background. George is killed off and Bunty herself is declared ‘an exile from her own kingdom’ (Museum, p. 366). The extrapolation of meanings from kingdom through god via monarchy and coronation to nation-state indicates an ironic incongruence between Britain’s national political culture as it is officially defined and its daily public life as it is more wittily portrayed. A third complicating definition of the concept of kingdom is also highly significant in the novel. The concept of the animal kingdom is given embodiment within the novel by the shop, which is after all, a pet shop: ‘Shop!’ George returns. The budgerigars rise up and flutter in their cages . . . But now we are freed from our enslavement to the counter (Bunty has just sold the Shop Cat, but she doesn’t mention this to George. Poor cat.) and we can go and discover the world beyond the Shop. (Museum, p. 17) The shop as we have seen is like its own kingdom, with its own laws and rulers and conflicts. The shop stands in for a substitute nation when both the wider kingdom of Great Britain and the heavenly kingdom of Christendom are shown to be emotionally inaccessible to Ruby and her family. Just as the concepts of God’s Kingdom and the United Kingdom are subtly fused with each other, and each with the private kingdom above the shop, so the animal kingdom to which the shop provides geographical habitat also blends into these alternative senses of a kingdom. For though the kingdom of the shop is a place to which Ruby can flee when dissatisfied with the rules of the other kingdoms to which she feels bound, it is also a place in which she is enslaved at times in turn and the animals become her ironic masters. In other words, different definitions of nationhood, kingdom and belonging continually melt into each other, and this perhaps is why at its core, Behind the Scenes at the Museum is a novel about a girl, Ruby, who does not know where her home is.


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By playing with different concepts of a kingdom in this way, Atkinson in effect undercuts all of them. The ‘footnote’ sections of the novel, which treat of relatives emigrating to Canada, and South America and Australia, and wars and overseas adventures support this sense of a multitude of different potential national domains to which Ruby might feel some allegiance, but by which she always ends up feeling shut out. The footnotes also have the effect, as we have seen, of providing an ironic clustering together of different moments in time, not equally spaced throughout history, but sometimes bunched together and sometimes stretched apart, like radio waves whose transmitter is continually expanding or contracting the length of the signal. Because of this capacity of the novel to both stretch and foreshorten time, its conclusion is oddly disjointed. The young Ruby grows up, moves to Scotland, marries an Italian immigrant and divorces him seven years later, all within the amount of time taken to read five pages. Yet even here, Atkinson cannot resist sketching an ironic portrayal of the ceremonies of state power that circumvent her life. The whole period of her married life is disposed of in one foreshortened sentence: For seven years, three months and eighteen days I am the oddly named person, Ruby Benedetti, before I am restored, courtesy of the Court of Session in Edinburgh and the even more oddly named Lord Ordinary, to my true self and I am Ruby Lennox once more. (Museum, p. 361) Ruby Lennox may be odd; indeed, she is a stranger in the most literal sense of not feeling that she knows anything about the country which she inhabits. Atkinson wishes to show us that the ceremonies through which state power guides our lives are no less strange than this single woman. Behind the Scenes at the Museum, like The Virgin in the Garden, holds the concept of a kingdom founded on patrimony, monarchy and aristocracy up to ironic interrogation – and finds it wanting.

The Televisual Community Behind the Scenes at the Museum is a highly visual novel. The objects and artefacts animated in the footnotes are brought vividly to life as if they are there before the reader’s eye to behold, and then endowed with a social and cultural history. If it is a visual novel in general, it is also a televisual novel

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in particular. Repeated references are made to films, popular culture and television broadcasting, and this enables Atkinson, like Byatt, to mobilize the masquerade of femininity. Like the elliptical orbit of a comet, Behind the Scenes at the Museum has two principal foci. One of these is the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, and the Lennox family’s response to it. The other is the final of the football World Cup in 1966, in which the victorious England team were presented with the trophy by the young queen, as if to symbolize a new and confident golden age. These are both televised events of national significance. In a seminal book entitled Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Raymond Williams has shown that the medium of television arose as the culmination of diverse histories in the military and telecommunications. Having been created supposedly in the national interest, Williams argued, television became primarily a medium of distribution, rather than a means of production, and this fact separated it from any other item of consumer goods that had been produced before or since. Whereas washing machines or refrigerators are goods to be produced first and then distributed, television is not complete as an object simply by being owned: it must also have something to broadcast.11 As a result of this dependence, Williams argued, television became parasitic on other events that were in any case already taking place. Given that television broadcasting had arisen as a result of national developments in military planning and communications, and given also that the technology of television needed an event (or content) in order to complete itself as a medium, it was logical that the early broadcasts would be events of a national-historical nature. This, Williams, argued, is precisely what happened: during the early years of consumer television, events of national cultural significance dominated the airwaves. ‘The centralization of political power led for a need for messages from that centre.’12 The two particular examples Williams gives of the state using its medium of broadcasting to extrapolate a sense of social cohesion from the centre of political power outwards are a coronation and a cup final – the two climactic events of Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Thus, where A. S. Byatt satirizes the coronation in 1953 by portraying an amateur dramatic society struggling to come to terms with the supposed gentility of the event, Atkinson’s tactic is different. Atkinson contrasts the splendour of the coronation as witnessed by millions, with the carnage that results from Bunty Lennox having invited dozens of neighbours around to the pet shop to watch it on the family’s first television set. This ironically


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shifts the location of the ceremony from Westminster Abbey to the pet shop in York: ‘The coronation is taking place, in miniature, in various shades of grey on the little Ferguson set in the corner of the living-room Above the Shop’ (Museum, p. 77). The attention to detail that lay behind the costume, the crown, the invited guests and the schedule of events on that day of national importance is undercut by a relative lack of attention to detail in the homes where events are being watched: ‘Bunty is torn in two ways – she is naturally proud of the television set and must show it off, and what better occasion than a coronation? At the same time she can’t stand having all these people in the house. The sandwiches! The pots of tea! Will it ever stop?’ (Museum, p. 78). By ranking pots of tea and sandwiches alongside the crowning of the monarch in terms of importance, Atkinson satirizes the pageantry of monarchic culture and demonstrates how far removed these national ceremonial occasions – and the people who participate in them – really are from the majority of people in the country. This ironic contrast is created primarily via the contrast between the childish behaviour of Ruby, Patricia and Gillian and the sober demeanour of those portrayed at Westminster: Meanwhile back at the television set, the young Queen is being ‘Girded with the Sword’ and Patricia is helpfully supplementing Richard Dimbleby’s reverent commentary with snippet’s from the Daily Graphic Coronation Gift Book for Boys and Girls. We learn that it ‘signifies an act of beautiful symbolism, the power of the State placed at the service of God.’ Her squeaky voice stumbles over the word ‘symbolism’ – she is only seven years old after all, although top of the class in reading and generally regarded as quite precocious in her learning – but she picks herself up and tells us that the ‘Jewelled Sword’ was made for George IV’s coronation, thus precipitating an argument amongst one section of the grownups about George IV’s position in the chronological order of the kings. (Museum, pp. 80–81) The contrast between the rehearsed and well-drilled scene at Westminster and the ordinary disarray of a domestic interior Above the Shop recalls A. S. Byatt’s contrast between the supposed heroic nature of the first Elizabethan Age, and its travesty in an over-sexed and alcohol-fuelled student play. In both novels, the contrast generated between the spectacle of state power and private life is a masquerade in the full political sense. These novels demonstrate an ironic lack of fit between male-dominated monarchic

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culture and the scenes of everyday life around the country, which are associated with womanly labour. By masquerading the trappings of monarchic power, the novels reveal the extent to which monarchic power itself is an outdated and outmoded concept in need of change. In this sense, the gentility of the coronation is shown to be the same kind of event, born out of the same feelings, as the crowd instincts that are attached to the football match: The commentary drifts in after them through the open door. There’s Ball running himself daft, there’s Hurst – can he do it? The men stand rooted to the spot, craning to hear, He has done! – yes – no, their faces twist in agony, No, the linesman says no! ‘Fucking linesman!’ Uncle Bill shouts and the crimplene relatives make dreadful noises as if they are suffocating. It’s a goal! It’s a goal! Oh, the Germans have gone mad at the referee! The men go mad at Sandra. (Museum, p. 295, emphasis in original) As with the coronation, the scene at Empire Stadium is ironically contrasted with the wedding reception room in which the game is being viewed. As central points of the novel, the choice of the coronation in 1953 and the World Cup final in 1966 provide foci to a series of recurring themes. The intersection of BBC television commentary from each event, with the offstage sounds of Gillian getting in the way, and the wedding party disintegrating, blurs the boundaries between fiction and history and creates an ironic contrast between the pageantry of national ceremonies and the less auspicious surroundings from which they are viewed. Moreover, thematic continuity is provided by the re-appearance of Queen Elizabeth II, following the coronation, at the Cup final: ‘It’s all smiles in the Royal Box’ (Museum, p. 291). Television, as Raymond Williams argues, became developed as a medium capable of elaborating the pageantry and ceremony of nationhood to the nation. In Atkinson’s handling of the medium, it then reveals an ironic disparity between the pomp of monarchy and the details of daily life. The technology of television was developed through interaction with the development of other technologies, especially in radio and long-distance communication. It was an actively sought innovation, utilized initially by the navy and intelligence services for strategic purposes. As its potential as a medium for the transmission of information and cultural products became clear, television became parasitic on pre-existing events across the nation which provided early BBC broadcasters with something to broadcast. The concept of creating new work specifically to be broadcast was a later stage in the history of television and remains a relatively recent phenomenon.


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Robert Hewison has pointed out that the first full year of commercial television in Britain was 1956, the year of the crisis in Suez.13 Indeed, Suez can be described as the first major political event to be broadcast extensively on television. The Cup final and coronation examples show that from the beginning, television was inculcated with national interest and helped to define a sense of national consensus. The Suez example, by contrast, suggests that television is also involved in a contrasting development, away from national cohesion and towards a crisis in the nation’s self-imagining. In Britain, institutions of television broadcasting retained their national prerogative for a relatively long period of time. The new commercial channels of ITV and Channel 4 offered free access to members of the viewing public, while the subscription-paying programmes available via satellite broadcasting were taken up by only a minority of households until well into the 1990s. Since that time, however, change has accelerated. Where programmes of apparently national interest could easily have pulled in viewing figures of 20 million viewers during the 1970s, the most popular daily broadcasts, that is, the soap operas, now pull in a little above 8 million. With the commercialization of television and the growth of audiences for subscription-paying satellite broadcasting there has come a diversity of content. This has had the effect of splitting audiences into smaller blocks than was the case before the 1990s, when only a small number of channels and hence only a few programmes were available. The fragmentation of the viewing audience into a greater number of smaller groups appears to replicate what has happened to national consensus in Britain’s public sphere during the same period: it has broken up into different competing factions. Moreover, television does not only mirror this historical development, it also actively contributes to the dividing up of a previously agglomerated viewing community into smaller units and hence contributes to the fractious imagery that has become current in Britain. Television, like film and drama, is a medium capable of displaying power and authority to the nation. Like those other media, however, it is also capable of presenting that power in masquerade: mimicking the pageantry of power and so highlighting its own inconsistencies and contradictions. Women writers like A. S. Byatt and Kate Atkinson have employed the technique of the masquerade to political effect, satirizing the pomp and ceremony of Britain’s monarchic culture in order to carry out acts of imaginative subversion. By doing so in the form of the pageant, Byatt draws attention to the lack of fit between members of the political state and the population in general. By extending this mimicry into the domain of

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television, Atkinson invites us to consider the relationship between state institutions of broadcasting and a broader national community. Dissipation in one domain, she seems to imply, parallels and contributes to dissolution of the other.

Chapter Five

A Borderless World

One of the important elements of postmodern literary creation is scepticism of meta-narratives. A. S. Byatt and Kate Atkinson both satirize the narratives of nationhood and belonging on which modern political nation-states are founded. In her 1985 novel Boating for Beginners, Jeanette Winterson plays with the most fundamental meta-narrative of all: the Bible. In Winterson’s parody of the biblical story of Noah’s Ark, Noah becomes a fashionconscious playboy, going on a tour in a glamorous new ship built to impress others: ‘the whole show was to tour the heathen places of the world, like York and Wakefield, in a gigantic ship built especially by Noah’s most experienced men’.1 Although Boating for Beginners is not a serious work, it does nevertheless touch on some of the important concerns of feminist writers. These can be characterized as the tendency of myth and history to assign power to men; a long history of biblical and narrative exegesis which apportions guilt for the failings of human society to women and the lack of space in conventional narrative for the insertion of female voices. Winterson addresses all of these concerns when she transplants the biblical Holy Land into contemporary Yorkshire and has Noah accompanied on his voyage by a romantic novelist, Bunny Mix. By inserting these incongruous details into a new rendering of the biblical account, Winterson debunks the nature of maleauthored myth and releases narrative from the captivity of its own history. In a more recent and more serious novel, The Stone Gods, Winterson has returned to the concept of the flood. The world of The Stone Gods (‘Orbus’) is on the brink of apocalypse. Its natural resources have almost run out, its climate and environment are rapidly becoming uninhabitable and the population is divided into units competing for scarce resources. It is, in short, our own world. Winterson juxtaposes this portrayal of the world with two other potential portrayals of it: one past and one future. The portrayal of the past is confined to a thinly disguised Easter Island four hundred

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years ago, a serene and balanced ecosystem, spoiled only by the arrival of human explorers. These bring with them a tendency to establish hierarchical power structures, both religious and political, and erect statues and monuments of their leaders – hence the ‘stone gods’ of the title. The latter half of the novel is concerned with the discovery of a new planet, the ‘blue planet’ which appears to offer climatic conditions safely habitable by humans if they can develop the technology necessary to colonize it. The implication is that as the successor to two previously despoiled Edens ruined after human occupation, the blue planet is likely to share the same fate. The Stone Gods attempts to redefine the novel form. The Easter Island of pre-history, contemporary Western Europe and a futuristic planet in space appear to be settings too disparate in space and in time to allow for easy narrative continuity. I argued in Chapter One that one of the important qualities of postmodern fiction is its propensity for formal innovation. J. G. Farrell’s ‘empire’ series of novels was not a trilogy in the conventional sense of following a character or group of characters over the course of several years. Rather narrative continuity was provided by the historical recurrence of a series of structurally congruent societies. Farrell’s formal experimentation with the concept of a literary trilogy enabled me to suggest that he was an early postmodern novelist. Farrell portrayed Ulster in the 1920s, Singapore on the eve of the Japanese occupation, and India during the mutiny of 1857 through the lens of historical farce, enabling him to gain an outside perspective on each of those societies. This externally located viewpoint, rather than anything inherent in the novels themselves, provides sufficient thematic unity to generate a sense of inter-connectedness, rather than of three discrete novels. In The Stone Gods Winterson uses the recurrence of thematic similarities between three societies to create a single overall narrative, rather than three entirely separate stories. This enables her to endow The Stone Gods with an apocalyptic vision. What ultimately is at stake in The Stone Gods is not just this society, or that. It is the whole shared future of planet Earth, and its common humanity, that is imperilled. This is also true of Julian Barnes’s novel, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Barnes and Mitchell share with Winterson an imaginative vision of planet Earth as such – a single entity, isolated and precarious, rather than a series of separate and bordered societies. This global vision has important implications for the narrative strategies deployed by each writer. In each case, the parameters of individual nation-states are entirely overridden by an imaginative global vision.

