Dulcie is Not Wrong

At the end of The Queen of the Tambourine, when Eliza (Elizabeth) Peabody has returned to what appears to be sanity, she writes, " I wondered if he was some sort of a sign. Certainly not, for we need no signs. We need no extras, no tickets, or labels, or tags. Dulcie is wrong--it is sufficient just 'to be.' And signs only appear, it seems to me,' I said to the empty space before me, 'when the need for them is over." (225) But is it possible that Dulcie is not wrong, as we are dependent upon signs (their instability) to read Eliza's story? To understand the significance of 'number thirty-four?'

Let's consider number thirty-four, as "once there was, but it went years ago when a bomb fell on it in the War and left it ruined." (218) The house, as imaginary and real, where an imaginary, but real family onced lived. A house "being pulled down and bulldozed." (218) A house where a single woman, Elizabeth, lost "the family [she] wished was [her's]." (218) The house as a sign that is a symbol, a ticket, a label, a tag that appeared too late. That what is being signified in number thirty-four is Britain herself. A place where "there has been no family...Since 1941." (218) 1941 being the year of the Blitz; the bombing of London; the beginning of Operation SeaLion; the year war (that George Bowling predicted) directly affected British citizens. Number thirty-four as a country, like suburbia, which has always seen itself as distinct from continent of mainland Europe (urban centre).

If number thirty-four is not just the sign of a house, but a marker of a country and a life-style, then how do we read Eliza's story? Is the individual loss of her child, her subsequent madness and Barry as a tool to escape number thirty-four, not then tied directly to British society? When you consider that even Eliza's name is tied to British social history--The Peabody Trust is the oldest and largest community housing association in the greater London area, founded by American philanthropist George Peabody in 1862 (www.peabody.org.uk/main/)-- her imagined house becomes central to understanding the social issues tied to the novel.

If the claim Eliza's espouses about having "we need no signs" is true, then the instability of sign in fiction and her own imaginary, therapeutic world of number thirty-four would be regarded as implausible social tools. There's hope in the fact that Eliza contradicts herself, even in her sanity: as "the Creative Writing Class [is] real" and she is glad about that as "they lightened a dark day," (220) bring back to life, along side Barry, the remains of a damaged soul....

Renovation and Reconstruction

What is fascinating about Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia is its concern with the process of construction, or rather, 're-construction' of the self and of space. Within the pages of the narrative, the representation of houses paralells the representation of their inhabitants, as "Display [is] the game" (75) of national identity. Houses, just like the characters, are distorted and re-constructed through the combination of multiple 'authentic' identities.
Karmin describes the home-renovation process as "the English passion, not for self-improvement or culture or wit, but for DIY, Do It Yourself...the painstaking accumliation of comfort and, with it, status--the concrete display of earned cash." (75) His words hold value, as houses are seen as a microcosum of the cultural negociation between objects as display and the self as performer in a setting that demands authentic truth. We are meant to see contradition in the journalist's description of Eva and Haroon's flat in Westminister as "very feminine in the English manner," (261) not to reaffirm an existing 'Englishiness.' Instead, Kureishi, through the asthetic of 'home' as a symbol of the nation, is highlighting the fluidity of 'space' as it combines "English country-house armchairs and [traditionally colonial] cane tables." (261)
In this book, where the "paradox of paradoxes [is] to be someone else successfully, you must be yourself," (219-20) the paralell between the reconstruction of space and self is fruitful. Just as it is ironic that a cane table is seen as "in the English manner," it is ironic that Tracy calls Karim's Anwar, who's based upon the 'real' Anwar, inauthentic as a "picture of what white people already think." (180) Kureishi is asking why is it possible that we can see the combination of traditionally English and traditionally colonial objects within a space as an asthetic respresentation of authenticity, but not the combined identity of an English boy born of mixed blood.
"Display [is] the game," (75) that operates within The Buddha of Suburbia. Houses show an asthetic fluidity with cultural objects, that paralells the characters, as a demonstration of Kureishi's attempt replace the dominant, Anglo-national narrative with asthetic fluidity. As I closed the book, the houses, along with their inhabitants, forced me to ask, "Is anything ever the objective reproduction of a single cultural truth?" Why can we not see Karim as both an "English country-house armchair and a cane table"?

