Re-writing Englishness: imagining the nation in Julian Barnes's England, England and Zadie Smith's White Teeth
2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09502360701529093
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size 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 Identified: 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 Identified, p. 318. 5 Paxman, The English, p. 53. 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. 6–7. 9 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). 10 Slavoj Žižek, 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. 83–4. 12 See Madan Sarup's very useful summary of the relationship between the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real in Lacan in the former's Jacques Lacan (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 101–19. 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. 44–70. 19 Homi Bhabha, 'DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation', in Bhabha, Nation and Narration, pp. 291–322. 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. 61–3; pp. 72–6). 22 It is also useful to think of the jigsaw puzzle as another example of Freud's 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 final 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 Zizek's Lacanian reading of the fall of Romania and 'the hole in the flag', 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 flag 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). 24 Sarah Henstra, 'The McReal Thing: personal/national identity in Julian Barnes's England, England', in Nick Bentley (ed.), British Fiction of the 1990s (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 95–107, 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 Crichton's Jurassic Park and Julian Barnes's England, England', Critique, 45, 2 (2004), pp. 163–71, 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 Foucault's 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 indefinite 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. 2–3). 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. 18–20. 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. 441–9, 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. 269–73. 35 Zadie Smith, White Teeth (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2001), p. 181. 36 Zadie Smith, 'Love, actually', Observer, November 1 2003, pp. 4–6. 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. 159–76. 38 The last chapter incorporates elements of the picaresque in its final 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 defines it (Belsey, Critical Practice, pp. 67–84). 39 Dominic Head, 'Zadie Smith's White Teeth', in Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew (eds.), Contemporary British Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), pp. 106–119, p. 117. 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 Smith's theme of colonial encounters and the form of the English novel. 43 Interestingly, Slavoj Zizek uses the same Zeno paradoxes to illustrate Lacan's 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.
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