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Nick Bentley Re-writing Englishness: imagining the nation in Julian Barnes’s England, England and Zadie Smith’s 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 (fiction, literary criticism, history and cultural commentary) produced over the last seven or eight years that have attempted to address, define, locate or explore Englishness: Robert Colls’s The Identity of England, Roger Scruton’s England: An Elegy, Paul Langford’s Englishness Identified, Peter Ackroyd’s Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, Jeremy Paxman’s The English: A Portrait of a People, John McLeod and David Rogers’s The Revision of Englishness and Krishan Kumar’s 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 cotermi- nous 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 over- lapping, 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 Imagin- ation 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 reflects both a mixed language comprised of Textual Practice 21(3), 2007, 483–504 Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502360701529093

Transcript of Bently Nick Rewriting Englishness

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Nick Bentley

Re-writing Englishness: imagining the nation in JulianBarnes’s England, England and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

Introduction

The topic of English national identity has attracted a lot of attentionrecently, both popular and academic. There have been several books(fiction, literary criticism, history and cultural commentary) producedover the last seven or eight years that have attempted to address, define,locate or explore Englishness: Robert Colls’s The Identity of England,Roger Scruton’s England: An Elegy, Paul Langford’s Englishness Identified,Peter Ackroyd’s Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, JeremyPaxman’s The English: A Portrait of a People, John McLeod and DavidRogers’s The Revision of Englishness and Krishan Kumar’s The Making ofEnglish National Identity have all sought to investigate the subject.1 Thiscluster of works includes a combination of nostalgia and mourning for alost Englishness with an anxiety for, or a coming to terms with, thepresent condition and future projections of England. What they share isan idea that England and Englishness is currently experiencing a periodof transformation (some say that this has always been the case) and togetherthey point towards a moment of crisis in the idea of the nation.

One of the factors fuelling this debate on Englishness is the cotermi-nous discourse around the concept of multiculturalism. Englishness andmulticulturalism can be conceived as having a dialectical relationship,which sometimes regards them as an opposition, whilst at other times over-lapping, and even mutually supportive. Peter Ackroyd, for example, in hisassessment of the English, manages to incorporate both positions in closeproximity. In the conclusion to Albion: The Origin of the English Imagin-ation he claims that:

Englishness is the principle of diversity itself. In English literature,music and painting, heterogeneity becomes the form and type ofart. This condition reflects both a mixed language comprised of

Textual Practice 21(3), 2007, 483–504

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09502360701529093

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many different elements and a mixed culture comprised of manydifferent races.2

But this signal to heterogeneity and diversity is undercut in the very nextparagraph when he returns to his dominant homogenous construction ofthe English as a ‘practical and pragmatic race’ (448). At several times inhis book, Ackroyd presents the image of the English imagination as circu-lar: ‘[It] takes the form of a ring or circle. It is endless because it has nobeginning or end; it moves backwards as well and forwards’ (xix). Thisdescription reinvigorates older ideas of the nation as timeless and essenti-alist. According to Ackroyd’s conclusions on the subject, the singularity ofEnglishness resides in its relationship with a specific territory in which‘English writers . . . have been haunted by a sense of place, in which theechoic simplicities and past traditions sanctify a certain spot of ground’(448). For Ackroyd, then, Englishness is located in a constant dialoguebetween the past and the present, where the past is the dominant interlo-cutor. It is determined by a ‘territorial imperative’ that identifies the geo-graphical space of Englishness; and it is characterized as an ‘enchantedcircle’, hermetically sealed and transcendent of any actual events thatmight threaten to disrupt the sanctity of Englishness, such as imperialism,colonial exploitation or the slave trade, despite his claims of itsheterogeneity.

This contradiction at the heart of Ackroyd’s text is one that reoccursin a number of recent works that address Englishness, and reveals theanxiety and instability that England’s legacy as a colonial power continuesto have on the construction of national identity. John McLeod, forexample, emphasizes that post-war immigration to Britain resulted in ‘anew multicultural English population as well as triggering myths of anembattled national identity which turned increasingly to race and hetero-sexuality as the prime marker of legitimacy and belonging.’3 Paul Langfordstresses the historically ‘mongrel nature’ of the English whilst acknowled-ging that, ‘the creation of a self-consciously multiracial society . . . mighthave startled many who sought to summarize the English characterbetween the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth century’4 Both JeremyPaxman and Roger Scruton emphasize the changed nature of Englishnessfor the contemporary world, and although neither of them mention multi-culturalism outright, the issue hovers around their writing on the subject.Paxman does identify the end of empire as one of the major influences inthe changed nature of English identity; however, in a chapter titled ‘TheEnglish Empire’, he restricts his discussion to the relationship betweenthe English and the Welsh, Scots and Irish. In fact, throughoutPaxman’s book, what he defines as the ‘English’ are assumed to be awhite, mostly Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ despite his claim that ‘any belief in

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Anglo-Saxon purity becomes clear the moment you start to examine theroots of the English people’.5 The title of Roger Scruton’s England: AnElegy signals his main argument that a certain version of Englishness hasalready passed away, and although he warns against mourning such aloss, he stresses that it is ‘right that the heirs to English civilizationshould commemorate its virtues, its achievements and its meanings’.6 Itis deemed unnecessary by Scruton to state that these ‘heirs’ are whiteand are marked by a certain ‘physiognomy’ (244). For Scruton, part ofthe unstated reason that England needs an elegy is that the multiculturaland multiethnic make-up of contemporary England has replaced any tra-ditional, racially homogenous model. For both Paxman and Scruton, a his-torical sense of Englishness stands in a dialectic opposition to anycontemporary model of English multiculturalism.