Ironic Importance of Home

Last class, we discussed the inherent paradoxes of everyday life as it both conforms to and opposes a view of suburbia as a restrictive environment preventing personal (individual) and cultural (communal) growth. The questions that we have been asking throughout English 382 about how to negociate and understand the paradoxes and ironies of suburbia is what Rita Felski attempts to address in her article, The Invention of the Everyday.
Felski argues that despite the fact that "we are all ultimately anchored in the mundane...everyday life...is rarely viewed with neutrality." (16) Suburban ordinariness is given the ideological purpose of either affirming the modern herocisms of capitialism and patriarchy, or being "synonymous with acts of resistence and subversion" (18) to them. According to Felski, ideological frames, despite their usefullness, prevent intellectuals from being able to discuss the significance of everyday paradoxes and ironies found outside their purposes. That no matter how hard we try to prevent it from being true, there is always going to be an experiences in the realm of repetition, home and habit that exists in opposition to our theory.
Felski's purpose in pointing-out, in written-concrete-form, the inherent ironical nature of suburban discourses is to being a new type of dialogue. Instead of an opposition of perspectives concerning the nature of suburbia and everyday life, she is purposing a reading that combines the binaries of male and female roles, public and private spheres, and backward and forward moving, as the space itself does. In this reading, we do not have to disregard the fact that it was 19th century industrialization and consumerism that led to the technological developments of household products, such as the washing machine, the dishwasher and the electric stove, which provided women with the free-time to consider a world outside the domestic sphere on a mass scale. This development was not simply progressive, but circular as men themselves were involved in the advancement of women. By studying the circularity of the everyday, as readers we might no longer have to "ignore the fact that men are also embodied, embedded subjects, who live, for the most part, repetitive, familiar and ordinary lives." (31) That men, like women, young and old are defined by the shifting inbetweenness of the ordinary, conventional and fluid nature of the place they call home.

Metroland and History: The Significance of Paris '68

The entire middle section of Julian Barnes' Metroland takes place in Paris in 1968. Ironically, this is the year that student protests and workers' rallies combined into chaos in May with a general-strike and a partisan siege of the Sorbonne University. Despite mass closures of public transportation and whole sections of the city being taped off, Chris the narrator, talks little about the ground-breaking event. He even attempts to deflect the reader's interest in the Days of May, as it is known by historians, by telling us in the opening paragraph of Part Two, "I would never mention May for a start" (75). The protests and rallies that shut down the French capital seem to have little or no significance for him, but ironically they must for Barnes who chose to include their presence.
The Days of May is one of the most prominent examples of ordinary people responding to the "unevenness of the modernization effort" (Western Civ., 998) which began to neglect public services and reduced educational opportunities in the late-1960's. Chris, who is at once a graduate student and self-proclaimed radical, ignorance of the event shows the power of living in an individual mind set; one governed by the ordinariness of the 'semi-detached.' For him, "The point is --I was there... But I didn't actually see anything. I can't...Remember even a smudge of smoke in the sky. Where did they put up all their posters? Not where I was living." (76) Ironically, it would have been accuring very close to the 'old' national library, where he claims he lived. Barnes, places Chris front and centre for the events that took place around the Latin Quarter, where the Sobonne is located. Why does Chris then claim that he missed the protests of hundreds of thousands of people literally upon his door step? Why would Barnes create a character too ignorant to notice a major partisan revolt?
For me, the inclusion of Paris '68 within the narrative of Metroland produces so many questions about the relationship between the individual and history; individual and communal experience; how an event is remember and its reality. It opens the possibility into what Barnes might have been suggesting about the effects of suburbia and 'art only for art's sake' upon an individual's social consciousness within the framework of the novel as a whole. As I was trying to suggest in class, historical reference in Metroland brings the political into the Suburban consciousness (possibily from the unconscious). It forces the reader to question Chris, not only as suburbanite-advertiser, but as a partisan member of society. Why is he 'semi-detached'?

