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.