In what follows, I argue that the anxieties identified in the works citedabove form a crucial part of two recent works of fiction: Julian Barnes’s1998 novel England, England, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, publishedtwo years later. I argue that in Barnes the debate between Englishnessand multiculturalism reveals itself through absence, in what FredricJameson might call the ‘political unconscious’ of the text.7 White Teeth,on the other hand, engages more openly with the debates around English-ness and multiculturalism and attempts to offer a reframed model ofnational identity. Before looking in detail at these two novels, however, Iwant to explore a few theoretical approaches that prove useful in addressingthe concept of Englishness, and which will then provide a basis for thediscussion of the way in which Barnes and Smith produce imaginativerepresentations of the nation.

One well-used theoretical perspective that is apposite to an under-standing of the way in which national identity is constructed is BenedictAnderson’s famous description of the nation as an ‘imagined community’in which the nation is conceived as both imaginary and as a shared ‘com-radeship’.8 Accepting Anderson’s model for the moment, the imaginedstatus of the nation has two consequences. Firstly, the fact that it is difficultto objectively test an imaginative construct means that it can be manipu-lated to produce a powerful ideological discourse for a disparate groupof people. Secondly, because it is unfixed, it is open to varying interpret-ations and claims. To develop Anderson’s model, I would suggest thatwithin each nation at any moment in history there are always competingversions of the nation, each of which combine social, geographical and his-torical images. What the discourse of multiculturalism does is to pluralizeAnderson’s notion of ‘community’, and suggests that the contemporarynation is more accurately identified as an amalgamation of differentsocial and cultural communities, each of which is engaged in negotiatingthe larger grouping that constitutes the nation.

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Now there are two theoretical models that prove useful whenapproaching the construction of Englishness as an imagined community.The first of these is informed by the structuralist-psychoanalyticapproaches of Jacques Lacan and the second by Paul Ricouer’s work onnarrative. The former is predominantly spatial, whilst the latter is predo-minantly temporal.

Lacan, Englishness and multiculturalism

Lacan’s theories can prove fruitful as a way of thinking about national iden-tity in a number of ways.9 Following Anderson, we can regard England as afantasy space, an imaginary body onto which individuals can project theirdesires of wholeness, completeness and belonging; a space that momen-tarily removes the lack with which individuals are burdened by theirmove into the symbolic world of adulthood. As Slavoj Zizek has describedthis aspect of Lacan’s theory: ‘The subject attempts to fill out its constitu-tive lack by means of identification, by identifying itself with some master-signifier guaranteeing its place in the symbolic network’.10 In this sense thenation becomes another of the many possible master-signifiers, one of thealternative ‘names of the father’ that interpose themselves between the indi-vidual and the mother during the mirror stage. In this model, Englishnessdoes 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 recog-nized as a chain of signifiers (in the Derridean, not Saussurean sense) – acycle of open symbols that do not have referents in the real world but are ina continuous glissement with each other. An example of this psycho-semio-tic model of the nation can be seen in Julian Barnes’s novel in the list of‘Quintessences of Englishness’ that is produced by way of a market researchquestionnaire. This list produces 50 signifiers of the nation, including theRoyal Family, Big Ben, the Class System, Cricket, Imperialism andShakespeare.11 Barnes, of course, has invented this list, but most of theiconic images and character traits are clearly recognizable as representingEnglishness in the public imagination. Furthermore, each of thesesymbols has a recognizable connection to each of the others within thechain, but none of them, nor the list as a whole, fully evokes the wholenessof Englishness; rather, they become a series of signifiers of the nation thatoperates within the linguistic field of the list, without necessarily relating toreferential aspects of the nation.

Approaching Englishness as a series of signifiers can be extended toanother psychological model suggested by Lacan, that of the Imaginary,the Symbolic and the Real as three competing orders in the psychologicalmake-up of an individual, or, in this case, the collective psychology of the

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nation. This model suggests that, rather than a dialectic operating betweenEnglishness and its ‘others’, a more complex three-way Borromean knot isestablished between Englishness as an indicator of an individual’s self-awareness of their personal identity (Ego-Ideal), Englishness as a collectivediscourse (Ideal-Ego) and multiculturalism as a manifestation of post-colonial guilt (The Real).12 Now because Englishness does not (and neverdid) exist in reality, it has a certain precarious status as a Symbolic orderin the mind of the individual who is hailed as English. It can be threatenedby the order of the Real, which in turn promises to explode the Symbolicmyth on which its identity is constructed. Zizek explains this in EnjoyYour Symptom as the moment that ‘marks the intrusion of a radical opennessin which every ideal support of our existence is suspended’.13 If we readimperialism, colonial violence and exploitation as the mark of the Real inthe symbolic construction of Englishness, then it threatens to ‘suspend’that very construction. Zizek goes on to talk of the ‘Nothingness’ thatLacan identifies at the moment when the Real surfaces as the radicalthreat to the Symbolic scaffolding upon which the structure hangs.Because the Real is that which is ‘impossible to symbolize’, then it appearsas a hole or lack in the fabric of the symbolic network of signifiers thatmake up the nation. As Zizek explains:

This moment is the moment of death and sublimation: when thesubject’s presence is exposed outside the symbolic support, he‘dies’ as a member of the symbolic community, his being is nolonger determined by a place in the symbolic network, it materializesthe pure Nothingness of the hole.14