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The Oceanic Feeling In his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters Julian Barnes starts out with the myth of Noah’s Ark and broadens this into a global perspective on human history. It is a novel rather than merely a collection of short stories, but it takes the form of 11 linked narratives. Unlike a conventional realist novel, there is no single linear plot, or character elaboration, or denouement. Continuity is provided rather by a series of symbolic returns to the original myth. Each narrative tells of a new, potentially apocalyptic, embarkation into the unknown, and this continual recapitulation of Noah’s symbolic quest generates a sense of continuation and repetition with variation, rather than the beginning, middle and end of a conventional linear narrative. In Barnes’s novel, all is circular and inter-related. Although the locations in which each narrative is set differ widely both temporally and geographically, each informs the others so that we are left with the impression of a vast edifice of narrative where each segment supports and is supported by the others. For example, the opening narrative of the novel is entitled ‘The Stowaway’, and it is here that Barnes lays out his intention to provide a novel exploration of the myth of Noah’s flood. ‘The Stowaway’ is a re-telling of the narrative of the flood, but instead of being encumbered by the weight of historical or scriptural authority, this version of the myth de-centres the biblical hero and his god. The eponymous stowaway is not Noah, the patriarch, or any member of his family, or indeed any member of the human race. The stowaway in question is the one creature whose presence on the ark could absolutely not be countenanced: the woodworm. In this way, Barnes short-circuits the didactic or religious elements of the founding text of western religion and instead invites us to explore what it is to be one of the unwanted rather than one of the saved. That is to say, ‘The Stowaway’ elaborates a perspective on myth and history from the perspective of the excluded. Like Canadian writer Timothy Findlay’s much earlier novel Not Wanted on the Voyage, it provides an account of the myth written from the point of view of the dispossessed and the unwanted. Howard Erskine-Hill has suggested that this forms an appropriate theme for Findlay’s novel because it reflects the history of the Canadian society which produced it: a society born out of the escapees, criminals and outcasts of empire.2 Barnes too chose to use the myth of Noah’s Ark as a starting point for an exploration of the myths that bind societies together. This might be related to the fact that he was writing during a period, the 1980s, when social cohesion and political consensus appeared to have evaporated.

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The eponymous woodworm recurs two stories later in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, in a narrative entitled ‘The Wars of Religion’. This ironic title suggests that we are going to be treated to an exposé of the hypocrisy and violence that inhered in the process of constructing a monarchic state immediately prior to the early modern period, hinting as it does at both the crusades to the Middle East, and the Wars of the Roses fought to establish a ruling dynasty in England. Yet a predictable diatribe against political or religious hypocrisy is precisely what Barnes refuses to provide. Instead, he sidesteps reader expectation by focusing his story ‘The Wars of Religion’ on a different point of European history. It tells the story of a community of sixteenth-century French Catholics. Their church has been blighted by woodworm, and, fearing that their religious piety is being negated by this contamination, the burghers bring a legal petition before the local court of justice, seeking to have the woodworm legally expelled from the church and its environs. In other words, the woodworm, previously a kind of cult hero of the ‘Stowaway’ narrative, is now a comical villain. By investing this scenario with the full weight of political and legal process, Barnes invites us to reflect upon the irrational, the literally inhuman nature of legalistic machinery and hence of the oligarchic state. ‘The Wars of Religion’ is preceded by a story of a group of Palestinian militants who hijack a tourist cruise ship in the Mediterranean in order to gain attention for their own claim to statehood. Moreover, it is followed by a story entitled ‘The Survivor’, which tells of Kath Ferris, a young woman afloat on a life raft after a nuclear catastrophe decimates the land of her native Australia. These two symbolically differentiated Noahs remind us that each of the tales in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters is in some way designed to generate scepticism towards myths of authority and hence to question contemporary political and social structures. The apocalypse of a nuclear holocaust might seem remote from the apocalypse of the biblical flood, just as the Mediterranean might seem remote from the Pacific. The point of weaving these stories together is to open up a sense of human history as being a sequence of related and repeatable actions, rather than a set of discrete or discontinuous structures. All societies, Barnes suggests, have their own particular and varying histories. At the same time, they each share a propensity for division into the distinct domains of rulers and ruled-over, where the myths of the leaders come to stand for the core values of each society. By undermining or ironically interrogating each myth through introspective re-write, Barnes shows how myths of origins on a purely national level can be superseded by a global consciousness emphasizing commonality between human beings across

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continental divides and national frontiers. This inter-relation generates a sense of history on a global – rather than merely national – scale, and such a global vision is primarily achieved via the repeated invocations of the ocean that accompany each consecutive re-write of the Noah myth. Christopher Connery has used the term oceanic feeling to refer to the capacity of images of worldwide ocean-going transportation to cultivate imaginary identification and symbolic kinship between different peoples at different points on the Pacific. He does this specifically in order to draw attention to the flow of manufactured goods, labour and money from the Korean peninsula and Taiwan to capitalist North America and Europe. ‘The imagination of the Pacific Rim can be read as one attempt to conceptualize . . . an arena for a hoped-for legitimation through the false promise of spectacularity provided by common Pacific Rim tropes of the dynamic, the new, the revivified and the miraculous.’3 Connery’s oceanic feeling is both dangerous and seductive. It offers workers and consumers in those places characterized by relatively high numbers of people involved in manual labour for relatively low wages a stake in the pleasures of consumption of the very products they produce. Yet it also continually defers fulfilment of that promise. To Connery, the ocean is functionally comparable to a railway track, or a canal, or even a motorway. The shipping lanes of which he writes are specific nodes of intersection between two other specific points on the globe. The view from the side of the ship is, as it were, blinkered by the insistence on the relationship between two specific foci. In Barnes’s creative imagination, the ocean is not bounded in this way. It is not just an enormous shipping lane. Barnes is aware that maritime transportation has the potential to contribute to structures of inequality in a global capitalist economy. Yet he also sees a creative human possibility in imagining the globe whole, undivided and unbounded. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters seeks to explore what kind of work a novel can carry out. Form and structure are clearly important to Barnes, for it is the structural repetition with variation that enables A History of the World in 10½ Chapters to generate a version of the oceanic feeling that he appears to be interested in. The structural redefinition of myth is perhaps most clearly active in the narrative entitled ‘Shipwreck’. Just as the novel consists of 11 thematically congruent narratives rather than one single unified entity, so this narrative is sub-divided into different segments with thematically linked contents, and this subdivision emphasizes the repeatability of history. In the first segment, Barnes narrates the history of the Medusa, a French warship wrecked off the coast of Africa in the early nineteenth

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century, and the mutiny and cannibalism that are reputed to have occurred among its survivors aboard a life raft, the Frigate, in the days leading up to rescue. In the second half, Barnes jumps forward a few centuries and puts himself in the position of a viewer at an art gallery, examining Gericault’s painting of the event, ‘The Raft of the Medusa’. Barnes is more interested in the varying representations of the historical event rather than in the event itself, to which he in any case has no unmediated access. Meditating on the painting, he tells us, The Medusa was a shipwreck, a news story and a painting; it was also a cause. Bonapartists attacked Monarchists. The behaviour of the Frigate’s captain illuminated a) the incompetence and corruption of the Royalist navy; b) the general callousness of the ruling class towards those beneath them. Parallels with the ship of state running aground would have been both obvious and heavy-handed.4 The painting ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ is placed in a historical context where its relationship to the historical event is less important than its relationship with a series of other representations of that event. Public representation of the shipwreck, attribution of responsibility and accusations of injustice were important elements of the public response to the disaster, and the painting came to symbolize these political disagreements. Though heavy-handed, Barnes is keen that the parallel with the ship of state running aground should nevertheless be made. ‘Shipwreck’ is not so much a story as a philosophical meditation on the acts of composition and representation. It is not just one of the ten and a half chapters that constitute Barnes’s history of the world. In a sense, all ten and a half chapters are present in this singular narrative, and equally co-present in each of the other narratives. Time itself is cyclical, rounded and repetitious. We start with going back to the myth of Noah and the flood, and then move cyclically through the period of western civilization, the Medusa expedition, the French Revolution, eighteenth-century enlightenment, and into a self-referential present where the historicity of these things becomes fore-grounded as such. Or, as Barnes himself puts its, ‘[t]ime dissolves the story into form, colour, emotion. Modern and ignorant, we re-imagine the story’ (History, p. 133). The historical cycle of repetition with variation gives rise to the importance of composition as the process that continually recreates historical events, turning them into myths and narratives for our time. As a result, Barnes suggests, when we look at the painting ‘Scene of Shipwreck’ it is necessary to look with a sense of

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history, remembering the political debates over the rights and wrongs of the Medusa’s voyage, and over many other naval missions before and since. When we look at the furtive figures in the painting using this historical sense, ‘[t]his is no longer Scene of Shipwreck. We don’t just imagine the ferocious miseries on that fatal machine; we don’t just become the sufferers. They become us’ (History, p. 137). What is the effect of Barnes’s readers in 1989 imagining themselves as the sufferers on the raft? The novel positions its readers in such a way as to involve them, and their society, in all of the political, religious and militaristic debates of the world portrayed. The stark metaphor of the ship of state going aground is not only applicable to the France of the nineteenth century. For versions of those same debates were just as operative in the Britain of 1989. Christopher Butler points out that ‘[t]he technique of the book, as its 10½ stories interact, is perpetually to make us look for such (ironic) parallels to recent political history’.5 Many of the political interpretations Barnes portrays of ‘Scene of Shipwreck’ in the nineteenth century are highly prescient to the society in which Barnes himself was writing. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters was published between two highly controversial episodes in Britain’s military history – the Malvinas War of 1982 and the Gulf War of 1991 – and this strengthens a sense of the congruence of the historical society Barnes portrays with his contemporary society. In each case, public consensus over significant questions of power and politics had long evaporated. Consistent with Barnes’s interest in ‘unofficial’ versions of myth, he places the interest on Noah’s nameless companions, rather than on the figure of Old-Testament renown, as if to open up biblical history to a broadening of the democratic franchise. This broadening of the franchise can then be used to inform our understanding of Barnes’s portrayal of all the other emblematic Noah-figures throughout the novel. Each of them stands, in some way, for an oppositional history, a history that contends with or negates its own officially sanctioned truths. Moreover, each of the narratives is to be read as being in some way a commentary or context for the others. How we read ‘Shipwreck’ impacts upon how we read ‘Survivor’ or ‘The Visitors’ or ‘The Wars of Religion’ and vice versa. The cyclical nature of Barnes’s vision of world history is such that each of the stories, and each of the moments in time, are co-present in a whole field, rather than a linear time frame. As Philip Tew says of the novel, ‘the past becomes something of the present, although the imaginary and unconscious persist’.6 The cyclical structure of repetition with variation presents a whole world view, a view of the world and its history that is

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rounded, cyclical, and circular. It presents a view of the world as an entire globe, rather than a series of discontinuous societies. It is a way of imagining the world from a point outside it; an imaginary, ideal point. It is a way of imagining the planet as such.

Planetarity In a moving passage of cultural criticism, Gayatri Spivak has used the term planetarity to refer to the imaginary vision of a world without borders, boundaries or conflicts. Planetarity is a means of imagining the planet as a single, continuous whole, emphasizing commonality and equality of human experience. Like Barnes, Spivak thinks that this way of envisaging human societies can be accessed by imagining the world as seen from a point outside it. She notes, The ‘planet’ is, here, as perhaps always, a catachresis for inscribing collective consciousness as right. Its alterity, determining experience, is mysterious and discontinuous – an experience of the impossible. It is such collectivities that must be opened up with the question ‘How many are we?’ when cultural origin is detranscendentalized into fiction – the toughest task in the diaspora.7 The scenes chosen by Barnes for his chapters of the history of the world appear to have been selected as representing ongoing, tenacious or violent human conflict: the Middle East, the Holy Lands, the eastern Mediterranean. In Spivak’s words, these moments of history are ‘detranscendentalized into fiction’. They are not made to stand for any more than themselves. However, their symbolic repetition and variation suggests a comparability and commonality of human experience that opens beyond individual conflicts. Significantly, Spivak uses the term ‘diaspora’ to refer to the spreading out of different peoples around the globe. It is a term that refers to the departure of ancient peoples from the Holy Lands, and it also has a much more general resonance. By hinting at the simultaneous nature of collectivities around the world, Spivak is able to imply that precise human societies differ, but patterns of human behaviour and human needs recur across them. Thus each society that Barnes narrates is detranscendentalized through juxtaposition with a series of narratives of other societies, while at the same time giving rise to a greater whole – a way of imagining the history of the world.

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Spivak goes on to imagine herself in a plane, flying over the same lands that provide the setting for A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. Like Barnes, she envisages the world below not as a series of discontinuous, bordered or separate landfalls, each with its own political creed and culture. When she imagines herself looking down from the window of the plane she sees no borders, no separate lands. She sees one continuous, borderless whole: My plane is flying now over the land between Baghdad, Beirut, Haifa and Tripoli, into Turkey and Romania. I am making a clandestine entry into ‘Europe.’ Yet the land looks the same – hilly sand. I know the cartographic markers because of the TV in the arm of my seat. Planetarity cannot deny globalization . . . The view of the Earth from the window brings this home to me. (Spivak, p. 93) The view of the Earth without political or militaristic borders is a highly suggestive one to Spivak. It enables her to generate a view of the world capable of transcending violent conflict between rich nations and poor, strong peoples and weak. Planetarity is a connecting concept, capable of indicating what human beings have in common in a connecting history on a common planet. It is accessed by viewing the world as if from a point outside it, and therefore viewing it without artificial markers, dividers or barriers. Spivak contrasts planetarity to the more politically sullied concept of globalization. The implication is that globalization refers not to the commonality of human experience across the globe, but to a political and economic process where goods, money, raw material and migrant labourers continue to flow from the poorest parts of the world to the richest. Whereas globalization expresses the continuing imperial dominance of the world by a few powerful nation-states, and increasingly, by the multi-national corporations based in those states, planetarity expresses the common fate of humans being together in the world equally. Spivak herself expresses the distinction when she writes, ‘[t]he Earth is a paranational image that can substitute for international and can perhaps provide, today, a displaced site for the imagination of planetarity’ (Spivak, p. 95). Planetarity is a concept that can be used to help us understand the climax of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. Spivak imagines the planetness of the planet by literally locating herself outside it, in an aeroplane, from which she can survey the entire globe rather than individual states or corporations. Barnes carries out a similar move in a different way. His novel is informed by an important understanding of how spatial relations shape and control human lives. Time itself, to Barnes, has a spatial element.

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The cyclical view of time presented in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters complements Spivak’s similar emphasis on the commonality of human experience across the globe. As a result of its circular view of the planet, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters reaches climaxes in two stories that firmly locate the planet in a cosmological setting. ‘The Mountain’ tells of an Irish Christian lady, Amanda Fergusson, who goes on a pilgrimage to Mount Ararat in 1837, ‘to intercede for the soul of my father’ (History, p. 149). ‘Project Ararat’ is about an American astronaut, Spike Tiggler, who, struck by the sublime beauty of viewing the Earth from the surface of the moon, achieves a moment of quasi-religious apotheosis and is inspired to return to the Earth and find the remains of Noah’s Ark. Barnes uses the technology of space transportation like Spivak’s aeroplane, to gain access to a point beyond the globe and hence to a global imagination that is whole rather than partial. The reversal of the normal sight of the moon, rising and setting above the Earth, has important implications for Barnes’s overall vision of a world without borders, and hence without nations: Spike was not much given to private thinking on a mission . . . but it struck him that he and Bud (plus Mike still circling above in the command module) were as far as you could currently get from the rest of the human species. Yesterday they had watched the Earth rise, and for all their bagful of jokes it had been an awesome sight which turned your head upside down. (History, pp. 255–56) Barnes paints a visual picture of Earthrise, the Earth rising for the lunar day, crossing the lunar sky and then setting at the lunar dusk. It is an image that makes the Earth appear small, distant and changeable, rather than large and stable. It is an image moreover which draws together the thematic elements of all of the previous stories, for the Earth as viewed from space is vivid with the blue of the oceans rather than the hues of forests, fields or mountains. This oceanic feeling in turn speaks to Barnes of the origins of human life, where it came from, and where it might ultimately end up. For this reason Barnes emphasizes that Spike Tiggler is a native of that part of coastal Florida which had been one of the pioneers in air transport. The conjunction of aviation and maritime history enables him to reflect that on visiting Tiggler’s home, ‘you had driven to the place where man first took to the air; and you are reminded instead of an earlier, more vital occasion when Man first took to the sea’ (History, p. 250). Barnes then puts a similar point into the mouth of Tiggler himself. At a press conference to launch his

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search for the Ark, Tiggler discusses the need to relate the landing on the moon with mankind’s very earliest adventures and explorations, thus placing present and future voyages in the context of a whole history of exploration. A particular irony arises when Barnes invests Tiggler, and his travel companion Jimmy, with the attitudes of an American Cold War hero. When the two travel to Armenia, they are appalled to discover that part of the mountain had formerly been inside the borders of the Russian Empire. They wonder how such an important religious location could fall within the perimeters of such a godless society as that of the (future) Communists. It came as news to Jimmy that only a hundred or so years earlier Mount Ararat, or Agri Dagi as the locals insisted on calling it, had been the meeting-point of three great empires – Russia, Persia and Turkey – with the mountain divided between the three of them. ‘Doesn’t seem right, the Soviets having a piece of it,’ commented Jimmy. ‘Guess they weren’t Soviets at the time,’ said Spike. ‘They were Christians like us when they were just Russians.’ (History, pp. 270–71) By counter-posing a religion, Christianity, with both a nation, Russia, and a specific political creed, Communism, Barnes invites us to sense the constructed and artificial nature of human borders. That Mount Ararat could somehow shift position, from inside the borders of the Russian Empire, to beyond its domain, also makes this point. It is an important point, for ‘Project Ararat’ is the climax of the whole history of the world, combining as it does an implicit look at mankind’s earliest capacity for maritime adventure, life on Earth, mountaineering, and the futuristic world of travel to the moon. The Earth as viewed from the moon is a borderless world, whole, connected and serene. It principal salient feature appears to be the oceans, which provide a source for all life on the planet. The novel generates a visual image of a world beyond borders, without states, governments, or warfare. It is a symbolic image in the very particular sense that it is what remains when all of the other myths, all of the other narratives, have been recreated on other terms. The Earth as viewed from the moon is an absolute. Nations and the symbolic paraphernalia of nationhood are inevitably invested with a wide range of cultural and political associations. The Earth as a whole defies symbolism in this sense. It cannot be symbolized in other terms.

