monsters and children

We talked tonight about the rather odd families in "Keeping Up Appearances," where certain adult characters (such as Rose) function as children and others (like Hyacinth) as parents, while actual children are absent. This struck me as being like The Cement Garden; if there the children adopt adult roles, here adults become childlike.

Another link between these two "texts" is the tension between the human and the non-human. In The Cement Garden objects take on a life of their own, even the mother's corpse, which takes on peculiarly life-like qualities as it seems to push open the cement casing in which it's buried. In "Keeping Up Appearances," Hyacinth Bucket is described compared by Onslow to a "monster," and the vicar also questions her humanness.

But our sitcom was a bit less disturbing than McEwan's novel, to put it mildly. The humour isn't black; it's not even grey. Does the TV program air similar anxieties to the novel only to resolve them or render them less scary through parody and caricature? Here the monstrous becomes a joke, rather than an uncanny, unsettling phenomenon.

and finally . . .

History. In class we raised the issue of Chris's desire to write a history of London transport. What's up with that? Well, the novel raises the question of the relationship between different kinds of history. Chris's sexual education takes place against the backdrop of les événements in Paris in 1968. What's the relationship between his personal history and this broader backdrop? Is Julian Barnes suggesting the micro is as important as the macro (a theme in The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters)? Is there an ironic comment here about Chris's limited perspective, such that he misses the important events of the decade? Or is the irony that the events of 68 had little long-term effect: is the broader social shift from rebellion to conformity mirrored in Chris's own trajectory?

Similarly, is Chris's proposed history also an ironic example of his limited perspective, here evinced in the turn from the poetic and the metaphorical, from the world of literature, to the world of fact—the literal, the historical? Or is the history an assertion of the value of the local rather than the global? Does the railway's path—from ambitious project to the routine commute—mirror Chris's life? Or is this narrative of decline, provided by the man Chris meets on the train as a teenager, thrown into question; hence Chris's need to find out the history for himself?

Tell me your thoughts!

more irony

More, more. I apologized in class for mentioning television too much: I retract that apology. Cultural studies, people—we can talk about television all we want! And so (back) to Arrested Development. This is a great example of a "text" in which a thwarted, ironic version of personal development is mapped onto a social critique, in the manner of Grass's The Tin Drum. Here the criticism is aimed at the good old "American Dream" of wealth, success, and entrepreneurship, represented in the family's patriarch. He's a developer: and specifically, he's a housing developer—so he basically creates suburbs. This version of "development" is implicitly criticized when he is "arrested," as is his version of the American dream. And the arrested development of Gob, Buster and Lindsay, who are all more or less children, signal further the way in which the standard notion of success stunts growth. In this world the children are more mature than the adults: it's a reversed Bildungsroman.

But, but . . .don't both Michael and George Michael live (at least initially?) in the showhome of the suburban development? Of course, they're doing so ironically, partially--living in the attic, as the house itself is just for show. Similarly, both characters maintain an ironized detachment from the larger Bluth family, but they're still part of that family. Irony and complicitous critique meet in suburbia, once again.

irony

Our discussion tonight raised lots of questions for me. I have about 15 ideas floating round in my head right now, so I'll try to corral a few of them into some semblance of order.

At the end of my mini-lecture I raised the issue of whether the suburb works the same way in the Bildungsroman genre as the traditional provincial town or village, but I didn't return to this question. So let me try now. In a classic example of the genre,Great Expectations, the hero, Pip, comes from a village in Essex. By the end of the novel he returns home literally and metaphorically as he discovers his real father (a convict, Magwitch), and revisits Joe, his adoptive father, whom he had early shunned for the sophistication of city life. Pip's process of maturation and development leads him to reject the material wealth and success valued in London, and to recognize Joe's true value (and by implication the value of so-called "provincialism").