In applying this to national identity, therefore, for England to accept itsresponsibility to the actions that have been perpetrated in its name is toexplode the very notion of Englishness. Colonialism in its ‘Real’ form isimpossible to imagine if any imaginative and symbolic sense of Englishnessis to be maintained. This means that to maintain a positive model ofEnglishness, the colonial past has to be either repressed or to be re-workedin a form that does not radically threaten the essential nature of theSymbolic construction. As Zizek writes, ‘our very symbolic existence is a“compromise formation”, the delaying of an encounter [with theReal]’.15 Each time the nation’s involvement in colonial exploitationreturns, which according to the Lacanian model, it must keep doing,Englishness comes face-to-face with the Nothingness at its centre. To pre-serve its existence it must simultaneously keep in play strategies by which itcan incorporate the guilt of that colonial exploitation within its presidingnarrative, without it threatening the framework of the whole. Multicultur-alism can fulfil this role. However, it can also remind Englishness of the

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

Ricoeur, narrative and Englishness

Another theoretical perspective I want to introduce at this point is PaulRicoeur’s work on narratives. In Time and Narrative Ricoeur argues thattime, because it is an abstract concept that is intangible and unlocatable,relies on a process of narrativization and emplotment to present itself tohuman understanding.16 He argues that we begin to understand timethrough a combination of narrative forms, and in particular in the relation-ship between fiction and history. He writes: ‘From these intimateexchanges between the historicization of the fictional narrative and the fic-tionalization of the historical narrative is born what we call human time,which is nothing other than narrated time’.17 Furthermore, he suggeststhat a process of emplotment is necessary in this process: that time canonly be grasped through the supplement of a plot. Now, this is also auseful way of thinking about the way in which it is possible to articulatean awareness of national identity. Englishness presents itself to us as achain of symbols and images, but it is only through narrativization andemplotment that we begin to approach an understanding of Englishness.Narrative and emplotment supply the mechanism by which the imaginedcommunity of the nation is articulated.

Timothy Brennan has commented on ‘the national longing forform’18 and, in thinking of Englishness as a narrative, we might considerthe form or mode that narrative has traditionally taken. As HomiBhabha suggests, the power of national identity often resides in the wayit articulates itself through a combination of narratives: historical, mythicaland fictional.19 Furthermore, the way in which it is narrated, the form ormode of narration deployed, can determine the type of nation that isevoked, and this can have ideological implications. For example, a senseof traditional national identity has been equated with the realist mode offiction. Bhabha writes, ‘Such a form of temporality produces a symbolicstructure of the nation as “imagined community” which, in keepingwith the scale and diversity of the modern nation, works like the plot ofa realist novel.20 To take this point further: if the realist novel representsthe ideal literary expression of Englishness, then formal experimentation(for example, modernism or postmodernism) can be said to function ideo-logically as a disruption of that dominant narrative. Therefore, literaryform can intervene in the ideological articulation of the nation, and exper-imental narrative techniques can produce alternative and contestingmodels. This is an important factor to bear in mind when analyzing the

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

Julian Barnes, England, England

Julian Barnes’s novel, England, England, is not only representative of theway in which Englishness can be constructed in a narrative form’ it isabout the reconstruction of England itself. This is achieved through thecentral story of the creation of a theme park based on a collection of allthings traditionally associated with Englishness. The novel traces theplanning and development of the park, called ‘England, England’, andits eventual construction, which involves the taking over, wholesale, ofthe Isle of Wight.21 The novel’s theme is clearly related to the way inwhich the nation is constructed and exists in the collective imaginationof not only its inhabitants, but also the rest of the world. The project isthe brainchild of Sir Jack Pitman (Pitco Industries), a parody of a Thatch-erite entrepreneur, whose success has been established by the time of themain events of the novel, and for whom ‘England, England’ (the themepark) is his final project, his magnum opus.

The novel is divided into three sections: ‘England’, ‘England,England’ and ‘Albion’, each of which has a distinctive narrative stylethat to some extent tries to mirror its subject matter. Barnes’s text inter-weaves an analysis of the nation with an exploration of the way in whichthe identities of individuals are constructed. This is focused primarilythrough the character of Martha Cochrane. Martha is eventually employedas Sir Jack Pitman’s adviser, given the provocative title of ‘AppointedCynic’, but the first section of the novel is concerned with her childhood,and supplies us with an indication of why she is so cynical in later life. Thetext opens with a powerful image that connects national with personalidentity. Martha’s first memory (although this itself is presented as an arti-ficial memory) is of doing a jigsaw puzzle that consists of the counties ofEngland. The process of constructing and re-constructing the nation is,of course, central to this image, but this is overlaid with the developmentof Martha’s individual identity in that she recounts how, each time she didthe jigsaw, her father would playfully hide one piece (usually a piece fromthe heart of England – Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire) and then supply itat the end (4–6). The image of the father providing the final piece is thuspresented in terms of both completing the nation, but also of completingand fulfilling Martha’s identity. Crucially, when Martha’s father leaves herand her mother, she imagines that he has taken the last piece of the jigsawwith him. This defining metaphor for the incompleteness of Martha’s char-acter is projected throughout the rest of the book and profoundly marks

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Martha’s adulthood as unsatisfied, unfulfilled and incomplete. It is notdifficult to produce a Lacanian reading of this passage.22 The jigsawbecomes a symbolic expression of the psyche of both Martha and the col-lective consciousness of the nation. The missing piece, taken significantlyby the father, represents the lack at the heart of Martha and also thebody of contemporary Englishness, and the impossibility of regainingthat wholeness in the present of the nation or in Martha’s adult life.23

The combination of part-fictionalized and emplotted narratives of theself and of the nation are seen as inseparable indices in the formation ofidentity. That these narratives are based on memories is also crucial tothe novel’s exploration of the way in which the nation is produced. AsSarah Henstra has pointed out, in Barnes’s novel, ‘memory is a sign thatonly ever points back to another sign’.24 The text stresses that memoriesare essentially unreliable, and that they are constructed and re-constructed:

If a memory wasn’t a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory,mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about whatit claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had hap-pened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: thepast was never just the past, it was what made the present able to livewith itself. The same went for individuals . . . an element of propa-ganda, of sales and marketing, always intervened between the innerand the outer person. (6)

Here, the combination of the unreliability of memory, and the necessaryelement of fictional re-construction involved, plus the language ofconsumerism and commodities, parallels the way in which England isre-constructed in the middle section of the book, in the theme park.