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The counter-factual way of envisaging the Earth without borders is made possible by the work of fiction, serving in its properly imaginative capacity. In this capacity, imagination refers not to a body of work or experience conceived of separately from some putatively defined reality. Rather, it refers to the process of forging connections between real experiences and potential futures. This is the work that fiction can perform, imagining, as it were, planetarity into existence. Or as Gayatri Spivak herself puts it: Just as socialism at its best would persistently and repeatedly wrench capital away from capitalism, so must the new Comparative Literature persistently and repeatedly undermine and undo the definitive tendency of the dominant to appropriate the emergent. It must not let itself be constituted by the demands of liberal multiculturalism alone. (Spivak, p. 100) Planetarity is a way of imagining the wholeness of the globe, opening beyond the fissiparous conflicts generated by capitalist society. It is a way of comparing human beings on an equal footing. As such, Spivak suggests, it can be activated by a new kind of comparative literature, which in turn contributes to a fully global, fully historical, fully political imagination. By reading the world comparatively, she suggests, we can enable the concept of planetarity to emerge: The planetarity of which I have been speaking . . . is perhaps best imagined from the precapitalist cultures of the planet. In this era of global capital triumphant, to keep responsibility alive in the reading and teaching of the textual is at first sight impractical. It is, however, the right of the textual to be so responsible, responsive, answerable. (Spivak, pp. 101–02) Spivak believes that the literary text is both responsible and responsive. Reading, for her, is a social and political process, whereby it is the responsibility of the reader to relate what is read to what is happening outside the text. It is not easy for any work of fiction to imagine a version of planetarity based on common human experience, rather than a version of globalization based on the division of people into different conflicting classes. Spivak suggests that there are examples of such a version of planetary consciousness in certain pre-capitalist societies in history. By insisting on the responsibility of a literary text to respond to human conflicts, she implies that those pre-capitalist societies should occupy a privileged position in fiction.

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Julian Barnes seems to have come to the same conclusion. His novel imagines the circular structure of the Earth and its history into existence precisely from the standpoint of a series of pre-capitalist moments in the planet’s past. As Spivak suggests, fiction and the written text can be responsive, answerable, and capable of speaking not only for the past but also for a potential or potentially avoidable future. For that, we need to look outside Barnes’s novel, using the new comparative literature that Spivak describes.

An Atlas of Clouds David Mitchell’s 2005 novel Cloud Atlas is comprised of six different layers of narrative. At its climax is a story entitled ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’After’, set on a Pacific Island in a post-apocalyptic future. It tells the story of Zachry, a young man whose tribe has been conquered by the Kona, a warlike people from the other end of the island. Zachry himself only survives because he is rescued by Meronym, a visitor from a different part of the ocean. Her people are sailing the globe in search of survivors from a recent cataclysmic flood. Their superior knowledge and technology have enabled them to survive apparent catastrophe, but have also denied them access to the traditions, folk tales, oral narratives and religious sentiments that had previously held Zachry’s community together. Meronym knows, for example, that the totem ‘god’ worshipped by Zachry’s people is an audio-visual recording of a person called Sonmi, who had lived centuries earlier. The narrative ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’After’ is sandwiched between two halves of another narrative entitled ‘An Orison of Sonmi-451’. This narrative is set in another dystopic future, although it is nevertheless a future that is imagined as the distant past to Zachry and Meronym. An Orwellian Korean empire has started to clone human beings for domestic and public service. These cloned beings are known as ‘fabricants’ and they are treated as pieces of property just like a car or a video recorder by the ‘pure blood’ humans whom they serve. The name Sonmi-451 brings Cloud Atlas into direct intertextual relationship with Ray Bradbury’s dystopic science fiction classic, Fahrenheit 451. Within Cloud Atlas it refers both to a generic model of fabricant, the 451 series which can be replaced as soon as it becomes obsolete, and to one particular fabricant who is cloned to work in a restaurant. In fact, the whole world is divided into ‘Consumers’ and ‘Servers’ and the restaurant in which Sonmi eats, sleeps and works is her

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whole universe. She enters into a rebellion by joining a covert group known as ‘The Union’, which campaigns for abolition of the distinction between Pure Bloods and Fabricants and hence campaigns against the systematic denial of human rights to the servers. The rebellion fails and Sonmi is sentenced to execution. Her last request is to watch a film. This film, ‘The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish’, is described in the third level of textual narrative. Its protagonist is a hack publisher who happens upon a potentially lucrative manuscript when one of his commissioned novelists commits a murder and prurient public interest in the killer results in the book becoming a bestseller. However, the killer’s brutish relatives demand that they receive all of the proceeds from the sales of the book, and Cavendish is only able to resist their menaces by going into hiding. He checks into what he believes to be a hotel, but actually transpires to be a care home for older people. Having signed the register upon arrival, Cavendish is not permitted by the carers to leave the premises and, believing him to be a delusional schizophrenic, they treat him with drugs to curb his perceived violence and impatience. His attempts to escape are both comical and poignant. As Cavendish finally sets off en route back to his home, he reads a new manuscript that has been submitted to his publishing house, called ‘Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery’. This layer of Cloud Atlas is David Mitchell’s parody of a populist thriller written for an ephemeral mass market rather than a high-brow readership. Luisa Rey is a reporter in Governor Regan’s California. She is investigating plans to construct a new nuclear energy plant at Swannekke on the Californian coast and discovers that its chief scientist, Sixsmith, had mysteriously died soon after compiling a report casting serious aspersions over the safety and viability of the project. Luisa Rey herself is pursued by the Swannekke assassin Bill Smoke and gets into various perilous situations before managing to expose the official cover-up that she has detected. As she clears up the dead Sixsmith’s papers, Luisa discovers letters that Sixsmith had received as a young man in the 1930s, from Martin Frobisher, a poor musician trying to scratch a living working as an amanuensis to the composer Vyvyan Ayres in Belgium. These letters constitute another strand in the narrative. They tell us how Frobisher has affairs with both Ayres’s wife and daughter, which only create a torment of guilt and loneliness for him. He becomes more and more isolated and remote, withdrawing for long hours into a private room in the Ayres mansion where he buries himself inside a nineteenth-century manuscript he has discovered there, entitled ‘The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing’. This is yet another layer of narrative,

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telling of the conquest of one indigenous island people, the Moriori, by another, the Maori, who are in turn driven into servitude and near-extinction by the arrival of the British empire. The two halves of ‘The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing’ are placed at the beginning and end of the novel, with each of the other stories divided into two halves and placed symmetrically inside these two, so that Cloud Atlas can be seen as a novel version of a set of Russian dolls. It is a palimpsest, a bundle of several different textual strands held together by porous seams. Although the narratives are self-contained and discrete, it is a novel, rather than a disparate collection of short stories. The novel-ness of the novel, its status as such, is supplied by its textual characteristics rather than a linear plot or development of character. Narrative continuity, where it is provided at all, is provided by a series of recurring themes and motifs, and foremost among these are recurrent concerns with servitude and tyranny, and with the twilight of civilization. Again and again Cloud Atlas depicts the genesis of some form of tyranny, an attempted rebellion against it, and the risks, dangers and outcomes attendant on such a rebellion. The narrative ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’After’ is the only one that is not divided into two halves. It is delivered as one continuous story, and placed at the centre of the novel, with each of the other sections divided into two parts around it. As such, it can be seen as the climax of the novel. In a moving section of the ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’ narrative that gives the novel its title, Zachry witnesses the twilight of his civilization and the extinction of his native island from the kayak that is carrying him to safety: I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o’that kayak. Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’clouds.8 The implication is that islands and civilizations, like people, have life cycles that arise, mature and become obsolescent. Mitchell constructs a highly visual image of an imperilled landscape and by extension an entire planet that is under threat of imminent extinction. It is appropriate that this visual image should be located at the midpoint of the novel, for it is an image that recurs across all the different layers of textuality within it. In the section entitled ‘An Orison of Sonmi-451’, the fabricant clone Sonmi-451 escapes from the cafeteria in which she was created. She is helped by Hae Joo, a member of the illicit Union group of resistance fighters

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against the dictatorship of the Beloved Chairman. Hae Joo takes her far away from the capital, Seoul, to a crowded seaport on the remote eastern coast of Nea So Copros, Mitchell’s name for the Korean peninsula, where there will be a certain level of safety through anonymity. For Sonmi, who has only escaped the captivity of the restaurant a few days earlier, the maze of human life, cars, roads, shops, factories and homes seems like an image from a dream. Even more unreal to Sonmi is the seascape that she is able to glimpse for the first time, beyond the furthest reaches of the land. Her reaction to this previously unimaginable sight resonates with a lyricism that gives the lie to the idea that cloned slaves have no emotion and so cannot be treated as equal human beings. On glimpsing the beauty of the ocean, she tells Hae Joo, ‘there, in the background, the sky’s sediment had sunk to a place where all the woe of the words I am dissolved into blue peace’. She is unable to name what she has seen and it is Hae Joo who supplies the word for her. ‘He said it. The ocean’ (Cloud Atlas, p. 355). As in the ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’ story, Mitchell makes a subtle conjunction between the life cycle of an individual human and that of the planet. The highly poetic expression ‘all the woe of the words I am’ reveals Sonmi’s ability to detach her words from herself. This detachment exists simultaneously with a capacity to thread those words into the fate of the landscape. It is in the beauty of the natural world that for a moment, Sonmi is able to dissolve the woes of being a rebel and a runaway into ‘blue peace’. The dissolution of the self that is portrayed in Sonmi is common to all of the narratives of servitude and rebellion. Each of them joins the individual subject to a natural environment. This is Mitchell’s technique for imagining planetarity.

The Apollonian View Just as Julian Barnes’s oceanic feeling enabled him to create an image of a borderless world, so too Mitchell’s visual image of a serene, small and vivid planet has a resonance outside the text of Cloud Atlas. By locating his globe in the midst of a series of environmental disasters and space-age technologies, Mitchell in effect imagines the planet on a cosmic scale. It is another way of creating an image of the Earth as viewed from a point outside it. Paul Gilroy has noted that, The last third of the twentieth century saw our world becoming a different kind of object, approached through a geopiety that operates on an earthly scale and is not oriented by fundamental concern for the sovereign

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territory of national states. Images of the Earth photographed from outside its orbit by the Apollo spacecraft in 1972 have emerged as the emblem or signature of this novel planetary consciousness.9 Gilroy’s phrase ‘geopiety’ expresses concisely the phenomenon that Mitchell’s novel again and again seeks to depict. That is, the imposition of the tyranny of the strong over the weak. Gilroy, a committed socialist and activist for racial equality in Britain, America and the third world, has realized that the creation of an equitable society based on equal division of resources, fair access to information and the overhauling of special privileges for those with money and weapons cannot be achieved in individual nations. The pressure placed on humankind at the outset of the twenty-first century to divide increasingly scarce resources has had the effect that the barriers between owners and labourers, or between rulers and oppressed, can only be broken down at all if they are broken down everywhere. Under these circumstances, Gilroy notes, ‘the world becomes not a limitless globe, but a small, fragile and finite place, one planet among others with strictly limited resources that are allocated unequally’ (Gilroy, p. 83). He goes on, This is not the globalized mindset of the fortunate, unrestricted traveller or some unexpected fruit of some heavily insulated postscarcity and indifferent overdevelopment. It is a critical orientation and an oppositional mood triggered by the comprehension of the simple fact that environmental and medical crises do not stop at national boundaries and by a feeling that the sustainability of our species is itself in question. (Gilroy, p. 83) Gilroy’s emphasis on the sustainability of the species is the key aspect of his sense of a new planetary consciousness. Since the challenges facing the globe are challenges to humanity rather than challenges to any one individual nation, such a consciousness also creates the opportunity for a new kind of politicized cosmopolitanism. In a world run by capitalist corporations whose power extends beyond existing national boundaries, it is important for any politically oppositional stance to mobilize a planetary consciousness across and beyond different national, racial or ethnic parameters Cloud Atlas makes possible in fiction an imaginative relationship with Gilroy’s ‘oppositional mood’. Mitchell emphasizes in each of the narratives the smallness of the planet, the fact of its coincidental existence alongside

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other, more or less remarkable, planets. When we re-read ‘The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing’ retrospectively, carrying a sense of what the oceanic imagination symbolizes in the novel, we are likely to be more attuned to the theme of subjection and rebellion, and of the potentially catastrophic consequences of the unequal division of resources. Such a retrospective reading is particularly enabled by the structure of Cloud Atlas, splitting as it does each narrative into two mirrored sections so that we have read at least part of every other narrative before completing any of them. When Adam Ewing sails to the Pacific, he notes in his journal that the first European settlers hunted seals and certain fish almost to extinction. Immediately we begin to sense the same kinds of scarcity, the same kinds of immiseration and landscape destruction through over-development that occurred in Nea So Copros. Ewing’s journal goes on, Within a few years the seals were found only on the outer rocks & the ‘sealers’ too turned to farming potatoes, sheep & pig-rearing on such a scale that the Chathams are now dubbed ‘The Garden of the Pacific’. These parvenu farmers clear the land by bush-fires that smoulder beneath the peat for many seasons, surfacing in dry spells to sow renewed calamity. (Cloud Atlas, p. 13) The Earth here is angry, scarred red with fire and in pain, as if Mitchell wishes to compare it to the Voyager photographs of the great red spot on the surface of Jupiter. The Voyager satellite confirmed the red spot to be constituted by an enormous and long-lasting storm of gases and vapours, extending far beyond anything comprehendible on a human scale. The image of an imperilled Earth, captured by the Apollo missions and subsequently realized in Mitchell’s novel, becomes suddenly more poignant when viewed alongside this other image of another planet. Such a move invites us to ask that in converting the land to dustbowls, in emptying the oceans of marine life and in poisoning the rivers, is there not a risk that frail humanity might be creating a new kind of storm, not on Jupiter, but on the Earth itself? Mitchell’s invocation of unemployed migrant labourers fleeing from the dustbowls of their homes hints at a great dust storm to come, on a cataclysmic scale. The sense that Jupiter’s storm might be unintentionally recreated on Earth strengthens and is strengthened by the idea that the Earth really is just one planet among many, and that once destroyed, its resources will not be infinitely replenished. Paul Gilroy uses the term a new planetary consciousness to refer to the redefinition that has been necessarily undertaken by public intellectuals

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seeking the end of third world immiseration. Scarcity of resources is such that unless they can be shared out equally, mankind is likely to pay a significant price in hatred, violence, crime, and ultimately war. Gilroy himself notes that the ‘rolling protest against the war in Iraq on February 15, 2003 involved hundreds of dark blue flags bearing the iconic imprint of the NASA photograph AS17-22727. This is a striking image of the Earth isolated, whole, delicate, and centerless’ (Gilroy, p. 81). In the image of clouds flying over the planet like human souls passing through time, and in the poignant metaphor of the blue peace provided by the ocean for Sonmi’s troubled mind, Mitchell has distilled in novel form an understanding of what the image of Earth as viewed from space represents. The combination of beauty in peril is not simply intended as an iconic image. It functions in Cloud Atlas like a leitmotif in a musical symphony, continually drawing attention to the key themes of the novel. Just as Paul Gilroy relates the new planetary consciousness to anti-war demonstrations and hence to anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, so Mitchell’s novel too reinforces the totemic image of a planet under threat with a deeper portrayal of the ways in which that threat is constituted. Soon after her escape, for example, Sonmi learns that, Nea So Copros is poisoning itself to death. Its soil is polluted, its rivers lifeless, its air toxloaded, its food supplies riddled with rogue genes. The downstrata can’t buy the drugs necessary to counter these privations. Melanoma and malaria belts advance northwards at forty kilometres per year. Those production zones of Africa and Indonesia that supply consumer Zones’ demands are sixty per cent uninhabitable. Plutocracy’s legitimacy, its wealth, is drying up; the Juche’s Enrichment Laws are mere sticking plasters on haemorrhages and amputations. (Cloud Atlas, p. 341) The ‘Juche’s Enrichment Laws’ are the means by which the dictatorship portrayed obliges its people to participate in capitalist society: they are literally required to spend and consume a specified number of dollars per month. ‘Under the enrichment laws, consumers have to spend a fixed quota of dollars each month, depending on their strata. Hoarding is an anticorpocratic crime’ (Cloud Atlas, p. 237). In this way, capitalist hegemony is bought by the surrender of political power to the compensatory offer of material goods. It becomes clear that the dictatorship Mitchell portrays is merely a capitalist society such as our own, in which the logic of capitalist practice has been taken to an extreme form.

