Textual Practice 21(3), 2007, 483504

Nick Bentley Re-writing Englishness: imagining the nation in Julian Barness England, England and Zadie Smiths White Teeth

Introduction

The topic of English national identity has attracted a lot of attention recently, both popular and academic. There have been several books (ction, literary criticism, history and cultural commentary) produced over the last seven or eight years that have attempted to address, dene, locate or explore Englishness: Robert Collss The Identity of England, Roger Scrutons England: An Elegy, Paul Langfords Englishness Identied, Peter Ackroyds Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, Jeremy Paxmans The English: A Portrait of a People, John McLeod and David Rogerss The Revision of Englishness and Krishan Kumars The Making of English National Identity have all sought to investigate the subject.1 This cluster of works includes a combination of nostalgia and mourning for a lost Englishness with an anxiety for, or a coming to terms with, the present condition and future projections of England. What they share is an idea that England and Englishness is currently experiencing a period of transformation (some say that this has always been the case) and together they point towards a moment of crisis in the idea of the nation. One of the factors fuelling this debate on Englishness is the coterminous discourse around the concept of multiculturalism. Englishness and multiculturalism can be conceived as having a dialectical relationship, which sometimes regards them as an opposition, whilst at other times overlapping, and even mutually supportive. Peter Ackroyd, for example, in his assessment of the English, manages to incorporate both positions in close proximity. In the conclusion to Albion: The Origin of the English Imagination he claims that: Englishness is the principle of diversity itself. In English literature, music and painting, heterogeneity becomes the form and type of art. This condition reects both a mixed language comprised of
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502360701529093

Textual Practice

many different elements and a mixed culture comprised of many different races.2 But this signal to heterogeneity and diversity is undercut in the very next paragraph when he returns to his dominant homogenous construction of the English as a practical and pragmatic race (448). At several times in his book, Ackroyd presents the image of the English imagination as circular: [It] takes the form of a ring or circle. It is endless because it has no beginning or end; it moves backwards as well and forwards (xix). This description reinvigorates older ideas of the nation as timeless and essentialist. According to Ackroyds conclusions on the subject, the singularity of Englishness resides in its relationship with a specic territory in which English writers . . . have been haunted by a sense of place, in which the echoic simplicities and past traditions sanctify a certain spot of ground (448). For Ackroyd, then, Englishness is located in a constant dialogue between the past and the present, where the past is the dominant interlocutor. It is determined by a territorial imperative that identies the geographical space of Englishness; and it is characterized as an enchanted circle, hermetically sealed and transcendent of any actual events that might threaten to disrupt the sanctity of Englishness, such as imperialism, colonial exploitation or the slave trade, despite his claims of its heterogeneity. This contradiction at the heart of Ackroyds text is one that reoccurs in a number of recent works that address Englishness, and reveals the anxiety and instability that Englands legacy as a colonial power continues to have on the construction of national identity. John McLeod, for example, emphasizes that post-war immigration to Britain resulted in a new multicultural English population as well as triggering myths of an embattled national identity which turned increasingly to race and heterosexuality as the prime marker of legitimacy and belonging.3 Paul Langford stresses the historically mongrel nature of the English whilst acknowledging that, the creation of a self-consciously multiracial society . . . might have startled many who sought to summarize the English character between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth century4 Both Jeremy Paxman and Roger Scruton emphasize the changed nature of Englishness for the contemporary world, and although neither of them mention multiculturalism outright, the issue hovers around their writing on the subject. Paxman does identify the end of empire as one of the major inuences in the changed nature of English identity; however, in a chapter titled The English Empire, he restricts his discussion to the relationship between the English and the Welsh, Scots and Irish. In fact, throughout Paxmans book, what he denes as the English are assumed to be a white, mostly Anglo-Saxon race despite his claim that any belief in

484

Nick Bentley Re-writing Englishness

Anglo-Saxon purity becomes clear the moment you start to examine the roots of the English people.5 The title of Roger Scrutons England: An Elegy signals his main argument that a certain version of Englishness has already passed away, and although he warns against mourning such a loss, he stresses that it is right that the heirs to English civilization should commemorate its virtues, its achievements and its meanings.6 It is deemed unnecessary by Scruton to state that these heirs are white and are marked by a certain physiognomy (244). For Scruton, part of the unstated reason that England needs an elegy is that the multicultural and multiethnic make-up of contemporary England has replaced any traditional, racially homogenous model. For both Paxman and Scruton, a historical sense of Englishness stands in a dialectic opposition to any contemporary model of English multiculturalism. In what follows, I argue that the anxieties identied in the works cited above form a crucial part of two recent works of ction: Julian Barness 1998 novel England, England, and Zadie Smiths White Teeth, published two years later. I argue that in Barnes the debate between Englishness and multiculturalism reveals itself through absence, in what Fredric Jameson might call the political unconscious of the text.7 White Teeth, on the other hand, engages more openly with the debates around Englishness and multiculturalism and attempts to offer a reframed model of national identity. Before looking in detail at these two novels, however, I want to explore a few theoretical approaches that prove useful in addressing the concept of Englishness, and which will then provide a basis for the discussion of the way in which Barnes and Smith produce imaginative representations of the nation. One well-used theoretical perspective that is apposite to an understanding of the way in which national identity is constructed is Benedict Andersons famous description of the nation as an imagined community in which the nation is conceived as both imaginary and as a shared comradeship.8 Accepting Andersons model for the moment, the imagined status of the nation has two consequences. Firstly, the fact that it is difcult to objectively test an imaginative construct means that it can be manipulated to produce a powerful ideological discourse for a disparate group of people. Secondly, because it is unxed, it is open to varying interpretations and claims. To develop Andersons model, I would suggest that within each nation at any moment in history there are always competing versions of the nation, each of which combine social, geographical and historical images. What the discourse of multiculturalism does is to pluralize Andersons notion of community, and suggests that the contemporary nation is more accurately identied as an amalgamation of different social and cultural communities, each of which is engaged in negotiating the larger grouping that constitutes the nation.