The middle section is concerned with a theory of replicas, simulationsand simulacra that form the theoretical basis for the theme park project.This section is also concerned with the way in which the nation is commo-dified and re-presented as a marketable, reified object and therebyconverted into a series of saleable symbols. This again involves a processof emplotment, of turning the nation into a narrative that can then betold/sold to consumers, who buy both the story and the commoditiesassociated with it. When developing the project, Sir Jack relies on the mar-keting consultant Jerry Batson, whose narrative articulates this sense of thenation 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 sothan in the current climate. Shakespeare, Queen Victoria, Industrial

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Revolution, gardening, that sort of thing. If I may coin, no copyrighta phrase, We are already what others may hope to become. This isn’tself-pity, this is the strength of our position, our glory, ourproduct placement. We are the new pioneers. We must sell ourpast 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 finally beenreplaced by the triumph of the market. A financial analyst in the bookcomments, ‘It’s [the theme park] a pure market state. There’s no interfer-ence from government because there is no government. So there’s noforeign or domestic policy, only economic policy. It’s a pure interfacebetween buyers and sellers without the market being skewed by centralgovernment’ (183).

The middle section also shows the way in which the novel parodies thepostmodern effects of a total victory of the market economy articulatedthrough an ‘end of history’ image, in particular, the end of the historyof England (‘There was no history except Pitco history’, p. 202). Theaccumulation of paradigmatic images of England’s past – the RoyalFamily, Dr Johnson, Nell Gwynn, the Battle of Britain pilots, etc. –results in the removal of any sense of a future England. The culturalspace of the theme park reduces history to the immediate present, to theephemeral, transience of the now. It is easy, here, to see the novel as acritique of postmodernism’s love affair with surfaces, replicas and the com-modified present.25 This critique of postmodernism is dramatized mostclearly in the figure of the French intellectual who Sir Jack invites tospeak to the project team. This intellectual theorizes the contemporarypreference for the replica over the real, the simulacra over the original,and is a clear parody of Jean Baudrillard. In fact, the French philosopherin the novel presents us with an argument that is an adaptation ofBaudrillard’s third order of simulacra.26

It is well established – and indeed it has been incontrovertiblyproved by many of those I have earlier cited – that nowadays weprefer the replica to the original. We prefer the reproduction tothe work of art itself, the perfect sound and solitude of thecompact disc to the symphony concert in the company of a thousandvictims of throat complaints, the book on tape to the book in the lap. . . the world of the third millennium is inevitably, is ineradicablymodern, and that it is our intellectual duty to submit to that moder-nity, and to dismiss as sentimental and inherently fraudulent allyearnings for what is dubiously called the ‘original’. (53–55)

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The irony, of course, is that the theories of Baudrillard, the post-68 enfantterrible of the left, are here being invoked for the support of Sir JackPitman’s paradigm of a capitalist project. Baudrillard’s critique of postmo-dern culture is recycled as a celebration of the market economy.

What remains ambiguous, however, is whether we are to accept theFrench critic’s ideas or to recognize them as being wholly satirized. Theend of the chapter in which he appears details how the great philosopheris flown in, gives his speech, stops off in London to buy fishing waders,flies and a quantity of aged Caerphilly with his conference fee, and thenflies off to his next international conference. But despite this satire of thecontemporary high flying intellectual, the ideas expressed in the first partof the novel concerning the unreliability of memory and the impossibilityof recovering any sense of an original or authentic recuperation of the pastis corroborated by the postmodern theorizing of the French intellectual.What is being satirized is not the ideas or theories themselves, but theway 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 waysrepresents an English academic tradition in opposition to poststructuralistcontinental theory, ultimately agrees with much of what the French theor-ist says, although significantly in a language that appears more empiricaland everyday:

is it not the case that when we consider such lauded and fetishizedconcepts as, oh, I throw a few out at random, Athenian democracy,Palladian architecture, desert-sect worship of the kind that still holdsmany in thrall, there is no authentic moment of beginning, of purity,however hard their devotees pretend. We may choose to freeze amoment and say it all ‘began’ then, but as an historian I have totell you that such labelling is intellectually indefensible. What weare looking at is almost always a replica, if that is the locally fashion-able term, of something earlier. (132)

It is Dr Max and Martha’s discussion of a particularly natural-lookingEnglish landscape that precipitates this moment, and the focus on the arti-ficiality of ‘nature’ emphasizes the sense in which England itself, as both ageographical and historical concept, is contingent upon time and place,rather than being presented as essential and permanent. The artificialconstruction of ‘England, England’, therefore, is presented as an extremecase of the processes involved in any construction of what appears to bethe natural world – always artificial, with no authentic moment ofbeginning. The fact that this idea is presented through the style ofaddress of Dr Max reduces the parodic tone given to the French

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intellectual’s speech. Dr Max’s speech is placed at a higher level on thenovel’s hierarchy of discourses and, therefore, it is a challenge to anotion of essential Englishness from within the English tradition, ratherthan, as one might expect, from a French tradition of theoretical rational-ism. The novel is not a critique of postmodernity, but a lament that thetheories underpinning postmodernism are likely to be the most accuratein understanding how the contemporary nation can be articulated. AsJames J. Miracky argues: ‘Just when one suspects that Barnes is validatingpostmodern theory, he incorporates elements that reach for an authentichuman experience of the real ultimately leaving the novel positioned some-where between homage and parody of the dominance of the “hyperreal”’.27