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The ‘downstrata’ of the novel are the members of an economic underclass, who are unable to feed, clothe or educate themselves adequately. By ironically using this term to describe them, Mitchell parodies the language of administrative communication in order to highlight the epistemic violence that is inflicted when human beings cease to be seen as such. The visual image of an eminently vulnerable planet is best understood when we realize that the threat to the planet comes from the people on that planet. Resources are scarce so that competition for drinking water, drugs, printed material, clothes, shelter and basic amenities are liable to spill over into violence and division, as in the futuristic dystopia Mitchell portrays. Cloud Atlas takes an Orwellian logic of more equal than others to a logical endpoint. It is at this stage that other differentials begin to reassert themselves. Hiding out in eastern Korea, Sonmi encounters members of different communities, who would all be acceptably equal were they able to spend a fixed number of dollars but who, having fallen into the ‘crime’ of poverty are unable to assert their equality with other members of the corporation and so must fall back on otherness. Hiding out in a ghettoized area far from the capital, Sonmi notes, ‘I saw leathery Himalayans, Han Chinese, palehued hairy Baikalese, bearded Uzbeks, wiry Aleutians, coppery Viets and Thais’ (Cloud Atlas, p. 353). She goes on, ‘Each colonist had a different story. I met Uyghur dissidents; dustbowled farmers from Ho Chi Minh delta; once-respectable conurbdwellers who had fallen foul of Corp politics . . .’ (Cloud Atlas, p. 346). When she is taken by Hae Joo to a safe house in a taxi, the ‘elderly taxi driver spoke of his boyhood in a distant conurb called Mumbai, now flooded’ (Cloud Atlas, p. 236). In other words, the novel presents two different views of cosmopolitanism. The first is a cosmopolitanism that is bought through the compensation of material consumption. Everyone is permitted to be part of the corporation provided that they surrender themselves utterly to it. The second is a cosmopolitanism of opposition. The Indians, Chinese, Uzbeks and Vietnamese whom Sonmi encounters are in the system, but they are not consciously of it. It is a political cosmopolitanism based on consciousness of difference, into which members of different national or ethnic communities can gain admittance simply by showing willingness to live and work together. It is unlike the cosmopolitanism of the corporation, admittance into which is rewarded with material gain, but at the cost of surrendering distinct national or ethnic differences. The novel presents us with an opportunity to select between a cosmopolitanism based on the elimination of difference, which in effect is no cosmopolitanism, and one based on recognition of

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the increasing need to assert human equality through means other than the balance sheets of capitalist economics. By offsetting the red spot of a planet in peril with the blue peace of Sonmi’s ocean, Mitchell provides symbolic compensation for the threatening forces that have been unleashed in the world. This invites us to think that the ocean itself is neither intrinsically benign nor hostile. Rather it is a natural element to be moulded and managed in a human landscape. Mitchell taps the oceanic imagination as a symbol of the planet, both threatened and threatening, by forces which entirely override the parameters of individual nation states. His apollonian view, like Barnes’s oceanic feeling, opens up the imaginative possibility of a genuinely cosmopolitan human society. It is then a debatable question, whether cosmopolitanism can be based on economic equality or cultural difference.

Chapter Six


Globalization and planetarity are both concepts that relate to current debates about the nature of cosmopolitan society. Globalization appears to flatten the differentials between diverse national, ethnic and linguistic communities, offering to include everyone within its reach, provided that they are able to play the capitalist game. Planetarity on the other hand emphasizes the simultaneous co-existence of different human societies, identifying the common interest not in terms of the general ability to participate in capitalist economics, but in the shared state of being together on a planet as such. In other words, globalization cancels out the differences between the elements of a cosmopolitan society and reduces them to what Walter Benn Michaels describes as the ‘zero sum logic’ of financial accounting.1 Planetarity, on the other hand, approaches cosmopolitanism with the assumption of a cultural, rather than an economic, contribution to an increasingly globalized community. In this final chapter I wish to explore the cultural economy of cosmopolitanism in greater detail, by analysing how different varieties of the English language are expressed in contemporary British fiction.

Rushdie The experience of exile and immigration on which much cosmopolitan writing draws is registered in fiction through the mobilization of different linguistic codes. The experience of being an exile is to be caught perpetually between different languages, and different varieties of one language, just as much as it is a matter of being caught between different places or cultural practices. Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses is an important novel not just because of the fatwa that was served on its author as a result of its publication, and the related debates about censorship, freedom, and the encounter between east and west. Catherine Cundy is quite right to assert that any


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approach to the novel which is mainly concerned with the circumstances of its publication ‘fails to recognize that the dynamism of the novel resides in its handling of the issues that have developed in importance in Rushdie’s work – the relationships between location and dislocation, past and present, memory and history’.2 The Satanic Verses is a highly prescient study of a particular sub-cultural community that exists at the intersection between two different worlds, existing, as it were, in the space between nations and cultures. Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta are Indian film actors who have moved to Thatcherite London for very different reasons. After an expensive English public school and Oxbridge education, Saladin has been unable to settle in India. In the words of his nurse maid, we are just jungle people, he thinks so, and look how coarse our movies are, now he doesn’t enjoy, and so much disease you can’t even drink water from the tap, my god he really got an education . . . our little Sallu, England-returned, and talking so fine.3 In other words, Saladin is caught from the beginning in a postcolonial predicament of identity and anxiety. Cundy has argued that The Satanic Verses is a highly symbolic and ritualistic novel, and that one of the important early rituals is the moment at which Saladin cuts down the walnut tree planted in India by his father to celebrate his birth, ‘attempting to excise those years from the narrative of his existence . . . the gaps between past and present through which his real self is slipping’.4 He is unable to decide what his real identity is: ‘illusory, discontinuous, metamorphic’ (Satanic Verses, p. 5). Saladin has internalized the dominant ideology of the English class system, and assumes a particular place within it that the Indian experience would not be able to match. His lover Zeenat Vakil’s pestering him to renounce his anglicized ways has the opposite effect and drives him back to England. Gibreel Farishta, by contrast, flies to London to follow a woman rather than to avoid one: an accident during the production of a highly anticipated film leads to his meeting the mountaineer Alleluia Cone, and deciding that he must follow her to Europe. When their plane is hijacked and explodes, Saladin and Gibreel are the only survivors. This immediately positions them as people without a home or identity, as they are presumed to have perished in the crash. Moreover, they land at the house of Rosa Diamond, a colonial relic who years earlier had lived in Argentina and married an Anglo-Argentinean, Henry Diamond, only returning to England after the murder of her lover Martin de la Cruz.

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From the beginning, The Satanic Verses develops a sense of the interconnectedness of seemingly different peoples and places. The awkward hyphen that obtrudes into Rosa Diamond’s Anglo-Argentinean identity prefigures Saladin’s own identity crisis in a way that foregrounds the hyphen itself – the space in between, the symbol of complex diasporas and hybridity – rather than either half of the equation. Saladin is taken to a detention centre by immigration Inspector Stein, and suffers a stark encounter with institutional racism: ‘Opening time, Packy, let’s see what you’re made of!’ Stein exclaims, as he and his officers assault and interrogate Saladin (Satanic Verses, p. 157). To Saladin this treatment is beyond belief. Nothing in his education about the refined culture and civilization of Britain had led him to expect such a reception, and all he is able to do is repeat to himself, ‘This isn’t England’ (Satanic Verses, p. 158). Moreover, Saladin is a British passport holder through marriage to an English woman, Pamela Lovelace, and naively assumes that this fact will get him out of jail. In fact, when the nine officers discover his British citizenship, this causes more trouble for him, not less, as they begin to fear recriminations for assaulting a Briton. Saladin notes that in this new mood, ‘all nine had begun to look alike, all rendered equal and identical by their tension and fear’ (Satanic Verses, p. 165). Their solution to the risk of official reprimand is to beat him unconscious so that he cannot lodge a complaint, and throw him in a cell. The portrait Rushdie paints is of a society and an institution thoroughly racist and xenophobic. The officers’ fear of recriminations for beating a British citizen belies a cynical belief that to assault an immigrant from the Indian sub-continent would not warrant official sanction. Saladin is forced to realize that for all his expensive education, in the structurally racist London of the 1980s he will not be able to gain professional success, and will be left without money, power or recourse to legal protection. His treatment at the hands of Stein’s team recreates the classic racial stereotyping that had occurred for centuries during the period of empire. He is addressed insultingly as ‘Packy’, and the fact that he is from India, not Pakistan, is clearly of no interest to Stein. Members of others races such as Saladin are undifferentiated in the eyes of the police. D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke suggests that ‘the violence in The Satanic Verses looks back to the Notting Hill riots of the 1950s, involving working-class West Indians’ and ‘is set in the 1980s when the violence is also directed at the better-off Asians. The violence, by this time, has entered the machinery of the State and distorted the rule of law’.5


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It is important to note, however, that Rushdie draws these caricatures of officially sanctioned racism in order to mimic and subvert them. I explored in Chapter Three the notion of mimicry and masquerade in relation to feminist strategies for re-appropriating gender roles. Mimicry is a cultural practice in which a subjugated and oppressed group of people displays to an extreme form the characteristics assigned to them by their oppressors, and hence reveal the contradictions in the dominant ideology. The ideology of racial superiority had been an important part of orientalist discourse in Europe throughout the whole period of empire. Rushdie mobilizes the orientalist discourse of racial inferiority in order to mimic it. As Goonetilleke goes on to say, Rushdie adopts ‘part of the orientalist tradition; but in this case . . . he is appropriating and re-writing it’.6 If the generic visual classification of immigrants is a racist act, then at least Saladin is able to employ the same classification in order to subvert it. In his eyes, all of the Englishmen look the same. In this way, a racist attitude is turned against its employers. Moreover, once Saladin is taken into captivity, a series of fantastical metamorphoses takes place, allowing Rushdie to subvert Stein’s racist attitudes further. All of the inmates in the immigration cells are gradually morphing into beasts of burden, as if they are taking on the characteristics attributed to them by the officers who hold them in captivity: the characteristics of an inferior species, to be employed like so many working animals. Yet Rushdie satirizes this racist attitude as a sharp weapon of resistance. Saladin becomes devil-like, and grows into a goat-man of prodigious strength. This animal quality, supposed evidence of his inferiority, is what enables him to escape from captivity, and go in search of his English wife, Pamela Lovelace. Meanwhile, Gibreel Farishta undergoes a transformation that reveals a similar dialectic of empowerment and captivity. He becomes an angel, plagued by the ghost of Rekha Merchant, a woman who had once loved and lost him in Bombay. Fleeing this ghost, he collapses at the feet of the woman he had travelled to London to find, Alleluia Cone. Catherine Cundy considers this genuflection an important symbolic moment within the novel, representative of the ritual emasculation to which the postcolonial economic migrant is continually subjected. She refers to the act as ‘an insight into the inferiority experienced by the colonial subject in relation to authority; its public nature the index of all the humiliations of his situation’.7 Prostrate at the feet of his would-be lover, Gibreel falls into a dream about the origins of Islam, in which he appears as both the Angel, Gibreel, and the prophet, Mahound. In other words, the dream sequence is a technique

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used by Rushdie to act out a psycho-drama in which Gibreel becomes as much a split personality as Saladin, torn between the pagan deity of Abu Simbel and the radical new Islamic prophet Mahound. As Goonetilleke says, ‘the fact that Mahound is both the Devil and Prophet Mohammed . . . contributes to establish Rushdie’s chief philosophic point – that good and evil are two sides of the same coin, not contraries as usually thought’.8 The newcomer threatens the traditional ruler because whereas the old ways incorporate thousands of pagan deities, Mahound suggests that there should be only one god. This blasphemy is tantamount to sedition for it appears to strike at the basis of Abu Simbel’s political power, so that the grandee suggests a compromise: Mahound must visit the Angel Gibreel and acknowledge that if there is only one god, there are at least three goddesses, Lat, Manat and Uzza. When Mahound returns from his meeting with the angel proclaiming the compromise, Abu Simbel and his wife Hind take this as an opportunity to crack down on his followers and therefore re-establish their own authority. Mahound at once realizes he has been deceived. On the mountain, he met not an angel, but a devil, giving him the message that the pagan leaders are in control. Realizing this, he recants the ‘satanic verses’ of the compromise, and insists that there is only one true god, superior to all earthly pragmatists. But it is too late: his followers have already been defeated, Abu Simbel’s strength is augmented by force of arms, and all Mahound can do is flee from Jahilia into exile. By casting Gibreel as both the revolutionary activist (Mahound) and the server of the old structures (the angel) in his own dream, Rushdie appears to imply that Gibreel is torn between different religious and moral codes. This of course replicates the split subjectivity that makes the Indian actor Saladin unable to settle in India due to his anglicized education. Moreover, the split that opens up in the heart of Gibreel’s self-constitution occurs along several different perforations. His dream of the satanic verses recurs with continuity and variation throughout his residence in London. Metaphorical linkage is provided between his pursuit of Alleluia Cone in Britain and the vision of Abu Simbel by the location in which the dream unfolds: Mount Cone. He goes on to dream that an Imam in London calls on the Angel Gibreel for help is defeating the pagan goddess, Al-Lat. Two subsequent dream sequences appear to project a rather gloomy prospect for the future of Gibreel’s encounter between the worlds of east and west. First he dreams of Zamindar Mirza Saeed’s village of Titlipur shortly after the independence of India and Pakistan from Britain. The villagers follow a peasant girl, Ayesha, who claims to have been told by the


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Angel Gibreel that she must lead them on a pilgrimage, on foot, to Mecca. Mirza considers this nonsensical, but all of the villagers, including his wife Mishal, set off and are finally engulfed by the Red Sea. It is then a matter of interpretation as to whether they arrive in paradise or perish on Earth. By refusing closure to the sequence, Rushdie hints that the encounter between different peoples, languages, races and religions remains an ongoing process, rather than a historical fait accompli. In the final dream sequence, Gibreel Farishta dreams that after 25 years of exile, Mahound returned to Jahilia, defeated its people in battle, and ushered in a new political and religious system. He forgives his enemies Abu Simbel and Hind, and forgives also his own follower, Salman, for turning against him. It cannot be co-incidence that Rushdie assigns his own name to a character who exists at a historical crossroads, caught between old-style dogmatism and a revolutionary new approach. While Gibreel is in effect rendered motionless by the transfixing power of dreams, Saladin settles into his new life in ‘ellowen deeowen London’. This childish way of spelling out the name of the city as part of its annunciation is Rushdie’s technique for estranging what might otherwise seem too familiar. The London of The Satanic Verses is not the same place that millions of British people might identify. It is the London of an immigrant’s imagining, seen through a newcomer’s eyes and presenting the challenges faced by the newcomer , a city ‘in which the laws of space and time had ceased to operate . . . litter-blown [and] . . . lorry-infested’ (Satanic Verses, p. 201). Rushdie has separately described members of this sub-cultural community as ‘the last colony of the British Empire’.9 After being transformed into a devilish goat-man, Saladin is taken by Jumpy Joshi, his wife’s lover, to a bed-and-breakfast run by Muhammad Sufyan, and his wife Hind. Again, the characters of Gibreel’s dream seem to be given particular physical embodiment in Saladin’s experiences. Hind is not at all happy living in London or Britain, ‘this Vilayet of her exile’ (Satanic Verses, p. 248), and is tantamount to a captive in the house, clinging to a dream of an India that she can no longer access, but unable or unwilling to embrace her new surroundings. Receiving Saladin in his new capriform state into the family home only serves to exacerbate these vexed matters. Rumours about the goat-man rapidly spread around the south Asian community of London’s densely populated East End. Hind suspects Saladin of being a bad influence on her daughters Mishal and Anahita, themselves products of a complicated collision between a traditional Islamic upbringing and the upbringings of the other children among whom they mix. This suspicion deepens when Mishal starts a love affair with a lawyer, Hanif Johnson.