In Metroland the point of origin and return is suburbia, the twilight zone, as Chris describes it: neither "the city," fully, nor a provincial backwater. My hunch is that the characteristics of the suburb—as the twilight zone, as the neither/nor space—are reflected in the novel's rewriting of the Bildungsroman. Let me explain. Rather than reconciling whole-heartedly with the values of his point of origin, a la Pip, Chris reconciles with them ironically. As he says, "It's certainly ironic to be back in Metroland." He continues "But isn't part of growing up being able to ride irony without being thrown?" (135). Chris embraces the values of his parents, but with the detachment of irony, rather than the sincerity of Dickens's Pip. And irony is a state of in-betweenness. With irony, meaning hovers between the said and the unsaid, as we say one thing and mean another: "Great," we say, as the bus goes past without stopping. If the suburb is a liminal space, between the provincial and the metropolitan, the country and the city, irony is a liminal trope, hovering between the literal meaning of a word or phrase and its implied opposite. Irony is in the gap between the word and the world; the suburb is in the gap between the country and the city. So the return to the suburb implies—or at least is mapped onto—Chris's ironized embrace of "suburban values," such as domesticity, fidelity, and family life. He's part of this world, but distanced from it (like Baudelaire's flâneur). Similarly, the suburb is part of the city, but distanced from it.

Nowhere is the link between suburb and irony clearer than in the character of Marion, who is more cynical and ironic than Chris himself, as he recognizes. Marion marries someone she knows doesn't love her with a grand passion, and is unfaithful to him: she sees this not as a failure of marriage, but as its ironic reality. Idealism has departed. I think this is really interesting: in Barnes's novel, "woman" is irony—a contrast with Madame Bovary, where woman (Emma) is idealized romanticism. Here we maybe come back to a different version of the issue of "feminine irony" raised by Melissa in her presentation on Orwell. Rather than the irony existing in the gap between the narrative voice and the description of the women, as Melissa argued was the case in that novel, here irony is directly associated with Marion.

But is irony criticized in the novel? Does Barnes long for sincerity and idealism? That's the question . . .is (suburban) irony criticized as a complacent sell-out? Or do Chris and Barnes plump for the postmodern complicitous critique?

Bodies and Houses

We talked in class about the uncanny spaces in The Cement Garden, and Cecilia's presentation discussed the tower blocks, the bed, and the trunk. I think the cellar is another example of an uncanny space, acting as a strange distorted mirror of the world upstairs, divided into "a number of meaningless rooms" (14) that both reflect and disturb the meaningful arrangement of rooms upstairs (bedroom, kitchen, etc). Over the course of the novel the orderly spaces upstairs become more and more disordered, and therefore more like the cellar; the demarcation between bedrooms blurs, for example, as Tom starts sleeping in Julie's room.

The cellar seems to me to be linked to the lower body, if we think of the house itself as a body, divided between upper and lower. The cellar is associated with the unruly body (the mother's corpse which threatens to break through the concrete); with stench; with sexual desire (I link the old toys and childhood cot in the cellar with childhood sexual experimentation); and with the repressed which always threatens to return. In the final pages of the novel, the rhythm of the sledge-hammer in the cellar, breaking open the mother's tomb, mirrors the rhythm of Jack and Julie as they have sex: here the distinction between house and cellar, orderly upper body and disorderly lower body breaks down.

Anthony Vidler discusses the way in which architecture was traditionally modelled on the human body, a notion lost in modernism during which the "rational sheltering of the body" was more important than its "pictorial emulation" (The Architectural Uncanny, MIT Press, 1992, p. 70). He notes a return to the body in postmodern architecture in architects like Coop Himmelblau, but argues that this body differs from the classical humanist body. It is instead "a body in pieces, fragmented," which "no longer serves to center, to fix, or to stabilize," and which embraces forms "from the embryonic to the monstrous" (69-70). It's similar to the kinds of disturbing bodies depicted by artists like Cindy Sherman, whose work uncannily yokes together the natural and unnatural. Vidler reads the fragmented corporeal forms of postmodern architecture as an uncanny phenomenon, the return of the irrationality which modernist architecture sought to tame.



We might extrapolate from this and argue that (postmodern) body blurs the boundaries between inside and outside, human and monstrous, the natural and the unnatural; and that such blurring is precisely what McEwan's novel is concerned with, and represents in the imagery of the house as a (monstrous) body. The relationship between human and nonhuman is also the subject of the sci-fi novel that Jack reads, in which Commander Hunt chases the "colossal monster" (36). (I won't subject you to more glee about the linguistic doubling of semen stains/cement stains, but this novel seems to me to be another example of linguistic doubling, mirroring The Cement Garden itself.) What is the human, what is the monstrous? What is natural, what unnatural? The monstrous, uncanny "body" of the suburban house figures as an aporia breaking down these categories, just as suburbia itself blurs the line between the urban and rural, civilized and natural.