The form of the novel is interesting in this context. In terms of nar-rative modes, it can best be described as hybrid. The first section,‘England’, appears to deploy a classic realist mode.28 There is a thirdperson narrator, who presents the narrative with what appears to be littleself-consciousness in terms of the mode of address used. Also, a clear ‘hier-archy of discourses’ is established (to use one of Catherine Belsey’s indi-cators of conventional realist fiction) with Martha as the centralconsciousness of this section. There is a recognizable, even familiar,social setting located in a post-war English past. However, the fact thatthe middle section of the book shifts from this realist mode to whatmight better be described as postmodernist, alerts us to the constructednessof the first section. There is a clear case of form attempting to parallelcontent in Barnes’s novel. The first section is presented as realist becauseit is concerned with an evocation of a traditional English past. The formof the writing, therefore, evokes the sense of that past as much as thedetails it supplies us with. This, of course, is different from saying that itis un-self-conscious writing. In fact, it is a self-consciousness that fore-grounds its realism by not alluding to the textuality of the text.

The second section is more distinctly postmodern in style. It uses situ-ations 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 thesecond section – for example, the French intellectual’s speech, and a news-paper review of the theme park – and there are knowing side references tocontemporary theory, especially Baudrillard and Michel Foucault.29 Theelements of parody, pastiche, magic realism and knowing self-referentialitymark out the section as postmodern in style. Of course, this mode of nar-ration rests easily with its subject matter: the presentation of the postmo-dern theme park. It could also be argued that this section represents adeparture from a form associated with an English literary tradition. Post-modernism, despite many British novelists using the form, is still most

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associated with American novelists, both North and South. The encroach-ment of this foreign mode into the text, therefore, parallels Sir Jack’s Dis-neyfication of England on the Isle of Wight: a process that evokes fears ofan Americanization of British culture that stretches back to the 1950s, ifnot before.

In this context, the final section of the book, ‘Albion’, seems formallyto return us to a more recognizably English form – the pastoral elegy. Theelegy 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, isrepresented as a rural idyll and it is as if the market economy has beensiphoned off into the theme park on the Isle of Wight, leaving behind apre-capitalist society on the mainland. However, in terms of form, the situ-ation is not as straightforward as it appears. The opening description of thepastoral scene is exaggerated to the point of parody (241), and fictionalizednarratives still supply the main way in which identity is formed. This latterpoint is represented in the character of Jez Harris (formerly Jack Oshinsky)who in a previous life was a junior legal expert with an American elec-tronics firm, but who has now adopted the persona of an English yokelproviding made-up ‘tales of witchcraft and superstition, of sexual ritesbeneath a glowing moon and the trance slaughter of livestock’ (243).The artificiality that fuels the second section contaminates the third, andJez’s tales form an emplotment of Englishness in much the same way asthe theme park.

The novel, then, laments the belief that we cannot access an authenticplace of origin, whilst it simultaneously critiques those who celebrate thisfact. It presents the preference for the replica alongside the psychologicaldesire for the original, and, in fact, these are presented as the samething. What Martha discovers in the last section of the book is that ifwe desire to recover a lost past – a garden show, our image of ruralEngland, Cornish smugglers, Robin Hood – it is in fact not the originalor authentic reality that we desire (because there is no original), rather,it is the artificial construction of these objects and signs that we want toreclaim. Paradoxically, it is these always already copies that appear auth-entic to our memories of the past. To borrow Baudrillard’s phrase, it isthe hyperreal that we recover, because to talk of the reality of a memorybecomes non-sensical.30 If our pasts are a series of memories of constructedimages, then recovering those reconstructed images operates as a kind ofrecovery of what passes for the authentic. The novel, therefore, is alament, not for lost Englishness, but for the fact that we can neverrecoup the past, or, that if we do, it is always a false, artificial past thatwe recover. England, England addresses issues of national identity byundermining the basis on which they have rested in the past. If thereever was a grand or Master narrative of Englishness, then the novel is

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keen to undermine the philosophical basis on which such a model mightrest. However, it does not celebrate the ‘incredulity towards grand narra-tives’ that have provided the ideological and ethical basis for many postmo-dern British novels of the last two or three decades. Rather, it wistfullyreflects on what appears to be a simpler, if naıve version of Englishness,without the complexities of postmodern experience. However, thisreveals a contemporary cultural crisis in the meaning of Englishness, onethat, with Barnes, is filtered through a postmodern sensibility into akind of knowing nostalgia. This is very different from the ‘nostalgiamode’ that Fredric Jameson identifies as one of the features of postmodern-ism.31 In Barnes’s novel, the nostalgia is recognized for what it is, yet it stillhas the power to evoke longing for a lost Englishness whilst at the sametime registering a suspicion towards the grand narrative on which thatvery nostalgia rests.

This longing for a lost England can also be seen in the novel’s silenceon issues of Empire and contemporary ideas of the nation as multicultural.This is one rather worrying aspect of England, England. England’s colonialheritage, reference to discrete racial identities within the nation, and multi-culturalism are all written out of the text: there is no mention of them any-where in the book. You would, of course, imagine that a Black or Asianpresence might be missing from the theme park, given its ideologicalbias, but what is more significant is that this absence is not mentionedas a point of critique against the theme park – against the artificial, com-modified simulacra of England. There are, in fact, no Black or Asian char-acters anywhere in the book. Given the multicultural make-up ofcontemporary England, this is an unsettling omission for a novel thattakes the nation as one of its main themes. In Lacanian terms, the colonialpast and the multicultural present represents the repressed Real ofEnglishness that in England, England remains repressed. Or in Jameson’sterms, multiculturalism is part of the political subconscious of the text.