485

Textual Practice

Now there are two theoretical models that prove useful when approaching the construction of Englishness as an imagined community. The rst of these is informed by the structuralist-psychoanalytic approaches of Jacques Lacan and the second by Paul Ricouers work on narrative. The former is predominantly spatial, whilst the latter is predominantly temporal.

Lacan, Englishness and multiculturalism

Lacans theories can prove fruitful as a way of thinking about national identity in a number of ways.9 Following Anderson, we can regard England as a fantasy space, an imaginary body onto which individuals can project their desires of wholeness, completeness and belonging; a space that momentarily removes the lack with which individuals are burdened by their move into the symbolic world of adulthood. As Slavoj Zizek has described this aspect of Lacans theory: The subject attempts to ll out its constitutive lack by means of identication, by identifying itself with some mastersignier guaranteeing its place in the symbolic network.10 In this sense the nation becomes another of the many possible master-signiers, one of the alternative names of the father that interpose themselves between the individual and the mother during the mirror stage. In this model, Englishness does not exist in reality; it is constructed in our fantasy space. This means, however, that it does have a form of symbolic existence and can be recognized as a chain of signiers (in the Derridean, not Saussurean sense) a cycle of open symbols that do not have referents in the real world but are in a continuous glissement with each other. An example of this psycho-semiotic model of the nation can be seen in Julian Barness novel in the list of Quintessences of Englishness that is produced by way of a market research questionnaire. This list produces 50 signiers of the nation, including the Royal Family, Big Ben, the Class System, Cricket, Imperialism and Shakespeare.11 Barnes, of course, has invented this list, but most of the iconic images and character traits are clearly recognizable as representing Englishness in the public imagination. Furthermore, each of these symbols has a recognizable connection to each of the others within the chain, but none of them, nor the list as a whole, fully evokes the wholeness of Englishness; rather, they become a series of signiers of the nation that operates within the linguistic eld of the list, without necessarily relating to referential aspects of the nation. Approaching Englishness as a series of signiers can be extended to another psychological model suggested by Lacan, that of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real as three competing orders in the psychological make-up of an individual, or, in this case, the collective psychology of the

486

Nick Bentley Re-writing Englishness

nation. This model suggests that, rather than a dialectic operating between Englishness and its others, a more complex three-way Borromean knot is established between Englishness as an indicator of an individuals selfawareness of their personal identity (Ego-Ideal), Englishness as a collective discourse (Ideal-Ego) and multiculturalism as a manifestation of postcolonial guilt (The Real).12 Now because Englishness does not (and never did) exist in reality, it has a certain precarious status as a Symbolic order in the mind of the individual who is hailed as English. It can be threatened by the order of the Real, which in turn promises to explode the Symbolic myth on which its identity is constructed. Zizek explains this in Enjoy Your Symptom as the moment that marks the intrusion of a radical openness in which every ideal support of our existence is suspended.13 If we read imperialism, colonial violence and exploitation as the mark of the Real in the symbolic construction of Englishness, then it threatens to suspend that very construction. Zizek goes on to talk of the Nothingness that Lacan identies at the moment when the Real surfaces as the radical threat to the Symbolic scaffolding upon which the structure hangs. Because the Real is that which is impossible to symbolize, then it appears as a hole or lack in the fabric of the symbolic network of signiers that make up the nation. As Zizek explains: This moment is the moment of death and sublimation: when the subjects presence is exposed outside the symbolic support, he dies as a member of the symbolic community, his being is no longer determined by a place in the symbolic network, it materializes the pure Nothingness of the hole.14 In applying this to national identity, therefore, for England to accept its responsibility to the actions that have been perpetrated in its name is to explode the very notion of Englishness. Colonialism in its Real form is impossible to imagine if any imaginative and symbolic sense of Englishness is to be maintained. This means that to maintain a positive model of Englishness, the colonial past has to be either repressed or to be re-worked in a form that does not radically threaten the essential nature of the Symbolic construction. As Zizek writes, our very symbolic existence is a compromise formation, the delaying of an encounter [with the Real].15 Each time the nations involvement in colonial exploitation returns, which according to the Lacanian model, it must keep doing, Englishness comes face-to-face with the Nothingness at its centre. To preserve its existence it must simultaneously keep in play strategies by which it can incorporate the guilt of that colonial exploitation within its presiding narrative, without it threatening the framework of the whole. Multiculturalism can full this role. However, it can also remind Englishness of the

487

Textual Practice

colonial violence perpetrated in its name, and, in that sense, threaten to explode the myths on which it has rested.