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But it is Johnson who is brave and generous enough to warn the family that, following the arrest of an Asian man, Uhuru Simba, as part of an investigation into the notorious ‘granny ripper’ series of murders, racial tension and maybe even violence can be expected (Satanic Verses, p. 287). Saladin is therefore taken into hiding at the Hot Wax Nightclub, a venue where displaced, disaffected and voiceless people from all backgrounds gather. These are people without money, power or appropriate modes of expression, and many of them are Indians and Bangladeshis from relatively low-income backgrounds. They form a city ‘visible but unseen’ (Satanic Verses, p. 242) because the powerful political and commercial people around them admit no cognizance whatsoever of their existence. It is as if they inhabit not one city, but two very different places. Rushdie has written separately that Britain in the 1980s was ‘undergoing a critical phase of its postcolonial period, and this crisis is not simply economic or political. It’s a crisis of the whole culture.’10 Something of this crisis can be glimpsed in his portrayal of the city and the outlaws who gather at the Hot Wax Nightclub. Their exclusion from the public life of London is not just racial, or economic. It is a complex synthesis of economic inequality as experienced by members of particular racial communities. At the nightclub, members of its sub-cultural community engage in a ritual of burning effigies of the figure they identify as being responsible for their socio-economic exclusion: Margaret Thatcher. This ritual provides a peculiar form of cultural cohesion for those people outside the dominant culture of get-rich-quick London. The effect is so pronounced that Saladin is cured of his transformation. The animal characteristics disappear and the humanity that had been officially denied him is restored. Saladin turns to an ex-lover and fellow actor Mimi Mamoulian to try and find employment. She is unable to help him. However, when news is published that Gibreel Farishta has been spotted alive and well in London, her contact, S.S. ‘Whisky’ Sisodia decides to offer him parts in a series of films about the angel, Gibreel. Gibreel himself has taken up residence with Alleluia Cone. He receives another vision, telling him that it is his angelic mission to save the people of London from torment. In this, he makes little progress, and he remains pursued by the ghost of Rekha Merchant. On the evening of the launch of his new film, however, he becomes transformed into an angel again. The Angel Gibreel and the devil Saladin track each other across London, against a back-drop of gathering racial violence and street demonstrations. Uhuru Simba dies in police custody. The Hot Wax Nightclub is raided by police, and street violence erupts in Brickhall. The ‘undercity’ whose existence


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had ‘so long’ been ‘denied’ suddenly forces itself into the general consciousness in the form of violent conflagration (Satanic Verses, p. 412). By framing these events at the premier of a major international film, Rushdie draws attention to the ways in which society itself has become dramatized. In one of his important later articles, Raymond Williams explored how the broadcast media frame current affairs as if they are pieces of imaginative drama, using the technologies of new media to create a particular perspective on events that they offer to merely report.11 Gibreel and Saladin are most prominent as actors when they are not acting. Saladin’s colleague Mimi Mamoulian is jailed for a time for fraud. Her release party is attended by members of the acting industry and finally brings Gibreel and Farishta face to face: two opposing angels. Saladin thinks that he can strike a blow against Gibreel by undermining his relationship with Alleluia Cone, who is identified as the pagan goddess Al-Lat from Gibreel’s dreams. For his part, Gibreel believes himself to be the angel of vengeance. He buys a trumpet, gives it the name of Azraeel, the angel of death, and heads towards the riots, scattering flames from the trumpet as he goes. Mr and Mrs Sufyan, Mishal and Anahita, Pamela Lovelace and Jumpy Joshi all perish in the course of Gibreel’s attempts to track down Saladin. Saladin escapes, and returns to India where he effects a reconciliation with the culture and nation of his father and renounces his anglicized ways in order to rejoin his lover Zeenat Vakil. Still believing himself to be the angel of death, Gibreel destroys Alleluia Cone and S. S. Sisodia. In a final confrontation with Saladin, he then proceeds to destroy himself. The conclusion generates a feeling of exile ending, but it is not able to offer a portrait of healed wounds. Rather, the prospects for multi-racial cohesion appear bleak and sombre. As Saladin says, ‘When you’ve fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do?’ (Satanic Verses, pp. 401–02).

An Idea of Home The violent climax of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), disintegrating into racial hatred and confrontation, might at first seem depressingly familiar two decades after the Brixton riots and The Satanic Verses. Karim, and other members of the Bengal Tigers community pressure group, are persecuted by a group of racist thugs calling themselves the Lion Hearts Gang.

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In response, they become embattled and identify the Berners Estate as their home territory, to be defended in the face of a violent onslaught: ‘Out there, right now, are people who are twisted with hatred for us and for Islam. They are planning to march right on our doorsteps, and we are not going to let them get away with it. Let’s show the Lion Hearts that Bangla Town is defended. Tigers will take on Lions any day of the week . . . Right. The list of estates. We need volunteers for organizers. First one: Berners Estate.’12 Karim is appointed organizer of the Bengal Tigers because he is one of the most articulate members of the group, and is comfortable conversing in English. This is one of the things that cause the main character, Nazneen, to be attracted to him, and to start an affair with him. Her husband, Chanu, had absolutely forbidden that she speak in English. The east London Bangladeshi community among whom Chanu and Nazneen live is generally composed of low-income families, not necessarily because they are unskilled or uneducated, but because they simply find it difficult to convince middleclass employers to offer them work. In Chapter Three it was suggested that there is an important imbrication of social space with power relations, which are now revealed to have a specific racial dimension. Rowena in Shena Mackay’s Heligoland was obliged by poverty and lack of education to move into the communally designed Nautilus complex, years after the building had become dilapidated and run-down, because it is a space that she can afford financially and control spatially. The Nautilus in this sense is a small version of the Berners Estate in Brick Lane. Matters of space, class and ethnicity intersect in important ways. There is no direct link between ethnicity and inequality, but indirectly, the spatial structure of the city appears to provide access to education, employment and secure income more equally for some ethnic communities than for others. One of the consequences of this is that the Bangladeshi community in Brick Lane consciously identifies itself as a separate segment of the London whole. ‘Spreading rumours is our national pastime’ (Brick Lane, p. 20) Nazneen’s friend Razia explains to her, and the ‘nation’ in question is certainly not Britain. On the other hand, neither can it really be identified as Bangladesh as such. Rather, the ‘nation’ that Razia invokes is the subcultural national community of London-Bangladesh. Dr Azad imagines the same nation of London-Bangladesh when he complains that ‘our children are copying what they see here, going to the pub, to nightclubs, or drinking


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at home’, and that ‘our community is not properly educated about these things’ (Brick Lane, p. 23). Razia too employs the language of ‘our’ community and ‘our’ people in such a way as to invoke a separate and distinct community, which is tantamount to a re-imagined nation. She advises Nazneen, ‘If you go out to shop, go to Sainsbury’s. English people don’t look at you twice. But if you go to our shops, the Bengali men will make things up about you. You know how they talk. Once you get talked about, then that’s it.’ (Brick Lane, p. 47) Whatever their rights of citizenship or residence, Razia does not consider herself to be English. The ‘English people’ of her imagining are a separate category, with which she cannot self-identify. There is thus considerable irony in her encouragement to Nazneen to shop in the ‘English’ shops, rather than in stores staffed by Bengali or Bangladeshi men. This draws attention to an important cultural difference. Nazneen as a Bangladeshi woman is expected to remain in her family home at all times unless accompanied by her husband, Chanu. To go out alone is to foster a potentially damaging reputation as a transgressive and uncontrollable woman, which might not be the case for the independent English women of Razia’s imagination. In Brick Lane, Monica Ali explores the subtle complications that exist when the conflict over social space is inflected by class, ethnicity and also gender. As a Bangladeshi woman in the imagined city of London-Bangladesh, Nazneen is tantamount to a prisoner in her own home. The compartmentalization of cultures that has resulted in the Bangladeshi community becoming virtually besieged inside the Berners Estate also has the microcosmic effect of confining her in this way. In cultural terms, she is expected by Chanu to be a passive woman, an obedient wife and a ubiquitous mother – ubiquitous, that is, within the family home. She is not permitted to venture out, and a major practical obstacle to this is her inability to converse in the English language. She can only ‘say two things in English. Sorry and thank you’ (Brick Lane, p. 14), so that even when she contemplates the minor rebellion of going outside unattended, she loses confidence in her ability to navigate the city independently and resolves instead to ‘spend another day alone’ (ibid.). Spatially and culturally Nazneen is imprisoned, and language is the vehicle of her imprisonment. Thus when she proposes to Chanu that she enrol in a college ‘for the English lessons’ (Brick Lane, p. 62) he is instantly

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dismissive: ‘It’s not so simple as that. Just to go to college, like that’ (ibid.). Chanu articulates his objection to her learning English in terms of her role as a female member of the London Bangladeshi community: ‘You’re going to be a mother . . . Will that not keep you busy enough?’ (ibid.). Since that role does not include a necessity to converse in English – or in any language, with any adult human being – to Chanu the English course is redundant. Ironically, Chanu’s attitude, and Nazneen’s level of English are almost exact inversions of her attitude and his language ability. She is dutifully supportive of his high level of English – which brings ironic and unexpected results. On the day when he treats Nazneen, and their daughters Shahana and Bibi to a sightseeing tour of London, to celebrate his announcement of an impending return to Bangladesh, he enters into a debate with a bus conductor over the relative merits of the cultural landmarks of the city: ‘Can you tell me something? To your mind, does the British Museum rate more highly than the National Gallery? Or would you recommend gallery over museum?’ The conductor pushed his lower lip out with his tongue. He stared hard at Chanu, as if considering whether to eject him from the bus. ‘In my rating system,’ explained Chanu, ‘they are neck and neck. It would be good to take an opinion from a local.’ (Brick Lane, p. 240) The interest in high-brow cultural pursuits such as museums and galleries appear to be alien to the presumably under-educated bus driver, in whose national name they supposedly exist. Chanu’s formally accurate and grammatically correct English and literate vocabulary appear to align him, ironically, with those national landmarks in contradistinction to the conductor’s alienation from them. This in turn alienates the two men from each other. The conductor’s response to Chanu’s level of articulacy is open suspicion and hostility, as if in the conductor’s world-view, southern Asians should somehow not be entitled to a high level of education, as epitomized by the museums, or to class mobility. Chanu has a degree from the University of Dhaka. Does this enable him to move from the working to the middle class? No, because he is unable to find graduate or skilled employment. He is proud of his education and qualifications, to the extent that he displays all of his certificates to everyone who will look at them. Does this increase his prospects? No, it only brings mockery and vilification.


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In a sense, Chanu’s crime is to display the audacity of speaking two languages comfortably and hence of attempting to inhabit two radically dissociated worlds. In contrast to Chanu’s bilingualism, the man with whom Nazneen enters a love affair, Karim, is comfortable in only one language – English: It was a strange thing, and it took her some time to realize it. When he spoke in Bengali, he stammered. In English, he found his voice and it gave him no trouble. Having made the discovery, she went back to the beginning, and made it afresh. (Brick Lane, p. 173) To Nazneen, it is almost beyond belief that a member of London’s Bangladeshi community could be more comfortable speaking in English than in Bengali, to the point of not being comfortable in Bengali at all. Thus the transgression against the rules of her ethnic community implicit in her love affair is inextricable from the rebellion attendant upon her enlarged attitude to the English language. Language was the means of her confinement, and as a result, to enter into an illicit relationship with a man who speaks the language that was denied her is to resist that confinement. Although unable to make this protest against Chanu as an individual, Nazneen is able to make it as a woman, and specifically, as a woman from the Bangladeshi community of London. As a woman, she refuses to allow the women of her community to remain imprisoned linguistically and so allows her daughters to flout Chanu’s strict rule that they should speak only Bengali: ‘When Chanu went out the girls frequently switched between languages. Nazneen let it pass. Perhaps even encouraged it’ (Brick Lane, p. 158). To rebel against Chanu’s linguistic strictures is ultimately to rebel against the treatment of women that occurs within a specific ethnic community, the London-Bangladeshi community. This rebellion cannot take place as an individual because Nazneen has already been denied the chance of an English education. It must take place rather as a cultural and structural confrontation of general attitudes within the community in question. Thus by allowing her daughters to transgress the rule forbidding them to talk in English, she is striking at the very means by which London-Bangladeshi women can be imprisoned. The result of this is that her rebellion is not only against Chanu, the individual. It is also against the structural repression of women by men – and this includes Karim as well. When Karim suggests that she divorce Chanu to

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marry him, it is because she appears to offer him the model of ‘[a] Bengali wife. A Bengali mother. An idea of home’ (Brick Lane, p. 380). Through her revolt against Chanu, these are the very things she is unable to provide, so that in the end she is unwilling to choose between either Chanu or Karim, and elects to devote herself to her daughters. Nazneen’s relationship with Karim had been occasioned by his organization of a series of meetings of the Bengal Tigers community protest group, convened to formulate a response to the increase in incidents of racial hatred directed against the Bangladeshi community by the Lion Hearts gang. As part of her revolt against Chanu, not only had she thrown off her linguistic shackles, but this action had been inseparable from the physical escape outside the estate in which she had been confined. She learns English, attends the meetings and participates in the process of debating how to respond to the incitement of racial hatred. Thus in response to Chanu’s Bengali language Nazneen is a would-be Anglophone; in response to the racial antagonism of the Lion Hearts gang, she is a Bangladeshi; and in response to Karim’s masculinity she is a woman. The different fault lines that open up within her subjectivity reveal the many different divides which she must continually traverse. A subtly nuanced portrayal of the precise attitudes to the varieties of English spoken by this London-Bangladeshi woman is the means by which Ali explores that dialectic of self-constitution through conflict.