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

This is certainly not the case in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which offers acompeting version of contemporary Englishness, one that emphasizes andaddresses the multicultural make-up of late-twentieth/early twenty-firstcentury England, and in turn is keen, on one level, to challenge concernsthat Englishness and multiculturalism are mutually antagonistic concepts.Smith’s novel sets out to explore the complex interaction between a rangeof different ethnicities that make up contemporary British life and in doingso show differing conceptions of and attitudes towards both Englishnessand multiculturalism.

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The representation of a multicultural Englishness is attempted in anumber of ways, one of which is by emploting the multicultural nation,revealing it through personal stories from characters with a variety ofethnic cultures and backgrounds. This is registered most clearly in thethree 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 combi-nations of discrete ethnicities but as an indication that the old categoriesof race are an inaccurate way of describing the ethnic diversity of contem-porary England:

This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white.This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It isonly this late in the day that you can walk into a playground andfind Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the footballcage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Joneshumming a tune. Children with first and last names on a directcollision course. (326)

In this way she echoes Stuart Hall’s way of thinking about ethnicity thatmoves beyond the idea of ‘black’ as a useful indicator of racial difference.In ‘New Ethnicities’, Hall writes of the need to recognize that, ‘“black” isessentially a politically and culturally constructed category’ and of ‘theimmense diversity and differentiation of the historical and cultural experi-ence of black subjects [which] inevitably entails a weakening or fading ofthe notion [of] “race”’.32 Like Hall, Smith’s novel emphasizes that multi-culturalism should accept a mixing of ethnicity identified at the level of theindividual rather than the nation. In this model, each of us is multicultural,and by extension multiethnic. This is distinctly and radically different fromthe model of multiculturalism that represents a series of monoethnic indi-viduals who combine to produce a multicultural nation. This also movesbeyond the idea of ‘hybrid’ identities, which again suggests a ‘mix’ of dis-crete races or ethnicities. Irie Jones, with her complex ‘racial’ background(and even more so her unborn child) becomes, therefore, symbolic of thisnew kind of ethnicity, one that the text presents as the emerging model forcontemporary Englishness.

A multicultural model of the nation is also presented through dialo-gue, representing a multiethnic example of what Mikhail Bakhtin describesas the heteroglossic function of the novel form.33 The combination ofArchie Jones’s working-class, Cockney accent, Samad’s Asian-Englishand Clara’s Creolized Caribbean English represent socio-linguistic devi-ations from Standard English as the centripetal forces of language under-mining any notion of a homoglossic centre to the nation’s language and

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culture.34 In a sense the novel goes one stage further than Bakhtin’s modelas it presents heteroglossia as the now dominant mode of language in con-temporary Britain. As Samad says: ‘Only the immigrants can speakQueen’s English these days’.35 The representation of varying voices alsoextends to the positions that are taken towards the idea of England as amulticultural nation. Archie, for example, seems to embrace unthinkinglythe idea of the multicultural in his marriage to Clara and his friendshipwith Samad, whilst Alsana Iqbal remains more sceptical: ‘No one wasmore liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, inWillesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up onany other thing’ (63).

The formal mode of the novel also engages with the construction ofnational identity. The dominant mode of the novel is comedy, operatingmainly through a form of Horatian satire picking out unavoidablefoibles, hypocrisies and moral expediencies of the main characters. Thisstyle serves to avoid the didacticism of political correctness, whilst main-taining an underlying serious approach to the experiences of first- andsecond-generation immigrants to Britain. Recalling Homi Bhabha’s sug-gestion that the nation finds its most powerful articulation through theform of the realist novel, then despite its contemporary, multiculturalsubject matter the text uses literary modes and forms that are associatedwith traditional English literature and it comes as no surprise that Smithhas cited E.M. Forster as one of her main literary influences.36 Comedyand satire are, of course, two of the modes that have often been identifiedas indicators of an English tradition in the novel.37 Also, despite a few post-modern additions, such as the use of lists, tables and diagrams, andelements of the picaresque, the overriding mode of the novel is classicrealism.38 It has an omniscient third person narration that tends to showus, rather than tell us events, and it has socially recognizable charactersthat interact in a recognizable and named geographical environment(mainly North London). In addition, a ‘hierarchy of discourses’, to useBelsey’s phrase, is established, whereby within the social framework ofthe novel, certain characters carry the central moral, ethical and philosophi-cal outlook, mainly the female characters, and especially Irie Jones.Although the subject matter could be described as postcolonial, postmo-dern, post-Marxist and post-feminist, it nevertheless addresses thoseideas in the familiar frame of the comic realist mode. Dominic Head,for example, states that ‘Smith’s vision has the coherence and solidityafforded by one specific context’,39 whilst Philip Tew describes the novelas ‘quasi-Dickensian in mood’.40 This formal characteristic of the bookis related to Smith’s attempt to communicate a multicultural model ofEnglishness that balances inclusiveness with the articulation of othernessand difference. The deployment of a realist mode is part of the text’s

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desire to reach an inclusive interpretive community, one that not onlyspeaks to the various ethnic and cultural minorities it includes, but isalso directed to the dominant white middle-class readership that probablystill makes up the majority of the British novel-reading public. In effect, itre-imagines a multicultural interpretive community that corresponds tothe kind of plural society presented in the text.