Ricoeur, narrative and Englishness

Another theoretical perspective I want to introduce at this point is Paul Ricoeurs work on narratives. In Time and Narrative Ricoeur argues that time, because it is an abstract concept that is intangible and unlocatable, relies on a process of narrativization and emplotment to present itself to human understanding.16 He argues that we begin to understand time through a combination of narrative forms, and in particular in the relationship between ction and history. He writes: From these intimate exchanges between the historicization of the ctional narrative and the ctionalization of the historical narrative is born what we call human time, which is nothing other than narrated time.17 Furthermore, he suggests that a process of emplotment is necessary in this process: that time can only be grasped through the supplement of a plot. Now, this is also a useful way of thinking about the way in which it is possible to articulate an awareness of national identity. Englishness presents itself to us as a chain of symbols and images, but it is only through narrativization and emplotment that we begin to approach an understanding of Englishness. Narrative and emplotment supply the mechanism by which the imagined community of the nation is articulated. Timothy Brennan has commented on the national longing for form18 and, in thinking of Englishness as a narrative, we might consider the form or mode that narrative has traditionally taken. As Homi Bhabha suggests, the power of national identity often resides in the way it articulates itself through a combination of narratives: historical, mythical and ctional.19 Furthermore, the way in which it is narrated, the form or mode of narration deployed, can determine the type of nation that is evoked, and this can have ideological implications. For example, a sense of traditional national identity has been equated with the realist mode of ction. Bhabha writes, Such a form of temporality produces a symbolic structure of the nation as imagined community which, in keeping with the scale and diversity of the modern nation, works like the plot of a realist novel.20 To take this point further: if the realist novel represents the ideal literary expression of Englishness, then formal experimentation (for example, modernism or postmodernism) can be said to function ideologically as a disruption of that dominant narrative. Therefore, literary form can intervene in the ideological articulation of the nation, and experimental narrative techniques can produce alternative and contesting models. This is an important factor to bear in mind when analyzing the

488

Nick Bentley Re-writing Englishness

way in which Barnes and Smith use literary form in their evocations of latetwentieth-century versions of Englishness.

Julian Barnes, England, England

Julian Barness novel, England, England, is not only representative of the way in which Englishness can be constructed in a narrative form it is about the reconstruction of England itself. This is achieved through the central story of the creation of a theme park based on a collection of all things traditionally associated with Englishness. The novel traces the planning and development of the park, called England, England, and its eventual construction, which involves the taking over, wholesale, of the Isle of Wight.21 The novels theme is clearly related to the way in which the nation is constructed and exists in the collective imagination of not only its inhabitants, but also the rest of the world. The project is the brainchild of Sir Jack Pitman (Pitco Industries), a parody of a Thatcherite entrepreneur, whose success has been established by the time of the main events of the novel, and for whom England, England (the theme park) is his nal project, his magnum opus. The novel is divided into three sections: England, England, England and Albion, each of which has a distinctive narrative style that to some extent tries to mirror its subject matter. Barness text interweaves an analysis of the nation with an exploration of the way in which the identities of individuals are constructed. This is focused primarily through the character of Martha Cochrane. Martha is eventually employed as Sir Jack Pitmans adviser, given the provocative title of Appointed Cynic, but the rst section of the novel is concerned with her childhood, and supplies us with an indication of why she is so cynical in later life. The text opens with a powerful image that connects national with personal identity. Marthas rst memory (although this itself is presented as an articial memory) is of doing a jigsaw puzzle that consists of the counties of England. The process of constructing and re-constructing the nation is, of course, central to this image, but this is overlaid with the development of Marthas individual identity in that she recounts how, each time she did the jigsaw, her father would playfully hide one piece (usually a piece from the heart of England Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire) and then supply it at the end (4 6). The image of the father providing the nal piece is thus presented in terms of both completing the nation, but also of completing and fullling Marthas identity. Crucially, when Marthas father leaves her and her mother, she imagines that he has taken the last piece of the jigsaw with him. This dening metaphor for the incompleteness of Marthas character is projected throughout the rest of the book and profoundly marks

489

Textual Practice

Marthas adulthood as unsatised, unfullled and incomplete. It is not difcult to produce a Lacanian reading of this passage.22 The jigsaw becomes a symbolic expression of the psyche of both Martha and the collective consciousness of the nation. The missing piece, taken signicantly by the father, represents the lack at the heart of Martha and also the body of contemporary Englishness, and the impossibility of regaining that wholeness in the present of the nation or in Marthas adult life.23 The combination of part-ctionalized and emplotted narratives of the self and of the nation are seen as inseparable indices in the formation of identity. That these narratives are based on memories is also crucial to the novels exploration of the way in which the nation is produced. As Sarah Henstra has pointed out, in Barness novel, memory is a sign that only ever points back to another sign.24 The text stresses that memories are essentially unreliable, and that they are constructed and re-constructed: If a memory wasnt a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself. The same went for individuals . . . an element of propaganda, of sales and marketing, always intervened between the inner and the outer person. (6) Here, the combination of the unreliability of memory, and the necessary element of ctional re-construction involved, plus the language of consumerism and commodities, parallels the way in which England is re-constructed in the middle section of the book, in the theme park. The middle section is concerned with a theory of replicas, simulations and simulacra that form the theoretical basis for the theme park project. This section is also concerned with the way in which the nation is commodied and re-presented as a marketable, reied object and thereby converted into a series of saleable symbols. This again involves a process of emplotment, of turning the nation into a narrative that can then be told/sold to consumers, who buy both the story and the commodities associated with it. When developing the project, Sir Jack relies on the marketing consultant Jerry Batson, whose narrative articulates this sense of the nation as commodity: You we England my client is are a nation of great age, great history, great accumulated wisdom. Social and cultural history stacks of it, reams of it eminently marketable, never more so than in the current climate. Shakespeare, Queen Victoria, Industrial