Small Island Much the same is true of Andrea Levy’s 2004 novel Small Island, which again carries out an exploration of the contribution made by immigrant communities to Britain’s public life, and again performs this work through the mobilization of a series of interlocking linguistic idioms. In Jamaica on the eve of the Second World War, Gilbert Joseph answers a recruiting call from the mother country and sails to Britain to enlist in the Royal Air Force. In Britain, he is confronted by two layers of prejudicial behaviour. The local population of the Lincolnshire village in which he is based are patronizing and disparaging towards the efforts of Gilbert and his compatriots. Worse, the proximity of an American airbase which is sharply segregated on racial lines places him outside any easy alliance with either the British or the Americans. Nevertheless, Gilbert’s experiences in Britain encourage him to travel back to Jamaica only long enough to find a young bride, Hortense,


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before returning to Britain again in 1948 with the intention of settling permanently. Hortense is the half-sister of Michael Roberts, another Jamaican who had joined the Royal Air Force and during his time in Britain had a brief affair with Queenie Bligh. Queenie is a London lady obliged to take in lodgers to cover the cost of running her decaying home when her husband Bernard who had enlisted in the Air Force (ironically) is sent away from Britain – to India. In this way, Levy skilfully constructs a tripartite model of different migrations along different routes, and different peoples suddenly encountering each other as if for the first time. When Bernard Bligh returns from the war, he is horrified that his respectable wife has taken in the Jamaican immigrants Gilbert and Hortense as tenants. In a move that recapitulates the motif of Adam and Eve being cast out into the fallen world that runs through much women’s writing of the twentieth century, they are obliged to leave the house and make alternative arrangements. But there is one more twist: Queenie gives birth to a child from her affair with Michael Roberts, and asks that Gilbert and Hortense take the child with them. Thus Hortense is placed in the position of bringing up (without ever knowing it) the child of her own half-brother. It would be tempting but too simplistic to see this child, born to a white mother and a Jamaican father, as a symbol of potential harmonious racial integration. In fact, Small Island hints at how such integration might be possible, without ever arriving at a point to show how it can be realized. The novel does this through the alternation of specific and different linguistic codes, which at times mesh together and a times are radically sundered. That dialectic of integration and separation expresses much of the attempts at racial integration in twentieth-century Britain. The question of integration is rendered ironic from the outset, since to Hortense, Gilbert and Michael it is never in doubt. ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’ quotes Hortense to her school friend Celia on discussing plans for emigration, and she is clearly referring to herself as a Briton.13 ‘To fight for my country, sir,’ Gilbert replies to a Lincolnshire villager as to why he has come to Britain in the first place (Small Island, p. 138). ‘Your country?’ is the uncomprehending reply. It is the encounter generated by moving across the world that places in doubt the very sense of unity that people such as Hortense and Gilbert would otherwise not have questioned. One of the iconic moments of the novel is the point at which Bernard Bligh returns home from the war and discovers that Gilbert – ‘a black man’ (Small Island, p. 429) – is residing in his house. In response to Gilbert’s

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proffered handshake, Bernard ‘just shut the bloody door on him’ (Small Island, p. 430). Although Gilbert had studied law in Jamaica, the endemic racism of the society in which he arrives makes it impossible for him to pursue a legal career. In other words, he experiences racial prejudice both at home and at work. The relationship between space, race and power relations is evident in this basic structure, which squeezes Gilbert and Hortense until they are left with nowhere to go. Instead of his chosen profession, Gilbert is expected to feel grateful for finding unskilled employment as a post office driver, and his first day brings inevitable conflict with his colleagues: ‘Can you please help me?’ I have to ask one of them. ‘Speak English,’ one of them say. ‘It is English I am speaking,’ I tell him. ‘Anyone understand what this coloured gentleman is after?’ More laughing. (Small Island, p. 316) There is more complexity in this confrontation than may at first appear. It is of course a simple exposition of racist behaviour, manifested through the colleague’s disingenuous attitude to Gilbert’s language. It is clear that the postal workers can understand Gilbert and that Gilbert’s spoken language is quite correct. The choice epitomized in this brief scene is a conscious action not to accept otherness, and this is hidden behind a camouflage of imagined linguistic difference. This is ironic, for the language which Gilbert uses in his narration (and not to the faces of his colleagues) is linguistically different: Speak English, one of them say is the idiomatic construction of Jamaican English, here offering an alternative to the Oxford English ‘one of them says’. Ironically, by constructing Gilbert’s character through this alterity of linguistic codes, Levy enables the character to mobilize the very linguistic difference that had been mobilized against him as his own vehicle for self-expression. To begin with, the assumption of linguistic difference is both absolute, and inseparable from endemic attitudes to members of other races. Were the historic relations in question simply a matter of the uneducated and unskilled venting their inarticulacy on an easy target, this would be defeatable by a process of education. Yet the novel shows that in 1948 at least, racist attitudes were not limited to such a sector and were in fact much more general and hence much more difficult to combat. For example, when Queenie takes Hortense to visit the local shops for the first time, the baker reacts to


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Hortense without the consciously insulting attitude of Gilbert’s colleagues, but with the same basic assumption of superiority over difference: ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked me directly. A red Englishman! ‘He wants to know if you’d like anything,’ Mrs Bligh told me. I obliged her by making a purchase. ‘A tin of condensed milk, please’ I asked him. But this red man stared back at me as if I had not uttered the words. No light of comprehension sparkled in his eye. ‘I beg your pardon?’ he asked? (Small Island, p. 331) The baker is neither consciously nor deliberately insulting in his attitude towards Hortense. He does not ask her to leave the shop or refuse to serve her. Yet his basic attitude is still fundamentally one of prejudice. The assumption is that because Hortense is a woman of another race, she must be both uneducated and inferior, and this prejudice manifests itself in the related assumption that she will be unable to speak English. Thus when she addresses him, he is listening not with his sensory apparatus alone, but also with his cultural apparatus – an organ fine tuned by centuries of prejudice. Queenie herself, however welcoming to Hortense, communicates using the same cultural apparatus, and this is clear from her assumption that Hortense requires a translator – from English to English. The cultural apparatus that the two Londoners draw on arises from an in-built assumption of superiority which in turn draws on a general culture which for centuries had existed to assure them that this was the case. Thus the structural racism encountered by Gilbert and Hortense is far more general and ingrained than its mere expression in the more rebarbative elements of the society and is accordingly much more difficult to unpick. This assumption of superiority is ironic given the register of English in which Hortense has been educated to communicate. Upon first arriving off the ship in England, for example, she says to a fellow passenger, ‘[e]xcuse me, sir. I am needing to get to Nevern Street. Would you perchance know where it is?’ (Small Island, p. 16). On being advised to travel by taxi, she responds with another question: ‘Thank you, and could you be so kind as to point out for me the place where I might find one of these vehicles?’ (ibid.). The register that she employs and the high quality of her prose sets her apart from the other people on the dock, to whom this degree of formality seems old-fashioned and even unnecessary. It is the idiom of formal English that was taught in colonies towards the end of the period of empire,

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lagging behind the daily vernaculars of Britain itself and therefore ironically incongruous in England. Hortense, with her ability to recite Wordsworth and Tennyson in the appropriate poetic register, has internalized the ideology not just of the empire, but of a particular class within it. She is unaware that the values of that class do not necessarily express the values of the whole of Britain. The people of Britain are likewise unaware that she has been educated in those values: ‘How come England did not know me?’ (Small Island, p. 141). Hortense’s internalization of the dominant ideology of the English ruling class during the period of empire provides three obstacles to integration for her. If she is unable to integrate with members of the English working class it is because her linguistic inheritance causes them to be suspicious of her. If she is unable to integrate with the middle class, it is because the colour of her skin causes the same reaction. At an even more fundamental level, however, her internalization of the ideology of English, her self-definition as a Briton who will never be enslaved, mark her out from other people in Jamaica, where the seeds of national consciousness were already being sown by 1948. Thus a character such as Elwood is scornful of Gilbert’s willingness to fight for Britain in the first place. ‘To have your own country, yes. That is worth a fight’ (Small Island, p. 129). When Gilbert announces his plans to emigrate after the war, Elwood is incredulous, as Jamaica itself seems to offer its own opportunities for prosperity. Yet Gilbert dismisses these: ‘you know this is a small island?’ (Small Island, p. 207). There is considerable irony in this, for when Gilbert and Hortense sail to Britain, the broad horizons of opportunity that they believe await them are soon constricted as avenue after avenue of possibility is closed down to them. This forces readers to ask which really is the small island of the title, Jamaica or Britain? Elwood by contrast has not entirely internalized the ideology of empire and as a result, is ready to believe that Jamaica offers him ample opportunity in the future. It is a further irony of Small Island that the very thing Elwood believes worth working for, one’s own country, is the very thing invoked by Bernard as a reason for not accepting West Indian immigrants in London: ‘He’s just back from fighting a war and now this country no longer feels his own’ (Small Island, p. 117). When Bernard is serving in India, his overwhelming impression is of the myriad different languages that he hears spoken there. Upon arriving in Bombay he sees ‘Groups of carnivalcoloured natives gesticulating with arms as skinny as sticks. Jabbering in mysterious tongues’ (Small Island, p. 342). When he is sent on an expedition


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with a group of Gurkhas to capture a Japanese pilot, he again notes that they were ‘shouting. Not in English. Foreign themselves. Black. Indian’ (Small Island, p. 349). The Indian section of the novel is significant for it enables Levy to demonstrate how complicated global migration really is, and how difficult fulfilling any notion of cosmopolitanism might be. Bernard’s encounter with a series of ethnic cultures in India is registered through recourse to a further linguistic code. To him, the different Indian languages he hears, including Indian English, are all simply ‘foreign’. This is also his attitude to Caribbean speakers of English. It even extends to the Japanese pilots against whom he imagines himself to be fighting. When he dreams of a Japanese fighter after the war, he imagines his wife inviting that fighter into their house, as she had done Gilbert and Hortense. In his imagining, Gilbert and Hortense are not Britons, they are absolutely other to his culture and selfdefinition, to the extent that his cognitive faculties equate Jamaica with Japan. If Bernard embodies the ideology of empire, then Gilbert and Hortense have the capacity to absorb that ideology before leaving Jamaica. Bernard’s assumption of superiority on racial grounds is uncomfortably replicated in Hortense’s attitude to the kind of patois English spoken by her uneducated nanny, Miss Jewel, on linguistic grounds: ‘Miss Jewel,’ I asked. ‘Why your legs stick out so?’ She solemn, sucked her teeth and said, ‘Me nuh know, Miss Hortense. When me mudda did pregnant dem seh smaddy obeah’r. A likkle spell yah no. And she sang as she washed. “Mr Roberts wash him sock at night. And sidung pon de ground.”’ ‘No, Miss Jewel,’ I told her, ‘you are singing the wrong words. It is “While shepherds watched their flock by night”.’ (Small Island, p. 43) The image of winter shepherds watching their flocks when mobilized in Britain is likely to give rise to visions of wintry fields and snow, for these are common features of the Christmas season in Britain to which the hymn refers. It is an incongruous image when evoked by the words of Hortense in the tropical Caribbean, yet she never questions this incongruity. To her, the song is a song of Britain and therefore sings of the finest culture and noble truths. The ironic discrepancy resembles Bernard’s capacity to perform that other incongruous identification, of Jamaica with Japan. The difference is that Hortense has internalized an ideology instilled on her island by

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an outside colonial power, Britain, and this has the effect of cutting her off from some sections of her own people, as well as from the culture of the colonizer. Clearly we are intended to think of Miss Jewel as an uneducated woman, hence her belief in the black magic of obeah. Hortense accordingly believes that her educated version of English is superior to that of the uneducated servant, and that this superiority will equip her for life in the refined metropolis that she believes Britain to be. The irony is that she again expresses her reported narrative in a West Indian variety of English – ‘she solemn’ is used as if it were a verb – even while denying that she speaks in such a form. This shows that Levy has a keen ear for the many different linguistic codes which Gilbert and Hortense must continually negotiate. The challenge then is to find a way in which neither Jamaican patois nor English vernacular working class, nor Indian English are seen as any less authentic than the poetic idiom of Wordsworth. If racial integration is to be achieved, the novel seems to suggest that this must be more than a matter of one race ‘accepting’ another. It must be a matter of different races meshing together to their mutual transformation. In linguistic terms, this will only be possible if we arrive at a stage where instead of consigning other varieties of English to the junk box of the English language, these varieties are allowed to infuse, contribute to and mould a new form of English capable of reflecting a new form of cosmopolitanism.

Was Stevens Black? In Small Island, Andrea Levy ironically juxtaposes two distinct island communities which also represent distinct ethnic cultures failing to understand each other, and existing as it were in parallel, never quite converging. In Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, this parallelism is broken down when the members of different ethnic communities come face to face – but the result is violent conflict. As a way of concluding this study, I wish to present a reading of quite a different novel, again produced from within a specific ethnic community, in order to explore how racial cohesion might at least be imagined into existence linguistically. Who is the racial ‘other’ in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day? On the face of it, The Remains of the Day appears to be a novel about white, upper-class and possibly even racially supremacist (at any rate, proto-Fascist) men. This view is given physical embodiment by the performances of Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins and a young Hugh Grant in the Merchant-Ivory film


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adaptation of the novel. That Japanese-born Ishiguro should pen an internationally successful novel that makes no motion whatsoever towards racial inclusivity would seem like a striking omission. Unless, that is, the novel can be imagined differently. In a landmark study of race and the cultural politics of representation in the United States of America, Shelley Fisher Fishkin provocatively asked the question, ‘Was Huck black?’14 She was referring to the eponymous hero of the quintessential novel of American frontier spirit, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. By asking, Was Huck Black? and by sub-titling her book ‘Huckleberry Finn and African-American voices’, Fishkin did not necessarily seek to draw a literal conclusion to the implicit claim for racial identification of the main character. Rather, she sought to explore ways in which the novel could be understood from within a non-white American community. She sought to wrest control of the creative apparatus away from the literary establishment that had existed for two centuries, and to extrapolate a way in which the novel might be imagined differently. The specific contribution Fishkin brings to the canonical readings of Mark Twain is to suggest that the texture of the novel can be understood as a collection of different linguistic codes, including the dialects of African-American English: At a time when African-American vernacular speech was widely ridiculed in the nation at large, Mark Twain recognized that African-American vernacular speech and storytelling manifested a vitality and literary potential that was rich, powerful, and largely untapped in print.15 Fishkin’s point is not that Mark Twain consciously modelled his boy narrator on an African-American; or that the eponymous hero must be seen in this way. On the contrary, she is explicit about this, stating that Twain himself ‘wrote no manifestoes on this topic’ (ibid.). Her point is that by the time Huckleberry Finn was written in 1885, America was a highly diverse multi-racial society. Twain as both writer and orator could not fail to have been interested in the oral tradition that had developed in AfricanAmerican culture up to that point, arising because very few African-American children had access to formal education and hence were excluded from the written tradition in storytelling. Having cultivated an interest in the rhythms, tones, syntaxes and idioms of African-American speech and narration, it is not surprising that Twain should then allow those things to permeate his own work. For in Huckleberry Finn, it is not only the escaped slave Jim who speaks in a highly idiosyncratic idiom. Such a mode of narration permeates the text as a whole, enabling Fishkin to argue that Huck himself is a linguistic

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construct, and a product of the myriad African-American voices who before that point had had no access to the literary record. If the protagonist can be seen as having been constructed in language in this way, it is only a short step to imagining the boy as an African-American child. In the highly charged racial atmosphere of the USA in the early 1990s when Fishkin was writing, this is highly pertinent to attempts at inclusivity and diversity. For when we read, we tend to imagine the main character in our own image. Fishkin’s analysis revealed that Huckleberry Finn was not a racist book, full of racist assumptions, but was a founding document of a multi-racial society in which African-Americans themselves could have a stake. I wish to argue here that Ishiguro’s protagonist, the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day can also be seen as a linguistic construct, the product of several diverse competing and co-present linguistic idioms which are the result of contemporary Britain’s own current multicultural complexity. The Remains of the Day can be seen as a palimpsest, a text pervaded by the distinctive linguistic idioms of more than one social, cultural or ethnic grouping. Its characters can then be seen as inhabiting the interstices or boundaries between these different linguistic codes. One highly pertinent fact about The Remains of the Day is that it is set towards the end of the period of empire. That is to say, its action occurs at a point when the contribution made by colonial subjects to British culture is historically established, but only just about to gain any kind of official recognition. There is a relatively long line of colonial butlers and man servants, both in literature and history, from the late eighteenth century onwards, and this supports the identification of Stevens as a colonial immigrant. Samuel Johnson, one of the pioneers of modern English etymology, kept Francis Barber, a freed Jamaican slave, as his manservant in London from 1752 to 1784. In William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 novel Vanity Fair there is also an implicit tie-in between multicultural society and a diversified idiomatic version of English. The character of Sambo in Vanity Fair might be seen as a butler imported direct from the colonies, and with people like him came a peculiar contribution to the English language. Thackeray registers this contribution through his mobilization of a profusion of what were in 1848 exotic literary newcomers to the English language: bandana, veranda, bungalow, caravan, chutney.16 Tattycoram in Dickens’s Little Dorrit is another example. Interestingly, Shelley Fisher Fishkin points out that in arguing for the overhaul of white supremacist ideology in western society, Mark Twain often revealed his own ‘honest admiration of a


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black man whom he recognizes as in some respects “his superior”.’ This man turns out to ‘George Griffin, his former butler’.17 If there is a line of colonial butlers – not to mention man servants and maids – in English literature, this is because the history of immigration from the colonies to Britain was a complex one. Following the formal ending of slavery in Britain in 1807, few employment prospects would have been available to those members of the immigrant population and their families who had been brought into the country against their will and denied access to any formal education or training. They were therefore confined to the working class more or less by default. In drawing attention to the relationship between ‘poverty, racism and bad schools’ in the nineteenth century, Patrick Brantlinger has shown that ‘aspirations to transgress or transcend class barriers’ were ‘doomed to a tragic outcome’.18 Domestic service must have seemed like a real possibility for many members of Britain’s growing ethnic communities, and so the literary depiction of freed slaves remaining in servitude replicates the history of expropriation and inequality on which slavery was based. The Remains of the Day can be said to access this troubled history in important ways. Two narratives recounted by Stevens appear to frame his family’s background and values in an imperial context. Moreover, it is striking that these narratives had been handed down to Stevens by his ageing father, Stevens Senior, in a manner that recalls the oral tradition in AfricanAmerican literature to which Fishkin draws attention. The first of these narratives is intended as an example of what makes a good butler. The action of the novel is presented in the form of a series of long flashbacks by Stevens during the course of a journey to find an old companion, Miss Kenton. He recollects the time when as Head Butler at Darlington Hall in the 1930s he had been given the task of ensuring that a conference being organized by Lord Darlington (to mobilize potential British support for Hitler’s Germany) would run smoothly. Whatever his personal views on the matter in hand, Stevens feels a strong vocational imperative to perform his duties to the best of his ability. In this, he is guided by a story that had been told to him years earlier by his father. The story was ‘an apparently true one concerning a certain butler who had travelled with his employer to India and served there for many years maintaining amongst the native staff the same high standards he had commanded in England’.19 The story continues, ‘this butler had entered the dining room to make sure all was well for dinner, when he noticed a tiger languishing beneath the dining table’ (Remains, p. 36). Without being ruffled, however, the butler