Bibliography

Nobel, Thomas F. X. And Barry S. Strauss. Western Civilization: The Continuing Experiment, Vol. 2. New York: Houghton Mifflon Company, 2002.

Uncanny Objects in The Cement Garden

I have been struggling to write a blog for Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden for well over a week now. The reason? The book provokingly disturbs me. It truly is "a class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar." (Freud, 1) A suburban house, in a sense, which uncannily grips, distorts and twists its readers' consciousness about the role of domestic space and objects.
These 'immovable objects' in their correct space impose a type of order in suburban life. At one point when exploring the domestic wasteland of "empty land where stinging nettles were growing around torn, corrugated tin" (McEwan, 22) that surrounded the home, Jack tells us that, "Most houses were crammed with immovable objects in their proper places and each object told you what to do--here you ate, here you slept, here you sat." (40) The problem in The Cement Garden is that these objects are moved to adapt when the children's mother becomes ill and eventually dies. The living-room table is brought upstairs to the mother's room, the bathroom chair goes down to the cellar next to 'grave,' and the baby's crib is reclaimed from the bowls of the cellar for Tom's return to infancy.
As the characters lives become more chaotic and less attached to their social roles as siblings and students, the objects and rooms become disassociated places. For example, "The kitchen was a place of stench and clouds of flies" (73) instead of the room where nourishment was maintained. As Jack, living in chaos, tells us, "the objects in the room seemed too dense, locked hard into the space they occupied and bulging with strain" (76) from their movement. There is a sense that the objects can not adapt, so the children must. So, as a result of their environment, Julie becomes the mother, Jack slowly becomes the father, Sue the discontented teenager and Tom becomes the infant.
Order is returned, but it is uncanny. The house is cleaned, the food prepared and Jack himself takes a bath and stops masturbating. Yet, there is something unfamiliar and strange lurking beneath the surface of these familiar scenes of suburbia: family secrets, the cellar, the body. As containment in the home bursts, as the secrets from the cellar are opened by an outsider, Derek, I was stunned into a state of disassociation. I felt as if I was just an object within a game of rules and guidelines hoping it was just a dream. I hoped that the female voice was ironically right when she said, "wasn't that a lovely sleep?" (138) Even thought The Cement Garden is Fiction, a type of dream, I can not dismiss the fact it awakened a feeling of consciousness I am not entirely sure how to deal with.

Laurence--Kitsch-Man--???

In Abigail's Party, the audience is brought into the world of middle class 'things.' It seems when Beverly is not forcing drinks upon her house guests or discussing their relationships, she has them talking about her furniture, replica-paintings, records and even kitchen appliances. Her world is 'things, ' it is essentially Kitsch: "a realm of artificial imagery...Created by a desperate compulsion to escape from the abstract sameness." (Cainesco, 226)
While Beverly visibly partakes in Kitsch, dancing to the popular music of Elvis and Donna Summer, her husband Laurence takes an ambiguous interest in the classics of Beethoven and Dickens. The question for me became whether we are meant to see him as moving beyond kitsch or just manifesting a different type? Is he not really just enjoying the ascetic of what he sees as 'high culture,' while disregarding its impact?
For Laurence, Dickens comes in a package of "Complete Works" (Leigh, 40) and Van Gogh can only be viewed in replication. He holds the the world of the artist at the highest regard and dreams of "Montmartre by night, the Champs Elysees, boulevard cafes..." (Leigh, 46) The world of the artist is separate from his own; an place where the mystical and extraordinary rule over the mundane and normal. Dickens is 'high culture,' not the popular culture of its conception. Laurence displays his 'things' as objects, just as Beverly displays her furniture and kitchen appliances. He is perceiving "even a genuine works of art as kitsch," (Cainesco, 249) as objects, as "art that has a predictable audience, predictable effects, predictable rewards." (Cainesco, 253)
For all his posturing is Laurence then not the Kitsch-man to Beverly's Kitsch-woman? Is high culture in hands of some, no different then popular culture in others? Can popular culture, then become a vehicle for an artist to move beyond kitsch? Don't forget Dickens once belong to the world of mass culture....As a serial novelist!!!