490

Nick Bentley Re-writing Englishness

Revolution, gardening, that sort of thing. If I may coin, no copyright a phrase, We are already what others may hope to become. This isnt self-pity, this is the strength of our position, our glory, our product placement. We are the new pioneers. We must sell our past to other nations as their future! (39 40) The cultural, economic and fantasy space that is created as England, England is also perceived as a paradigm of a pure capitalist environment: a place where the mixed economy of post-war England has nally been replaced by the triumph of the market. A nancial analyst in the book comments, Its [the theme park] a pure market state. Theres no interference from government because there is no government. So theres no foreign or domestic policy, only economic policy. Its a pure interface between buyers and sellers without the market being skewed by central government (183). The middle section also shows the way in which the novel parodies the postmodern effects of a total victory of the market economy articulated through an end of history image, in particular, the end of the history of England (There was no history except Pitco history, p. 202). The accumulation of paradigmatic images of Englands past the Royal Family, Dr Johnson, Nell Gwynn, the Battle of Britain pilots, etc. results in the removal of any sense of a future England. The cultural space of the theme park reduces history to the immediate present, to the ephemeral, transience of the now. It is easy, here, to see the novel as a critique of postmodernisms love affair with surfaces, replicas and the commodied present.25 This critique of postmodernism is dramatized most clearly in the gure of the French intellectual who Sir Jack invites to speak to the project team. This intellectual theorizes the contemporary preference for the replica over the real, the simulacra over the original, and is a clear parody of Jean Baudrillard. In fact, the French philosopher in the novel presents us with an argument that is an adaptation of Baudrillards third order of simulacra.26 It is well established and indeed it has been incontrovertibly proved by many of those I have earlier cited that nowadays we prefer the replica to the original. We prefer the reproduction to the work of art itself, the perfect sound and solitude of the compact disc to the symphony concert in the company of a thousand victims of throat complaints, the book on tape to the book in the lap . . . the world of the third millennium is inevitably, is ineradicably modern, and that it is our intellectual duty to submit to that modernity, and to dismiss as sentimental and inherently fraudulent all yearnings for what is dubiously called the original. (53 55)

491

Textual Practice

The irony, of course, is that the theories of Baudrillard, the post-68 enfant terrible of the left, are here being invoked for the support of Sir Jack Pitmans paradigm of a capitalist project. Baudrillards critique of postmodern culture is recycled as a celebration of the market economy. What remains ambiguous, however, is whether we are to accept the French critics ideas or to recognize them as being wholly satirized. The end of the chapter in which he appears details how the great philosopher is own in, gives his speech, stops off in London to buy shing waders, ies and a quantity of aged Caerphilly with his conference fee, and then ies off to his next international conference. But despite this satire of the contemporary high ying intellectual, the ideas expressed in the rst part of the novel concerning the unreliability of memory and the impossibility of recovering any sense of an original or authentic recuperation of the past is corroborated by the postmodern theorizing of the French intellectual. What is being satirized is not the ideas or theories themselves, but the way in which they have been incorporated into a commodity culture where intellectualism is itself a commodity in the pay of corporate projects. In fact, Dr Max, the English historian in the novel, who in many ways represents an English academic tradition in opposition to poststructuralist continental theory, ultimately agrees with much of what the French theorist says, although signicantly in a language that appears more empirical and everyday: is it not the case that when we consider such lauded and fetishized concepts as, oh, I throw a few out at random, Athenian democracy, Palladian architecture, desert-sect worship of the kind that still holds many in thrall, there is no authentic moment of beginning, of purity, however hard their devotees pretend. We may choose to freeze a moment and say it all began then, but as an historian I have to tell you that such labelling is intellectually indefensible. What we are looking at is almost always a replica, if that is the locally fashionable term, of something earlier. (132) It is Dr Max and Marthas discussion of a particularly natural-looking English landscape that precipitates this moment, and the focus on the articiality of nature emphasizes the sense in which England itself, as both a geographical and historical concept, is contingent upon time and place, rather than being presented as essential and permanent. The articial construction of England, England, therefore, is presented as an extreme case of the processes involved in any construction of what appears to be the natural world always articial, with no authentic moment of beginning. The fact that this idea is presented through the style of address of Dr Max reduces the parodic tone given to the French

492

Nick Bentley Re-writing Englishness

intellectuals speech. Dr Maxs speech is placed at a higher level on the novels hierarchy of discourses and, therefore, it is a challenge to a notion of essential Englishness from within the English tradition, rather than, as one might expect, from a French tradition of theoretical rationalism. The novel is not a critique of postmodernity, but a lament that the theories underpinning postmodernism are likely to be the most accurate in understanding how the contemporary nation can be articulated. As James J. Miracky argues: Just when one suspects that Barnes is validating postmodern theory, he incorporates elements that reach for an authentic human experience of the real ultimately leaving the novel positioned somewhere between homage and parody of the dominance of the hyperreal.27 The form of the novel is interesting in this context. In terms of narrative modes, it can best be described as hybrid. The rst section, England, appears to deploy a classic realist mode.28 There is a third person narrator, who presents the narrative with what appears to be little self-consciousness in terms of the mode of address used. Also, a clear hierarchy of discourses is established (to use one of Catherine Belseys indicators of conventional realist ction) with Martha as the central consciousness of this section. There is a recognizable, even familiar, social setting located in a post-war English past. However, the fact that the middle section of the book shifts from this realist mode to what might better be described as postmodernist, alerts us to the constructedness of the rst section. There is a clear case of form attempting to parallel content in Barness novel. The rst section is presented as realist because it is concerned with an evocation of a traditional English past. The form of the writing, therefore, evokes the sense of that past as much as the details it supplies us with. This, of course, is different from saying that it is un-self-conscious writing. In fact, it is a self-consciousness that foregrounds its realism by not alluding to the textuality of the text. The second section is more distinctly postmodern in style. It uses situations and characters that become increasingly grotesque and unbelievable, including the metamorphoses of the actors playing, for example, Dr Johnson, Robin Hood and the Cornish smugglers in the theme park, into their adopted roles. There are a variety of textual forms within the second section for example, the French intellectuals speech, and a newspaper review of the theme park and there are knowing side references to contemporary theory, especially Baudrillard and Michel Foucault.29 The elements of parody, pastiche, magic realism and knowing self-referentiality mark out the section as postmodern in style. Of course, this mode of narration rests easily with its subject matter: the presentation of the postmodern theme park. It could also be argued that this section represents a departure from a form associated with an English literary tradition. Postmodernism, despite many British novelists using the form, is still most