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in question ‘proceeded calmly to the drawing room’ where he informed his master quite calmly that ‘there appears to be a tiger in the dining room’ and requested permission for the ‘twelve-bores to be used’ to shoot the animal (ibid.). A few moments later, the butler in question reported back that ‘[d]inner will be served at the usual time’ with ‘no discernible traces of the recent occurrence’ (ibid.). Though strictly figurative, and intended to serve as a lesson in decorum and propriety even in the face of personal excitement and fear, this narrative handed down by Stevens Senior to his son has an interestingly different effect for us as readers. It enables us to cultivate an imaginative association between the concept of a servant, the practice of decorum, and the colonial location of the native staff. In other words, although the butler of the fable had travelled with his master from Britain to India, the narrative invites an implicit mental depiction of the scene, whereby servitude is equated with a colonial servant. This is also the case in a follow-up fable, again intended to function didactically. Stevens recalls that ‘my elder brother, Leonard, was killed during the Southern African War while I was still a boy’ (Remains, p. 40). This is not greatly significant in itself, although it is interesting to note that the Boer Wars in southern Africa had been the occasion of Mark Twain’s greatest public support for America’s Anti-Imperial Society and hence to the wider campaign for racial inclusivity and equality which we find in his literature.20 Ishiguro’s reference to South Africa becomes more significant when Stevens continues his recollection of the manoeuvre in which his brother was killed. ‘Not only was it alleged that the manoeuvre had been a most un-British attack on civilian Boer settlements’ but also ‘overwhelming evidence emerged that it had been irresponsibly commanded with several floutings of elementary military precautions, so that the men who had died – my brother among them – had died quite needlessly’ (Remains, p. 40). Most significant of all for the didactic story in question is the fact that ‘the general concerned . . . had been discreetly retired, and he had then entered business dealing in shipments from southern Africa’ (Remains, pp. 40–41). Moreover, ‘this very same personage’ had been invited to the country house where Stevens Senior was employed for a few days, ‘during which my father’s employer hoped to lay the foundations for a lucrative business transaction’ (Remains, p. 41). The employer, Mr Silvers, was aware that having to receive the General whose blunder had resulted in the death of his son might be unpalatable for Stevens Senior and decided to ‘offer him the option of taking several days’ leave for the duration of the General’s stay’ (ibid.). Again, as an example of model behaviour in the face of personal animosity, the


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butler replied ‘to the effect that while he was most grateful that his feelings had been taken into account, Mr Silvers could be assured that service would be provided to the usual standard’ (ibid.). This insertion into the narrative of The Remains of the Day has the effect of strengthening the cultivated association between domestic staff and the colonial setting that had been generated by the first fable. The transfer from a military to a commercial occupation reminds us that throughout the period of empire, a constant flow of goods and people, including servants, was moving between the colonies and London. In addition, the reference to the ‘un-British’ nature of the manoeuvre raises the spectre of some of the racist and xenophobic assumptions on which the British empire had been based. Qualities of cowardice and weakness were ascribed by that ideology to the other peoples encountered by the British army during its colonial wars, with the army allotting to its own members the superior traits of courage, comradeship and discipline. When Stevens’s narrative reveals the discrepancy between this model and its historical lack of realization, the whole ideological bastion becomes fractured. Any simple dividing line between colonizer and colonial subject crumbles away, revealing that each side of the encounter is more diverse than had officially been declared. This diversity can be understood through analysis of the idiomatic English language deployed by Ishiguro throughout The Remains of the Day. The linguistic paradigm at work is a recognizable form of English which is nevertheless neither Oxford nor Ishiguro’s own natural tongue. When Stevens sets out on his journey to find Miss Kenton, he is obliged to stop at an inn because he has insufficient petrol for the journey. One of the men at the inn encourages him to take advantage of this break to climb a nearby hill, promising, ‘you won’t get a better view anywhere in the whole of England’ (Remains, p. 25). The exchange that follows is typical of the multiple linguistic layers that structure The Remains of the Day: ‘If what you say is true,’ I replied, ‘I think I’d rather stay here. I happen to be embarking on a motoring trip during the course of which I hope to see many splendid views. To see the best before I have properly begun would be somewhat premature.’ The fellow did not seem to understand me, for he simply said again: ‘You won’t see a better view in the whole of England.’ (Remains, p. 25) To a reader versed in the traditionally literary qualities of ambiguity and multi-accentuality, the promise of the finest view in England might or might not suggest that Stevens, the recipient of that promise, is an outside visitor

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to the country. Here alone there are grounds for exploring the contribution to the English language made by different multicultural groups, and hence for the ways in which the novel structures its characters as linguistic constructs. In this exchange, two distinct linguistic elements encounter each other – the one working-class and simplistic, the other highly educated and elaborate. In Small Island, the highly educated and formally correct English of a colonial immigrant is not understood by the cockney baker. A similar linguistic transaction appears to be taking place here. In one sense, the language used by Stevens throughout the novel is an indicator of his vocation towards extreme propriety at all times. Moreover, there is perhaps a hint of class mobility at work too, in the sense that Stevens the son appears to reach a level of education and formal speech never achieved by his father: My father . . . came of a generation mercifully free of . . . confusion of our professional values. And I would maintain that for all of his limited command of English and his limited general knowledge, he not only knew all there was to know about how to run a house, he did in his prime come to acquire that ‘dignity in keeping with his position’ as the Hayes Society puts it. (Remains, p. 35) The Hayes Society is a private club admitting as members only those butlers whose professional skills and attributes are of the very highest order. Stevens father and son both clearly possess these. In the description of Stevens Senior’s ‘limited command’ of the English language there is a hint that English might not be his first language. This, coupled with the framing colonial context as generated by the two fables which equate domestic servants with colonial outsiders, would make Stevens himself the son of a colonial immigrant to Britain at the dawn of the period of decolonization overseas – the period when such immigration was greatly opening up. The formal educated language with which he converses to the mechanic at the inn would then be not simply the language of someone committed to professional excellence. It would be the formally correct and idiomatically archaic language that was taught in schools in the colonies, and which recalls the language spoken by Hortense in Small Island. This would account for the contemptuous response that Stevens feels about the letter left behind by the maid, Lisa, when she elopes with her lover, the second footman: There were, as I recall, many misspelt, ill-formed sentences about how much in love the couple were, how wonderful the second footman was,


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and how marvellous the future was that awaited them both. One line, as I recall it, read something to the effect of: ‘we don’t have money but who cares we have love and who wants anything else we’ve got one another that’s all anyone can ever want’. (Remains, p. 157) The letter is poorly punctuated and badly structured yet it cannot correctly be described as being written in inaccurate English. Rather, it is written in the unchecked idiom of someone whose first language is English yet whose degree of formal education is insufficient to provide elaborate linguistic reflection. As someone who has grown up speaking English, Lisa does not pause to think before writing and this is the cause of her grammatical errors. Stevens is unable to comprehend this, and a possible explanation for his incomprehension is that if he is the son of a colonial immigrant who has been educated in English to absolute formal perfection, it would seem perhaps odd that another speaker of the same language is not able to master it to the same degree, even while possessing a degree of ownership over it. This is what Stevens cannot understand: how can his English be more right than someone who has more right to it than him? The difference reveals itself in the archaic formal tones in which he chooses to express himself, and which are utterly unlike Lisa’s working-class idiom. For example, he explains his professional habit of always listening at a door before knocking in the following way: You may not yourself be in the habit of taking this small precaution to avoid knocking at some highly inappropriate moment, but I always have been and can vouch that it is common practice amongst many professionals. That is to say, there is no subterfuge implied in such an action . . . (Remains, p. 94) Not only the vocabulary, but the elaborate grammatical structures and tenses employed by Stevens are utterly at odds with Lisa’s paratactic expression. Is this because The Remains of the Day is a novel structured by the many different class, regional, national and ethnic linguistic idioms that pervade modern British society and which Ishiguro, like Twain, wishes to identify in a positive and creative light? Can the argument be pushed a stage further, to suggest that Stevens himself is the member of a colonial family whose English language is scrupulously correct to the point of archaism because as a racial other, this is the kind of English he has learned formally rather than acquiring naturally? Such a portrayal would make Ishiguro, like Andrea Levy and Salman Rushdie, a subtle and delicate portrayer of the ways in which members of

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Britain’s ethnic and racial subcultures continually straddle different linguistic codes. When Rushdie puts into the mouth of one of his characters the words, ‘[t]he rapscallions have perpetrated an outrage’ he does this precisely to indicate how an Indian speaker of English employs a mode that is formally outdated and archaic, though grammatically and syntactically flawless.21 This in turn indicates how language structures subjects, and sometimes divides them from their immediate community and even from themselves. The interpretation of Stevens as colonial speaker of a distinct variety of English is best generated by the conversations that he has with his father. Shortly before Lord Darlington’s important conference, for example, the ageing father suffers a fall. Although not injured, this causes him to be unable to discharge his duties with absolute reliability in the eyes of the household. Stevens requests permission to be the person charged with informing his father of this decision, and opts for a meeting first thing the following morning. He greets his father with the words, ‘I might have known father would be up and ready for the day’ (Remains, p. 64) and ‘I hope father is not being kept awake by his arthritic troubles’ (Remains, p. 65). This odd linguistic construction, referring directly to the interlocutor in the third person (‘father’) rather than in the second (‘you’) could be a legacy of the more formal period that Ishiguro is trying to portray. It could also be interpreted as something more significant, a marker of linguistic difference, flagging up those points where the Stevens’ linguistic practice departs from the more conventional use of the word ‘you’ and thereby suggesting a cultural difference which might also in turn reflect a deeper national or even racial difference. For it is not only that Stevens addresses his father as ‘father’ rather than as ‘you’; it is that he also refers to him in the third person as ‘he’ and ‘his’. This has a very particular effect: The fact is, Father has become increasingly infirm. So much so that even the duties of an under-butler are now beyond his capabilities. His lordship is of the view, as indeed I am myself, that while Father is allowed to continue with his present round of duties, he represents an ever-present threat to the smooth running of this household, and in particular to next week’s important international gathering. (Remains, p. 65) The use of ‘him’ and ‘his’ to refer to the addressee is very rare among speakers of British English. It recurs when Stevens presents his father with the ‘round of duties he will from now on be expected to perform’ (Remains, p. 66). Interestingly, in the Japanese language which Ishiguro himself grew


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up speaking at a very young age before moving to Britain, it is common practice to replace the word ‘you’ (anata) with the name or title of one’s interlocutor. Ishiguro appears to have found this structure appropriate to Stevens’s dialogue with his father in the seemingly English world of The Remains of the Day, where it might hint at the possibility that the Stevens’ English is the public expression of a family whose private life originates in the colonies. Catherine Cundy says of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses that by mobilizing many different linguistic registers, Rushdie achieves a new integration of all the languages spoken by the postcolonial migrant, enabling that subject to posit a new narrative of identity out of the synthesis of different linguistic structures: ‘it is the deployment of polyphony that provides the opportunity for effecting a positive reconstruction of the divided migrant identity’.22 In Rushdie’s novel, Saladin himself declares that for an Indian immigrant to London, the challenge of forging a new identity out of the raw materials of dislocation is precisely a linguistic challenge: ‘the real language problem: how to bend it shape it, how to let it be our freedom, how to repossess its poisoned wells, how to master the river of words of time of blood: about all that you haven’t got a clue’ (Satanic Verses, p. 281). The eruption of violence and conflict at the climax of The Satanic Verses renders a straightforward confidence in the capacity of language to act as a tool of a new multicultural diversity problematic. The Remains of the Day, on the other hand, downplays conflict while also mobilizing the very polyphony of which Cundy writes and hence enabling a new narrative of racial inclusivity based on the synthesis of different cultural identities. This analysis has not been developed to conclude that Stevens was black, or Indian, as a point of fact. Indeed, such assertions are ontologically meaningless when dealing with a literary character; the creation of one artist’s imagination, for there is no reality outside the text in which Stevens exists with this or that identity. There are only ways of interpreting the text. The point is to explore the possibility of reading the novel in such a way as to re-inscribe racial difference by imagining the character of Stevens in a particular way. The Remains of the Day is a novel set during Britain’s colonial past, and written and read in a society where the majority population is of white European origin. It is not surprising therefore that the fundamental assumption about the novel has been that its characters also are white Europeans. After all, when we read, we read with our own image in mind. How many more people in Britain imagine Jesus Christ as a white European than envisage him in the complexion of the Middle East?

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The Remains of the Day is not the Bible, but to imagine a reading of a canonical text which departs from certain fundamental assumptions about race is to take a step towards acknowledging the complex and multi-faceted racial make-up of the society in which it was produced. It is to imagine also a sub-cultural community, not in hiding as in Brick Lane, or at war with itself as in The Satanic Verses, but ready to fracture several centuries of white, maleauthored ethnocentric canonization. In this sense, the diversification of the traditional British literary canon, like the break-up of consensus in Britain’s public life, reveals the make-up of the society to be something other than it was once thought to be.

Conclusion: Break-Up or Make-Up?

One of the declared aims of this study was to direct critical attention onto a new generation of British postmodern novelists, including Andrew Greig, Rachel Seiffert, Trezza Azzopardi, Andrew O’Hagan, Shena Mackay, A. S. Byatt, Kate Atkinson, Julian Barnes, David Mitchell, Salman Rushdie, Andrea Levy and Kazuo Ishiguro. To assert a particularly British brand of postmodern fiction might seem like an odd gesture, in a study dedicated to analyzing the relationship between writing and the break-up of Britain. The study as a whole performs a kind of fictional conjuring trick, exploring concepts of Britishness even while examining ways in which singular notions of Britain have been superseded. The simultaneous assertion and transcendence of what is asserted points to a dialectical relationship between writing and the cultural imagining of the nation. Philip Tew has suggested that one of the weaknesses of many studies of contemporary fiction has been what he calls the ‘ad hoc, often unacknowledged attempts to negate “Britishness” as if the term were too vexed and problematic a cultural concept, as if its adoption were implicitly racist or colonial’.1 Tew suggests that this assumption is inseparable from an ethnocentric approach to cultural studies, in which boundaries of nation, race, gender and class are held to be static and impermeable. A critical interrogation of the concept of Britishness, in Tew’s study, is unnecessary, because for Tew the term already implies a particular ‘diversity in a regional and class sense.’2 Tew seeks to rescue a sense of this regional diversity through recourse to an idea of cultural reclamation. He thinks that other writers cannot voice the word British without an unspoken refrain empire, and that as a result the word is too freighted with historical guilt to be used comfortably. In contrast, he assumes, the term English is free from these assumptions and suggests a kind of plurality: English men, English women, English regions, English classes. Since the majority of people in Britain are English, Tew suggests, it is ‘understandable’ that the word English be conflated with British (ibid.) and, paradoxically, he suggests that this conflation aids an attempt at exploring diversity.