The novel’s articulation of an emergent national identify, therefore,involves a negotiation, rather than rejection, of more established construc-tions of Englishness. One of the main devices here is through the figure ofArchie Jones. Archie emerges as representing the unlikely hero of the book,but this unlikeliness is part of his English identity. Archie’s characteristicsare tolerance, apathy, rejection of any fundamental systems of politics orreligion, philistinism, anti-intellectualism, enthusiasm for hobbies, adown-to-earth unromanticism, and yet, an inherent goodness. Clara recog-nizes these qualities in the opening section of the novel: ‘No knight, then,this Archibald Jones. No aims, no hopes, no ambitions. A man whose great-est 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 bookis surprising on one level, but not on another. Archie’s conventionalEnglishness, his belief in chance, and in making decisions on the spotrather than referring to some grand system of thought or religion markshim off as a point of resistance to the various fundamentalisms withwhich the novel presents us. The last section of the book, ‘Magid, Millatand Marcus’, begins with two dictionary definitions ‘fundamental’ and‘Fundamentalism’, and each of the characters referred to represents aform of fundamentalist ideology: Magid’s retro-colonial Englishness,Millat’s growing support of Islamic fundamentalism and Marcus Chalfen’sexperiments in genetic engineering, culminating in the ‘FutureMouse#’project. Other fundamentalisms are also presented in the novel, forexample, Hortense Bowden’s following of the Jehovah’s Witness move-ment, Joyce Chalfen’s application of horticultural practices to the ‘nurtur-ing’ of the waywardMillat’ and Joshua Chalfen’s involvement with a radicalAnimal Rights group. What stands in opposition to all these fundamental-isms is Archie’s flipped coin – his reliance on chance to determine hisactions, rather than a fixed ideology. As Fred Botting argues with referenceto Archie’s coin-flipping, ‘it seems that accidents keep open a space ofeveryday liberalism, ordinary possibility and gradual social change againstforces, divine or scientific, that would eliminate randomness with awfulcertitude’.41 That Archie emerges as an unlikely hero, therefore, supplies thenovel with a residual form of national identity that is incorporated, ratherthan rejected by Smith’s model of an emergent, multicultural Englishness.On one level then, this serves to place the multicultural themes of the novelas part of an English tradition, rather than a rejection of it.

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However, a mutually celebrated vision of multiculturalism is not thewhole story in White Teeth. Despite the novel’s encouragement of newways of thinking about ethnicity, it is also keen to show that the oldideas about race and culture are difficult to shift. The importance of thepast here (individual in the sense of roots, and collective in terms of colo-nial history) often acts as a debilitating weight on the possibility of anemergent model of multicultural identity. The difficulty of moving awayfrom the past finds its culmination in the stand-off between Magid andMillat towards the end of the novel, and somewhat undercuts theutopian idea of a harmonious multicultural nation:

Because we often imagine that immigrants are constantly on themove, footloose, able to change course at any moment, able toemploy their legendary resourcefulness at every turn . . . free of anykind of baggage, happy and willing to leave their difference at thedocks and take their chances in this new place, merging with theoneness of this greenandpleasantlibertarianlandofthefree . . .weaving their way through Happy Multicultural Land. Well, goodfor them. But Magid and Millat couldn’t manage it. They left thatneutral room as they entered it: weighed down, burdened . . . Theyseem to make no progress. The cynical might say they don’t evenmove at all – that Magid and Millat are two of Zeno’s headfuckarrows, occupying a space equal to Mangal Pande’s, equal toSamad Iqbal’s. 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 historyany more than you yourself can lose your shadow’ (465–6)

In this passage, Smith questions a liberal version of multiculturalism andshows that it is not applicable for every immigrant narrative. The twinscontinue on their separate paths despite the novel’s attempt to produce areconciliation.42 Smith describes Magid and Millat in terms of Zeno’sparadox of an arrow in flight. The paradox turns on the fact that if youobserve an arrow in flight it is seen to be in motion over a period oftime, and yet at any single instant the arrow is in stasis.43 This paradoxis used metaphorically to represent the stand-off between Magid andMillat, both of whom appear to be moving forward individually on theirown trajectories but are locked into a stasis by their immovable antagonismtowards each other. Multiculturalism emerges here, not as a panacea for theproblems of England’s relationship with its own colonial past, but as a dis-placement of the legacies of colonialism that continue to impact on indi-viduals in the present. Smith achieves this by imploding the temporaltrajectory at this point – by placing all events in the immediate present.

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This serves to tie together in this one encounter the legacies of colonialism:the perpetual encounter between the two subjects, one resisting, the otherbeing appropriated by colonialism – both of whom are forced to commu-nicate through a meta-language that continues to be controlled by colonialdiscourse. One of the ways therefore, that multiculturalism, appears in thenovel is as a narrative by which England copes with its guilty colonialsecret: and the text is full of secrets, not all of which are revealed tothose concerned (for example, Irie’s biological family connection to herwhite English colonial great-grand-father).

Magid and Millat’s entrenched positions represent an impasse, butthis is not the only position on multiculturalism that the text makes avail-able. One of the ways around this stand-off is in the figure of Irie’s unbornchild, which emerges at the end of the novel as the hope for a positive,forward-looking model of multicultural Englishness. Irie has slept withboth Magid and Millat, and therefore the undecidability the child’s pater-nity represents a significant (although not total) evasion of the nightmareof history, and symbolizes an escape from the ideological weight of colonialgenealogy. The parallel between Irie’s unborn child and the geneticallyengineered FutureMouse# is worth pursuing here. The genetically engin-eered mouse is, of course, pre-programmed in its moment of artificial cre-ation, and its genesis and confinement in laboratory surroundingsemphasize the predetermined nature of its existence. That it is a ‘Future’mouse works on two levels: the adjective suggests the enabling future pos-sibilities of science and technology, but at the same time its future is alreadyencoded in its creation – a predeterminism that evokes much older formsof containment and authority. However, it ultimately manages to evade itspredetermined narrative by escaping from the genetic scientists that havecreated it. This does not mean that it can evade its genetic codes (or byextrapolation) its genealogical heritage, rather that in claiming its stakefor freedom it defies those who wish to contain it, just as Archie’s coinevades the imperatives of fundamentalism: ‘He [Archie] watched it[FutureMouse#] dash along the table, and through the hands of thosewho wished to pin it down’ (540).