493

Textual Practice

associated with American novelists, both North and South. The encroachment of this foreign mode into the text, therefore, parallels Sir Jacks Disneycation of England on the Isle of Wight: a process that evokes fears of an Americanization of British culture that stretches back to the 1950s, if not before. In this context, the nal section of the book, Albion, seems formally to return us to a more recognizably English form the pastoral elegy. The elegy is, of course, for the passing of the old England, but also for Martha, who now appears as an old woman. Old England, as it is now called, is represented as a rural idyll and it is as if the market economy has been siphoned off into the theme park on the Isle of Wight, leaving behind a pre-capitalist society on the mainland. However, in terms of form, the situation is not as straightforward as it appears. The opening description of the pastoral scene is exaggerated to the point of parody (241), and ctionalized narratives still supply the main way in which identity is formed. This latter point is represented in the character of Jez Harris (formerly Jack Oshinsky) who in a previous life was a junior legal expert with an American electronics rm, but who has now adopted the persona of an English yokel providing made-up tales of witchcraft and superstition, of sexual rites beneath a glowing moon and the trance slaughter of livestock (243). The articiality that fuels the second section contaminates the third, and Jezs tales form an emplotment of Englishness in much the same way as the theme park. The novel, then, laments the belief that we cannot access an authentic place of origin, whilst it simultaneously critiques those who celebrate this fact. It presents the preference for the replica alongside the psychological desire for the original, and, in fact, these are presented as the same thing. What Martha discovers in the last section of the book is that if we desire to recover a lost past a garden show, our image of rural England, Cornish smugglers, Robin Hood it is in fact not the original or authentic reality that we desire (because there is no original), rather, it is the articial construction of these objects and signs that we want to reclaim. Paradoxically, it is these always already copies that appear authentic to our memories of the past. To borrow Baudrillards phrase, it is the hyperreal that we recover, because to talk of the reality of a memory becomes non-sensical.30 If our pasts are a series of memories of constructed images, then recovering those reconstructed images operates as a kind of recovery of what passes for the authentic. The novel, therefore, is a lament, not for lost Englishness, but for the fact that we can never recoup the past, or, that if we do, it is always a false, articial past that we recover. England, England addresses issues of national identity by undermining the basis on which they have rested in the past. If there ever was a grand or Master narrative of Englishness, then the novel is

494

Nick Bentley Re-writing Englishness

keen to undermine the philosophical basis on which such a model might rest. However, it does not celebrate the incredulity towards grand narratives that have provided the ideological and ethical basis for many postmodern British novels of the last two or three decades. Rather, it wistfully reects on what appears to be a simpler, if nave version of Englishness, without the complexities of postmodern experience. However, this reveals a contemporary cultural crisis in the meaning of Englishness, one that, with Barnes, is ltered through a postmodern sensibility into a kind of knowing nostalgia. This is very different from the nostalgia mode that Fredric Jameson identies as one of the features of postmodernism.31 In Barness novel, the nostalgia is recognized for what it is, yet it still has the power to evoke longing for a lost Englishness whilst at the same time registering a suspicion towards the grand narrative on which that very nostalgia rests. This longing for a lost England can also be seen in the novels silence on issues of Empire and contemporary ideas of the nation as multicultural. This is one rather worrying aspect of England, England. Englands colonial heritage, reference to discrete racial identities within the nation, and multiculturalism are all written out of the text: there is no mention of them anywhere in the book. You would, of course, imagine that a Black or Asian presence might be missing from the theme park, given its ideological bias, but what is more signicant is that this absence is not mentioned as a point of critique against the theme park against the articial, commodied simulacra of England. There are, in fact, no Black or Asian characters anywhere in the book. Given the multicultural make-up of contemporary England, this is an unsettling omission for a novel that takes the nation as one of its main themes. In Lacanian terms, the colonial past and the multicultural present represents the repressed Real of Englishness that in England, England remains repressed. Or in Jamesons terms, multiculturalism is part of the political subconscious of the text.

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

This is certainly not the case in Zadie Smiths White Teeth, which offers a competing version of contemporary Englishness, one that emphasizes and addresses the multicultural make-up of late-twentieth/early twenty-rst century England, and in turn is keen, on one level, to challenge concerns that Englishness and multiculturalism are mutually antagonistic concepts. Smiths novel sets out to explore the complex interaction between a range of different ethnicities that make up contemporary British life and in doing so show differing conceptions of and attitudes towards both Englishness and multiculturalism.