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The conflation of English with British might seem more or less understandable, depending on whether one is sitting in London, Newcastle, Exeter, Cardiff or Edinburgh. That a particularly empirical view should be offered as common sense however is a rather un-theoretical move. Consideration of the origin of concepts of the break-up of Britain reveals that nascent identities in Scotland and Wales are predicated upon a newly defined concept of Englishness through contradistinction from which those identities are partly asserted. Tom Nairn argued in The Break-Up of Britain that a new definition of Englishness is necessary to draw attention to the vexed problems of cultural belonging facing members of particular genders, ethnic communities, or regional cultures in England. These new, hyphenated versions of English identity will be valuable in and for themselves. They will also be replicated in the differential cultural alignments necessary in different areas of Britain. That those areas include Scotland and Wales, but are also ‘areas’ of the mind such as the area of ‘London Bangladesh’ or the ‘Bangladeshi-feminine’ explored in Brick Lane in Chapter Six points to the lack of easy re-definition. One of the historical raisons d’être of a literary canon was to help disseminate a sense of cultural identity during the formative years of the United Kingdom. Put simply, a common reading culture could help to define a common national culture. The paradoxical move of British postmodern fiction is therefore as follows. Postmodern fiction appears to be a genuinely international style in which few if any of the recognized names have so far been British and which therefore implicitly negates or devalues notions of Britishness in the global cultural economy. A fresh assertion of the work of British postmodern writers counters this oversight, and in Freudian terms, creates the negation of a negation, re-asserting the British postmodern on an otherwise international stage. At the same time, however, the British postmodern novelists I have examined, in their different ways, critique, interrogate or parody prior historical concepts of British identity, and so perform another kind of negation: a negation of a negation of a negation. Postmodernism is too recent a phenomenon for there to really exist an established tradition of postmodern works in the same way that there was a national tradition in English literature for centuries. On the other hand, there does seem to be an unspoken canon of postmodern writers. Looking beyond Italo Calvino, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez to writers such as Greig, Barnes, Byatt and Ishiguro re-directs the postmodern imagination onto a critical interrogation of Britishness, even while appearing to undermine what it interrogates.

Conclusion

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Other texts and other writers could have been included. A novel such as Jackie Kay’s Trumpet portrays a society and an individual in which constructs of gender and ethnicity complicate definitions of community and belonging and hence impact upon simplistic notions of the national community. Robert McLiam Wilson’s Ripley Bogle mobilizes the postmodern device par excellence of a consciously unreliable narrator, in order to juxtapose the differences between distinct class, regional, linguistic and national communities in Cambridge and Northern Ireland. Sebastian Faulks’s Engleby also deploys a deceitful narrator, to generate a narrative of mass murder in which what ultimately appears to be murdered is the social fabric of Britain itself. The character with whom the reader is invited to align him or herself is the murderous narrator. The blurring of symbolic boundaries around the United Kingdom appears to be an important trope in British postmodern fiction. I argued in Chapter Three that Shena Mackay’s Heligoland uses the term plotlanders to describe itinerant dwellers on the south coast, setting up a succession of temporary settlements on land which according to Ordnance Survey maps of the kingdom has eroded, so that the settlements exist on land that officially does not exist. Rupert Thomson’s Divided Kingdom also portrays a home built on a crumbling cliff, beyond the point at which the limits of Britain’s landmass is officially deemed to have ended and on land which ‘from an administrative point of view’ has been eroded away.3 Graham Swift’s novel Waterland similarly blurs the boundaries between the physical land and the ocean against which it continually battles, specifically in the context of the Norfolk Fen country. In a quite different way, Alan Kent’s Proper Job, Charlie Kurnow! emphasizes the near archipelagic nature of contemporary Devon and Cornwall. These counties are all-but cut off from the British mainland by three different channels, and as the novel makes clear, the cultural and economic connections that span the relevant isthmus are fragile and temporary, making for a local economy dependent on outside power and a prey to internal disaffection. In British postmodern fiction, it seems, the common assumption is that the common identity has become obsolescent. In its place, there is now a widespread fictional exploration of the different kinds of identity that constitute contemporary Britain. Dialectically speaking, postmodern fiction’s contribution to the historical process that has been described as the breakup of Britain is to draw attention to the precise and varying make-up of the British population. Yet the contribution of the new tradition of postmodernity to the make-up of Britain’s social fabric is to explore ways in

158


which Britishness itself has become unravelled. That is to say, postmodern fiction informs our understanding of the break-up of Britain. At the same time, the break-up of Britain informs how we understand the spatial characteristics of postmodern fiction.

Notes

Introduction 1 2 3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10 11

12

Anthony Horowitz, The Killing Joke, (London: Orion, 2004), p. 123. Rupert Thomson, Divided Kingdom, (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 11. Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy: The Story of Politics, Society and Popular Culture in Britain Since 1975, (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 9. Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 197. Hywel Dix, After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 80. Raymond Williams, ‘Are We Becoming More Divided?’ in his Who Speaks for Wales? ed. Daniel Williams, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), p. 188. Tom Nairn, After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland, (London: Granta, 2000), p. 73. D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke discusses Salman Rushdie’s role in the Charter 88 group in his Modern Novelists: Salman Rushdie, (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 69. Tony Pinkney, Raymond Williams, (Bridgend: Seren, 1991), p. 132. Charles Jencks, What is Post-Modernism? (London: Academy Editions, 1996), p. 22. Cited hereafter as What is Post-Modernism. Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel, (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 14.

Chapter One 1

2

3

4

5

This paragraph is a paraphrase of the opening of Raymond Williams’s The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), p. 3. Robert Hewison, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), pp. 127–29. Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 28. Cited hereafter as Lucky Jim. Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero, (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 35–39.

160 6

7

8

9 10 11

12

13 14

15 16

17 18 19

20

Notes

Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, (London: Athlone Press, 1997), p. 299. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, (London: Hogarth Press, 1985), p. 258. Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope, ed. Robin Gable, (London: Verso, 1988), p. 166. Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel, (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 15–16. Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel, (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 35. J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur, (London: Flamingo, 1985), p. 56. Cited hereafter as Krishnapur. Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy: The Story of Politics, Society and Popular Culture in Britain Since 1975, (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 375. J. G. Farrell, Troubles, (London: Phoenix, 1993), p. 194. Cited hereafter as Troubles. J. G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip, (London: Fontana, 1980), p. 213. Cited hereafter as Singapore Grip. Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel, (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 17. Jonathan Coe, The Rotters’ Club, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), p. 148. Cited hereafter as Rotters’ Club. Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel, (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 108. Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel, (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 80. Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy: The Story of Politics, Society and Popular Culture in Britain Since 1975, (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 81. Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy: The Story of Politics, Society and Popular Culture in Britain Since 1975, (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 8.

Chapter Two 1 2

3

4

5

6 7

8

9

10

Raymond Williams, The Volunteers, (London: Methuen, 1978), p. 207. Rachel Seiffert, Afterwards, (London: Vintage, 2007), p. 237. Cited hereafter as Afterwards. Edward Said, ‘The Voyage In and the Emergence of Opposition’ in his Culture and Imperialism, (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 292. Cited hereafter as ‘Voyage In’. Edward Said, ‘Travelling Theory’ in his The World, the Text and the Critic, (London: Vintage, 1991), pp. 226–47. Andrew Greig, In Another Light, (London: Phoenix, 2004), p. 448. Cited hereafter as Another Light. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 47. Desmond Barry, Cressida’s Bed, (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), p. 141. Cited hereafter as Cressida’s Bed. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 2. Trezza Azzopardi, The Hiding Place, (London: Picador, 2000), p. 39. Cited hereafter as Hiding Place. Catherine Cundy, Salman Rushdie, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 73.

Notes

161

Chapter Three 1

Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, (London: Verso, 1989), p. 34. Cited hereafter as Postmodern Geographies. 2 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (London: Verso, 1991), p. 51. 3 Andrew O’Hagan, Our Fathers, (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 93. Cited hereafter as Our Fathers. 4 Charles Jencks, What is Post-Modernism? (London: Academy Editions, 1996), p. 24. Cited hereafter as What is Post-Modernism? 5 Stella Duffy, The Room of Lost Things, (London: Virago, 2008), p. 184. 6 Shena Mackay, Heligoland, (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 25. Cited hereafter as Heligoland. 7 The best critical account of the island’s history is George Drower, Heligoland, (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2002). 8 Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy: The Story of Politics, Society and Popular Culture in Britain Since 1975, (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 118. 9 Sebastian Faulks, Engleby, (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 203. 10 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), p. 109.

Chapter Four 1 2

3

4

5

6

7

8 9

10

11

Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 152. Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’ in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, ed. John Caughie and Annette Kuhn, (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 234. Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England, (Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 54. Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England, (Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 55. T. S. Eliot, ‘Ben Jonson’ in his The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 90. A. S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 17. Cited hereafter as Virgin. Annette Kuhn, ‘Women’s genres’ in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality ed. John Caughie and Annette Kuhn, (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 302. A. S. Byatt, Still Life, (London: Vintage, 1995, first published 1985), p. 148. Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, (London: Black Swan, 1996), p. 11. Cited hereafter as Museum. Judie Newman, ‘Sexual and Civil Conflicts: George F. Kennan and The War Between the Tates’ in University Fiction, ed. David Bevan, (Atlanta: Rodopi Press, 1990), p. 104. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, (London: Routledge Classics, 2003), p. 18.

162 12

13

Notes

Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, (London: Routledge Classics, 2003), p. 14. Robert Hewison, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War, 1945–60, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), p. 128.

Chapter Five 1 2

3

4

5

6 7

8

9

Jeanette Winterson, Boating for Beginners, (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 20. Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘The Nuisance Grounds: The Theme of Relegation in Two Canadian Novels’ in Imagined Commonwealths: Cambridge Essays on Commonwealth and International Literature in English, ed. T. J. Cribb, (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999), p. 256. Christopher L. Connery, ‘The Oceanic Feeling and the Regional Imaginary’ in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, (London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 285. Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, (London: Picador, 1990), p. 127. Cited hereafter as History. Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 72. Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel, (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 141. Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline, (Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 101–02. Cited hereafter as ‘Spivak’. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, (London: Sceptre, 2004), p. 324. Cited hereafter as Cloud Atlas. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), p. 81. Cited hereafter as ‘Gilroy’.

Chapter Six 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Walter Benn Michaels, ‘Plots Against America: Neoliberals and Antiracism’, American Literary History, 18:2, 2006, p. 288. Catherine Cundy, Salman Rushdie, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 64–65. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 44. Cited hereafter as Satanic Verses. Catherine Cundy, Salman Rushdie, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 78. D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke, Modern Novelists: Salman Rushdie, (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 83. D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke, Modern Novelists: Salman Rushdie, (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 101. Catherine Cundy, Salman Rushdie, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 77–78. D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke, Modern Novelists: Salman Rushdie, (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 100.

Notes 9 10 11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21 22

163

Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, (London: Granta, 1991), p. 130. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, (London: Granta, 1991), p. 129. Raymond Williams, ‘Drama in a Dramatized Society’ in his Writing in Society, (London: Verso, 1984), pp. 11–21. Monica Ali, Brick Lane, (London: Doubleday, 2003), p. 348. Cited hereafter as Brick Lane. Andrea Levy, Small Island, (London: Headline Book Publishing, 2004), p. 72. Cited hereafter as Small Island. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 7. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (ed.), A Historical Guide to Mark Twain, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 135. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 570; p. 420; p. 416; p. 234; p. 571. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (ed.), A Historical Guide to Mark Twain, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 147. Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in NineteenthCentury British Fiction, (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 210; p. 95. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 35. Cited hereafter as Remains. See Jim Zwick, ‘Mark Twain and Imperialism’ in A Historical Guide to Mark Twain, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 227–56. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 70. Catherine Cundy, Salman Rushdie, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 83.

Conclusion 1 2 3

Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel, (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 33. Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel, (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 34. Rupert Thomson, Divided Kingdom, (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 55.

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Index

Ali, Monica 15, 133, 135, 138 Amis, Kingsley 10, 17, 18, 19, 92, 93, 94 anti-colonial literature 44, 45, 46 anti-imperialism 28, 44, 45–7, 65, 123, 148 Antipode 65 architecture 8, 9, 62, 70–5 Atkinson, Kate 13, 14, 85, 94, 96, 97, 99–105 Azzopardi, Trezza 12, 52, 56, 59, 60 Banks, Iain 72 Barnes, Julian 14, 106–15, 117 Barnett, Anthony 6 Barry, Desmond 12, 38, 52, 54, 59, 60 Bergson, Henri 46 Birmingham 31, 33 British empire 19, 26, 52, 54, 60, 94, 106, 131, 141, 142, 149, 155 British identity 3, 11, 18, 19, 86, 94, 153, 156, 157 British state 2, 3, 18, 38, 85, 97 Byatt, A. S. 13, 14, 48, 85, 87, 88–94, 100, 101, 103, 105 capitalism 5, 33, 61–2, 63, 109, 116, 123–5 Carter, Angela 91 Castells, Manuel 64 Charter 88 6 Coe, Jonathan 11, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 Cold War 19, 97, 115 Cornwall 157 devolution see Wales; Scotland Doane, Mary Ann 84, 85 Duffy, Stella 73

Eliot, T. S. 86, 87, 92 Esty, Jed 86 ethnicity 12, 134, 157 Falklands War 111 Farrell, J. G. 10, 11, 16, 21–6, 28, 29, 30, 37, 106 Faulks, Sebastian 81, 157 feminism 5, 6, 13, 84–5, 88–94, 105 Findlay, Timothy 107 First World War 26, 66, 67, 69 Fisher, Shelley Fishkin 145, 146 Fleming, Ian 10, 17, 19 Fowles, John 23 Gilroy, Paul 120, 121, 122, 123 Glasgow 66, 73 Greig, Andrew 11, 38, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 59 Grunwick Dispute 33, 34 Gulf War 111 Harvey, David 65 Hensher, Philip 31, 37 Hewison, Robert 18, 103 Horowitz, Anthony 1, 2 Hutcheon, Linda 84 imperialism 44–6, 59, 61–2, 65 India 10, 38, 44, 53, 54, 56, 94, 127, 128, 152 Industrial Revolution 61, 62 Ireland 10, 11, 12, 16, 19, 28, 30, 39, 53, 59 Ishiguro, Kazuo 15, 16, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153 Jacobs, Jane 8 Jencks, Charles 8, 9, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 83

170

Index

Kay, Jackie 157 Kent, Alan 157 Kenya 38, 43, 64 Kilbrandon Commission 3, 35 Lamming, George 17 Le Corbusier 8, 71 Lefebvre, Henri 65 Levine, Sherrie 84, 85 Levy, Andrea 15, 138, 139, 140, 143, 144, 151 London 33, 45, 80–1, 86–7 Lurie, Alison 97 McEwan, Ian 48 Mackay, Shena 13, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83, 84, 134, 157 Malaysia 11, 38, 64 Marx, Karl 62, 64 Marxism 63, 64, 65 Mitchell, David 15, 31, 106, 117–25 modernity 8, 45, 61–6, 70–2 Naipaul, V. S. 58 Nairn, Tom 3, 4, 5, 6, 156 national literature 92, 93, 156 nationalism 4–5, 6, 7, 26, 28, 32, 35–6, 142 nationhood 86, 88, 91, 94, 98, 115, 134–5, 136 nation-state 16, 81, 101–3, 113 O’Hagan, Andrew 12, 13, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73, 75, 77 postcolonial literature 44–8 postcolonialism 12, 37, 38, 54, 59, 127, 132, 153 postmodernism 8–9, 23, 65, 70–1, 73–6, 97, 155–7 Powys, J. C. 86 race 25, 35, 38, 76, 128, 131, 140, 141, 144, 145, 154, 155 racism 32, 34, 35, 128, 129, 140, 141, 147

regional identity 151, 157 Rushdie, Salman 15, 58, 94, 126–33 Said, Edward 44–5, 45, 46–7, 48 Scotland 2, 3, 3–5, 6, 9, 12, 19, 35, 59, 68, 72, 73, 156 devolution 3, 4, 6, 11, 12, 48–9 nationalism 4–5, 32 referendum 4, 5, 35 Second World War 10, 20, 21, 24, 68, 96, 138 Seiffert, Rachel 11, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 59, 83 Shakespeare, William 2, 18, 86, 87 Sherman, Cindy 84, 85 Soja, Edward 61, 62, 63–4, 65, 66, 68, 83 Spivak, Gayatri 112, 113, 114, 116, 117 Suez Crisis 18, 103 Swift, Graham 157 television 91, 100, 102–3 Tew, Philip 11, 21, 31, 32, 111, 155 Thatcher, Margaret 32, 127, 132 Thomson, Rupert 2, 157 Tolkien, J. R. 10, 17, 20 Ugandan refugee crisis 5, 33 United Kingdom (U.K.) 2, 3, 32, 43, 156, 157 Wales 2, 5, 19, 32, 56, 156 devolution 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 12, 54, 55–6, 57 nationalism 4–6, 32, 34–6, 39, 156 referendum 4, 35, 36, 38, 39, 52, 53–4 Welsh language 4, 53 Williams, Raymond 5, 6, 7, 17, 20, 38, 39, 55, 66, 100, 102, 133 Wilson, Harold 3 Wilson, Robert McLiam 157 Winterson, Jeanette 14, 105, 106 women’s writing 13, 83, 84, 91, 105, 139 Woolf, Virginia 82, 83, 86 working class 5, 11, 21, 33, 82, 128, 142, 144, 147, 150

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