The novel, then, presents a complex range of ways of engaging withthe multicultural nation, some of which celebrate the possibilities of a har-monious range of new ethnicities under the umbrella of a new model ofEnglishness, some of which remain more sceptical about such an idealizedconstruction of the nation. Despite the Lacanian ‘Real’ of the coloniallegacy continuing to reassert its influence on the actions of some of thecharacters (for example in Magid’s involvement in Islamic fundamentalismas a point of resistance to the threat to his Asian cultural heritage byWestern values, and in Millat’s re-adoption of old colonial sensibilities),it also offers a partial evasion of that inherited impasse. This is seen in

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the network of symbols of freedom that connect the narrative trajectories ofArchie, Irie’s unborn child and the FutureMouse#.

Conclusion

Both of these contemporary works of fiction are self-consciously workingin a tradition of the English novel, and each of them engages with theformal modes with which English fiction has developed historically. Inboth novels, formal techniques and thematic content are combined inthe articulation and exploration of varying discourses of Englishness. Aswe have seen, each, in its own way, is concerned to re-evaluate assumedand inherited models of national identity. In the case of England,England this involves a philosophical deconstruction of the premises andassumptions on which our understanding of Englishness has traditionallyrested. In the case of White Teeth we find an attempt to construct a newmodel of Englishness that is suited to the country’s multicultural make-up at the beginning of twenty-first century. However, the text realizesthat this is no easy task and reveals through its form as well as its subjectmatter many of the cultural anxieties attached to the construction ofEnglishness 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 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 andWindus, 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 inEnglish national identity is a feature of the 1990s, and supplies his own listof books concerned with the subject, Kumar, The Making of English NationalIdentity, p. 251.

2 Ackroyd, Albion, p. 448.3 John McCleod, ‘Introduction: measuring Englishness’ in McLeod, The Revi-

sion of Englishness, p. 3.4 Langford, Englishness Identified, p. 318.5 Paxman, The English, p. 53.

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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 LeftBooks, 1983), pp. 6–7.

9 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton,1977).

10 Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through PopularCulture (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 Ima-

ginary, 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, 2ndedn (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 DavidPellauer (eds) (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985);Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative: Volume 3, Kathleen Blamey and DavidPellauer (eds) (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

17 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative: Volume 3, p. 10218 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’sunderstanding of the Fort-Da game by which Martha, through repetition ofdoing the jigsaw, comes to terms with the loss of the connection with themother. This Freudian model is, of course, complicated in Barnes by thefact that her father permanently removes the final piece and frustrates the com-pletion of the game, and thereby relates to the frustration Martha feels in herlater life.

23 This passage is also reminiscent of Zizek’s Lacanian reading of the fall ofRomania and ‘the hole in the flag’, the psychological lacunae at the centreof the national consciousness, caused by the 1980 revolution, and representedvisually by a famous photograph of a revolutionary waving the Romanian flagwith the central ‘communist symbol, the red star cut out’ (Slavoj Zizek, Tarry-ing With the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 1993) p. 1).

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24 Sarah Henstra, ‘The McReal Thing: personal/national identity in JulianBarnes’s England, England’, in Nick Bentley (ed.), British Fiction of the1990s (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 PhilipBeitchman (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’sEngland, 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 accord-ing to . . .’ alluding to Michel Foucault’s seminal poststructuralist book TheHistory of Sexuality (Barnes, England, England, pp. 48 and 98). MichelFoucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 vols, trans. R. Hurley (London: Lane,1979).

30 Baudrillard writes: ‘Something has disappeared . . . No more mirror of beingand appearance, of the real and the concept . . . The real is produced from min-iaturised units, from matrices, memory banks and command models – andwith 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. Itis hyperreal, the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory modelsin a hyperspace without atmosphere’ (Baudrillard, Simulations, pp. 2–3).

31 See Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and consumer society’, in E. AnnKaplan (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. CarylEmerson 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 Englishtradition 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 unlikelycoming together of all the main characters in one social space: the launch of theFutureMouse# project. I am again using the term ‘classic realism’ in the sensethat Catherine Belsey defines it (Belsey, Critical Practice, pp. 67–84).

39 Dominic Head, ‘Zadie Smith’s White Teeth’, in Richard J. Lane, RodMengham and Philip Tew (eds), Contemporary British Fiction (Cambridge:Polity Press, 2003), pp. 106–119, p. 117.

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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 Fictionof the 1990s, pp. 21–41, p. 26.

42 There are echoes of Forster here and the irreconcilability of the two charactersat the end of A Passage to India. As suggested earlier, Smith has emphasized herlove of E.M. Forster and this English novelist provides an interesting point ofcomparison with Smith’s theme of colonial encounters and the form of theEnglish novel.

43 Interestingly, Slavoj Zizek uses the same Zeno paradoxes to illustrate Lacan’smodel of ‘the relation between the subject and its object cause of desire,which can never be obtained’; Zizek, Slavoj, Looking Awry: An Introductionto Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1992), p. 4.

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