495

Textual Practice

The representation of a multicultural Englishness is attempted in a number of ways, one of which is by emploting the multicultural nation, revealing it through personal stories from characters with a variety of ethnic cultures and backgrounds. This is registered most clearly in the three main families in the text: the Joneses, the Iqbals and the Chalfens, which together combine several ethnicities: white English, Asian, Caribbean and Jewish. Smith is also keen to regard these not as combinations of discrete ethnicities but as an indication that the old categories of race are an inaccurate way of describing the ethnic diversity of contemporary England: This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and nd Isaac Leung by the sh pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang ORourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with rst and last names on a direct collision course. (326) In this way she echoes Stuart Halls way of thinking about ethnicity that moves beyond the idea of black as a useful indicator of racial difference. In New Ethnicities, Hall writes of the need to recognize that, black is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category and of the immense diversity and differentiation of the historical and cultural experience of black subjects [which] inevitably entails a weakening or fading of the notion [of] race.32 Like Hall, Smiths novel emphasizes that multiculturalism should accept a mixing of ethnicity identied at the level of the individual rather than the nation. In this model, each of us is multicultural, and by extension multiethnic. This is distinctly and radically different from the model of multiculturalism that represents a series of monoethnic individuals who combine to produce a multicultural nation. This also moves beyond the idea of hybrid identities, which again suggests a mix of discrete races or ethnicities. Irie Jones, with her complex racial background (and even more so her unborn child) becomes, therefore, symbolic of this new kind of ethnicity, one that the text presents as the emerging model for contemporary Englishness. A multicultural model of the nation is also presented through dialogue, representing a multiethnic example of what Mikhail Bakhtin describes as the heteroglossic function of the novel form.33 The combination of Archie Joness working-class, Cockney accent, Samads Asian-English and Claras Creolized Caribbean English represent socio-linguistic deviations from Standard English as the centripetal forces of language undermining any notion of a homoglossic centre to the nations language and

496

Nick Bentley Re-writing Englishness

culture.34 In a sense the novel goes one stage further than Bakhtins model as it presents heteroglossia as the now dominant mode of language in contemporary Britain. As Samad says: Only the immigrants can speak Queens English these days.35 The representation of varying voices also extends to the positions that are taken towards the idea of England as a multicultural nation. Archie, for example, seems to embrace unthinkingly the idea of the multicultural in his marriage to Clara and his friendship with Samad, whilst Alsana Iqbal remains more sceptical: No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up on any other thing (63). The formal mode of the novel also engages with the construction of national identity. The dominant mode of the novel is comedy, operating mainly through a form of Horatian satire picking out unavoidable foibles, hypocrisies and moral expediencies of the main characters. This style serves to avoid the didacticism of political correctness, whilst maintaining an underlying serious approach to the experiences of rst- and second-generation immigrants to Britain. Recalling Homi Bhabhas suggestion that the nation nds its most powerful articulation through the form of the realist novel, then despite its contemporary, multicultural subject matter the text uses literary modes and forms that are associated with traditional English literature and it comes as no surprise that Smith has cited E.M. Forster as one of her main literary inuences.36 Comedy and satire are, of course, two of the modes that have often been identied as indicators of an English tradition in the novel.37 Also, despite a few postmodern additions, such as the use of lists, tables and diagrams, and elements of the picaresque, the overriding mode of the novel is classic realism.38 It has an omniscient third person narration that tends to show us, rather than tell us events, and it has socially recognizable characters that interact in a recognizable and named geographical environment (mainly North London). In addition, a hierarchy of discourses, to use Belseys phrase, is established, whereby within the social framework of the novel, certain characters carry the central moral, ethical and philosophical outlook, mainly the female characters, and especially Irie Jones. Although the subject matter could be described as postcolonial, postmodern, post-Marxist and post-feminist, it nevertheless addresses those ideas in the familiar frame of the comic realist mode. Dominic Head, for example, states that Smiths vision has the coherence and solidity afforded by one specic context,39 whilst Philip Tew describes the novel as quasi-Dickensian in mood.40 This formal characteristic of the book is related to Smiths attempt to communicate a multicultural model of Englishness that balances inclusiveness with the articulation of otherness and difference. The deployment of a realist mode is part of the texts

497

Textual Practice

desire to reach an inclusive interpretive community, one that not only speaks to the various ethnic and cultural minorities it includes, but is also directed to the dominant white middle-class readership that probably still makes up the majority of the British novel-reading public. In effect, it re-imagines a multicultural interpretive community that corresponds to the kind of plural society presented in the text. The novels articulation of an emergent national identify, therefore, involves a negotiation, rather than rejection, of more established constructions of Englishness. One of the main devices here is through the gure of Archie Jones. Archie emerges as representing the unlikely hero of the book, but this unlikeliness is part of his English identity. Archies characteristics are tolerance, apathy, rejection of any fundamental systems of politics or religion, philistinism, anti-intellectualism, enthusiasm for hobbies, a down-to-earth unromanticism, and yet, an inherent goodness. Clara recognizes these qualities in the opening section of the novel: No knight, then, this Archibald Jones. No aims, no hopes, no ambitions. A man whose greatest pleasures were English breakfasts and DIY. A dull man. An old man. And yet . . . good (48). That Archie turns out to be the hero of the book is surprising on one level, but not on another. Archies conventional Englishness, his belief in chance, and in making decisions on the spot rather than referring to some grand system of thought or religion marks him off as a point of resistance to the various fundamentalisms with which the novel presents us. The last section of the book, Magid, Millat and Marcus, begins with two dictionary denitions fundamental and Fundamentalism, and each of the characters referred to represents a form of fundamentalist ideology: Magids retro-colonial Englishness, Millats growing support of Islamic fundamentalism and Marcus Chalfens experiments in genetic engineering, culminating in the FutureMouse# project. Other fundamentalisms are also presented in the novel, for example, Hortense Bowdens following of the Jehovahs Witness movement, Joyce Chalfens application of horticultural practices to the nurturing of the wayward Millat and Joshua Chalfens involvement with a radical Animal Rights group. What stands in opposition to all these fundamentalisms is Archies ipped coin his reliance on chance to determine his actions, rather than a xed ideology. As Fred Botting argues with reference to Archies coin-ipping, it seems that accidents keep open a space of everyday liberalism, ordinary possibility and gradual social change against forces, divine or scientic, that would eliminate randomness with awful certitude.41 That Archie emerges as an unlikely hero, therefore, supplies the novel with a residual form of national identity that is incorporated, rather than rejected by Smiths model of an emergent, multicultural Englishness. On one level then, this serves to place the multicultural themes of the novel as part of an English tradition, rather than a rejection of it.

