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 As I was trying to suggest in class, historical reference in Metroland brings the political into the Suburban consciousness (possibily from the unconscious).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.