498

Nick Bentley Re-writing Englishness

However, a mutually celebrated vision of multiculturalism is not the whole story in White Teeth. Despite the novels encouragement of new ways of thinking about ethnicity, it is also keen to show that the old ideas about race and culture are difcult to shift. The importance of the past here (individual in the sense of roots, and collective in terms of colonial history) often acts as a debilitating weight on the possibility of an emergent model of multicultural identity. The difculty of moving away from the past nds its culmination in the stand-off between Magid and Millat towards the end of the novel, and somewhat undercuts the utopian idea of a harmonious multicultural nation: Because we often imagine that immigrants are constantly on the move, footloose, able to change course at any moment, able to employ their legendary resourcefulness at every turn . . . free of any kind of baggage, happy and willing to leave their difference at the docks and take their chances in this new place, merging with the oneness of this greenandpleasantlibertarianlandofthefree . . . weaving their way through Happy Multicultural Land. Well, good for them. But Magid and Millat couldnt manage it. They left that neutral room as they entered it: weighed down, burdened . . . They seem to make no progress. The cynical might say they dont even move at all that Magid and Millat are two of Zenos headfuck arrows, occupying a space equal to Mangal Pandes, equal to Samad Iqbals. The two brothers trapped in the temporal instant. . . . In fact, nothing moves . . . Because this other thing about immi grants (fugees, emigres, travellers): they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow (465 6) In this passage, Smith questions a liberal version of multiculturalism and shows that it is not applicable for every immigrant narrative. The twins continue on their separate paths despite the novels attempt to produce a reconciliation.42 Smith describes Magid and Millat in terms of Zenos paradox of an arrow in ight. The paradox turns on the fact that if you observe an arrow in ight it is seen to be in motion over a period of time, and yet at any single instant the arrow is in stasis.43 This paradox is used metaphorically to represent the stand-off between Magid and Millat, both of whom appear to be moving forward individually on their own trajectories but are locked into a stasis by their immovable antagonism towards each other. Multiculturalism emerges here, not as a panacea for the problems of Englands relationship with its own colonial past, but as a displacement of the legacies of colonialism that continue to impact on individuals in the present. Smith achieves this by imploding the temporal trajectory at this point by placing all events in the immediate present.

499

Textual Practice

This serves to tie together in this one encounter the legacies of colonialism: the perpetual encounter between the two subjects, one resisting, the other being appropriated by colonialism both of whom are forced to communicate through a meta-language that continues to be controlled by colonial discourse. One of the ways therefore, that multiculturalism, appears in the novel is as a narrative by which England copes with its guilty colonial secret: and the text is full of secrets, not all of which are revealed to those concerned (for example, Iries biological family connection to her white English colonial great-grand-father). Magid and Millats entrenched positions represent an impasse, but this is not the only position on multiculturalism that the text makes available. One of the ways around this stand-off is in the gure of Iries unborn child, which emerges at the end of the novel as the hope for a positive, forward-looking model of multicultural Englishness. Irie has slept with both Magid and Millat, and therefore the undecidability the childs paternity represents a signicant (although not total) evasion of the nightmare of history, and symbolizes an escape from the ideological weight of colonial genealogy. The parallel between Iries unborn child and the genetically engineered FutureMouse# is worth pursuing here. The genetically engineered mouse is, of course, pre-programmed in its moment of articial creation, and its genesis and connement in laboratory surroundings emphasize the predetermined nature of its existence. That it is a Future mouse works on two levels: the adjective suggests the enabling future possibilities of science and technology, but at the same time its future is already encoded in its creation a predeterminism that evokes much older forms of containment and authority. However, it ultimately manages to evade its predetermined narrative by escaping from the genetic scientists that have created it. This does not mean that it can evade its genetic codes (or by extrapolation) its genealogical heritage, rather that in claiming its stake for freedom it dees those who wish to contain it, just as Archies coin evades the imperatives of fundamentalism: He [Archie] watched it [FutureMouse#] dash along the table, and through the hands of those who wished to pin it down (540). The novel, then, presents a complex range of ways of engaging with the multicultural nation, some of which celebrate the possibilities of a harmonious range of new ethnicities under the umbrella of a new model of Englishness, some of which remain more sceptical about such an idealized construction of the nation. Despite the Lacanian Real of the colonial legacy continuing to reassert its inuence on the actions of some of the characters (for example in Magids involvement in Islamic fundamentalism as a point of resistance to the threat to his Asian cultural heritage by Western values, and in Millats re-adoption of old colonial sensibilities), it also offers a partial evasion of that inherited impasse. This is seen in

500

Nick Bentley Re-writing Englishness

the network of symbols of freedom that connect the narrative trajectories of Archie, Iries unborn child and the FutureMouse#.

Conclusion

Both of these contemporary works of ction are self-consciously working in a tradition of the English novel, and each of them engages with the formal modes with which English ction has developed historically. In both novels, formal techniques and thematic content are combined in the articulation and exploration of varying discourses of Englishness. As we have seen, each, in its own way, is concerned to re-evaluate assumed and inherited models of national identity. In the case of England, England this involves a philosophical deconstruction of the premises and assumptions on which our understanding of Englishness has traditionally rested. In the case of White Teeth we nd an attempt to construct a new model of Englishness that is suited to the countrys multicultural makeup at the beginning of twenty-rst century. However, the text realizes that this is no easy task and reveals through its form as well as its subject matter many of the cultural anxieties attached to the construction of Englishness in the contemporary imagination. Keele University

Notes

1 Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000); Paul Langford, Englishness Identied: Manners and Character 1650 1850 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (London: Chatto and Windus, 2002); Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People (London: Michael Joseph, 1998); John McLeod and David Rogers (eds), The Revision of Englishness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Kumar suggests that this interest in English national identity is a feature of the 1990s, and supplies his own list of books concerned with the subject, Kumar, The Making of English National Identity, p. 251. 2 Ackroyd, Albion, p. 448. 3 John McCleod, Introduction: measuring Englishness in McLeod, The Revision of Englishness, p. 3. 4 Langford, Englishness Identied, p. 318. 5 Paxman, The English, p. 53.

501

Textual Practice

6 Scruton, England: An Elegy, p. 244. 7 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1989). 8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso and New Left Books, 1983), pp. 67. 9 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). 10 Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 163. 11 Julian Barnes, England, England (London, Picador, 1999), pp. 834. 12 See Madan Sarups very useful summary of the relationship between the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real in Lacan in the formers Jacques Lacan (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 10119. 13 Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, 2nd edn (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), p. 8. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p. 22. 16 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative: Volume 1, Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (eds) (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative: Volume 2, Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (eds) (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative: Volume 3, Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (eds) (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 17 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative: Volume 3, p. 102 18 Timothy Brennan, The national longing for form, in Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 4470. 19 Homi Bhabha, DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation, in Bhabha, Nation and Narration, pp. 291322. 20 Ibid., p. 308. 21 The Isle of Wight is chosen as the ideal location for the theme park because it replicates, in miniature, the island heritage of England (Barnes, England, England, pp. 613; pp. 726). 22 It is also useful to think of the jigsaw puzzle as another example of Freuds understanding of the Fort-Da game by which Martha, through repetition of doing the jigsaw, comes to terms with the loss of the connection with the mother. This Freudian model is, of course, complicated in Barnes by the fact that her father permanently removes the nal piece and frustrates the completion of the game, and thereby relates to the frustration Martha feels in her later life. 23 This passage is also reminiscent of Zizeks Lacanian reading of the fall of Romania and the hole in the ag, the psychological lacunae at the centre of the national consciousness, caused by the 1980 revolution, and represented visually by a famous photograph of a revolutionary waving the Romanian ag with the central communist symbol, the red star cut out (Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) p. 1).

502

Nick Bentley Re-writing Englishness

24 Sarah Henstra, The McReal Thing: personal/national identity in Julian Barness England, England, in Nick Bentley (ed.), British Fiction of the 1990s (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 95107, p. 97. 25 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). 26 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), p. 4. 27 James J. Miracky, Replicating a dinosaur: authenticity run amok in the theme parking of Michael Crichtons Jurassic Park and Julian Barness England, England, Critique, 45, 2 (2004), pp. 16371, p. 165. 28 Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 1980), pp. 67 84. 29 Two sections of the novel begin with the words, A history of Sexuality according to . . . alluding to Michel Foucaults seminal poststructuralist book The History of Sexuality (Barnes, England, England, pp. 48 and 98). Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 vols, trans. R. Hurley (London: Lane, 1979). 30 Baudrillard writes: Something has disappeared . . . No more mirror of being and appearance, of the real and the concept . . . The real is produced from miniaturised units, from matrices, memory banks and command models and with these it can be reproduced an indenite number of times . . . In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is hyperreal, the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere (Baudrillard, Simulations, pp. 23). 31 See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and consumer society, in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Postmodernism and Its Discontents (London and New York: Verso, 1988) pp. 13 29, pp. 1820. 32 Stuart Hall, New ethnicities, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 4419, p. 443. 33 M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981). 34 Ibid., pp. 26973. 35 Zadie Smith, White Teeth (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2001), p. 181. 36 Zadie Smith, Love, actually, Observer, November 1 2003, pp. 46. 37 Anthony Easthope argues convincingly that there is a compatible relationship between the use of comedy and caricature in the English novel and an English tradition of empiricism. Anthony Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 15976. 38 The last chapter incorporates elements of the picaresque in its nal and unlikely coming together of all the main characters in one social space: the launch of the FutureMouse# project. I am again using the term classic realism in the sense that Catherine Belsey denes it (Belsey, Critical Practice, pp. 6784). 39 Dominic Head, Zadie Smiths White Teeth, in Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew (eds), Contemporary British Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), pp. 106119, p. 117.

503

Textual Practice

40 Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. xii. 41 Fred Botting, From excess to the new world order, in Bentley, British Fiction of the 1990s, pp. 21 41, p. 26. 42 There are echoes of Forster here and the irreconcilability of the two characters at the end of A Passage to India. As suggested earlier, Smith has emphasized her love of E.M. Forster and this English novelist provides an interesting point of comparison with Smiths theme of colonial encounters and the form of the English novel. 43 Interestingly, Slavoj Zizek uses the same Zeno paradoxes to illustrate Lacans model of the relation between the subject and its object cause of desire, which can never be obtained; Zizek, Slavoj, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 4.

504