Junk Food: Kitsch and Abigail's Party

There are some very interesting posts on Abigail's Party in the blogs of Jessica, Cecilia, Melissa, and Arzina. Several of these focus on the mysterious, shadowy goings-on at Abigail's party, and on this party's significance.

For further thoughts about Abigail's Party, you could look at this blog entry and the following comments. It is also a domestic dispute, though not quite on the scale of Beverly and Laurence. The entry points you in the direction of the Carney quote I referred to in class.

Naomi, Arzina, and Melissa have some great responses to the issue of kitsch. For kitsch, and laughs, watch this. For two provocative articles on kitsch, try Hal Foster and David Lloyd.


Watching the play as opposed to reading it, I was struck by the way in which issues of aesthetic taste are mapped onto the body, and onto the taste for food and drink. Rita Felski argues

kitsch is often described as easily digestible, or even predigested, like food given to babies; it is easy to swallow, the cultural equivalent of junk food . . . The original meaning of consumption was an essentially negative one; to consume meant to destroy, to use up, to waste, to exhaust. . . . this layer of meaning persists in the modern condemnation of kitsch, which conceives of mass culture as a destructive, devouring force, a "frenzy of consumption." Because "kitsch" embraces not simply an object, but also an attitude to an object - ie., its functional appropriation as a means to direct emotional gratification - any work of art risks being turned into kitsch in the modern age, its aesthetic value destroyed as it is metaphorically devoured, consumed by the greedy and infantile consumer lacking in the critical detachment of the (male) intellectual.

As Felski describes, Leigh's play associates kitsch with consumption, and with junk food: peanuts and crisps. But the detached intellectual here is female. Sue's tastes stand in stark contrast to the others at the party (though she and Laurence both like olives, a taste he ostentatiously displays as a sign of his sophistication). Her awkward dancing literalizes her more general discomfort in this situation. She is forced to consume Beverly's food and drink as well as listen to her music, but she vomits at the end of the first act—a literal rejection of Beverly's taste. The toilet plays some kind of important symbolic function here. Bev shows it off proudly as a sign of her social status (two bathrooms); and yet it's a place associated with the mucky reality of the body that Beverly wants to avoid. Sue vomits in the toilet, and later we see her there alone, traumatized, as she tries to escape the increasingly hellish party. Expulsion acts as the literal rejection of consumption.

Here consumption seems associated less with femininity than with the lower-middle classes; both Laurence and Beverly are implicated in consuming, from buying and selling houses to proudly displaying the rotisserie. Is upper-middle class Sue free from censure? Or is she shown to be a little too distanced, a little too remote—is she too trying to deny the messy realities of her own daughter's party? And therefore inside the world of suburban kitsch (in Leigh's terms) rather than outside it?

Coming Up for Air

I have been a bad blogger--this post will shortly be edited to contain some actual content. For now, it's a place-holder.

Why Tom and Barbara Good are (and are not) like Karl Marx

In the first class tonight we watched an episode and a half of The Good Life/Good Neighbors. An episode and a half, because my careful preparation was scuppered by many technological mishaps, culminating in the TV turning itself off, spontaneously, 20 minutes into the first episode. And then again, after twenty more seconds. It was enough to make me want to throw it all in and go and live off the land with Tom and Barbara, in quasi-luddite style.

We talked in class about the way in which Tom and Barbara reject various aspects of modernity and modernization, perhaps best epitomized by the plastic toys for cereal boxes which Tom spends his life designing. At work Tom is anonymous, undervalued, and doomed to failure unless he kowtows to the boss like his neighbour Jerry, who sells his soul in order to keep Margo in frocks and his gin supplies replenished. But interestingly, the Goods' rejection of certain aspects of the modern world is made very much in the spirit of modernity: Tom and Barbara's project of self-sufficiency is utopian, based on reason (the calculation of dung needed per unit of energy), and fuelled above all by the spirit of individualism.

The Goods are therefore like Karl Marx as Marshall Berman describes him: criticizing modernity in the utopian spirit of modernity itself. And they're trying to find some non-alienated form of labour--"it doesn't seem like work" Tom later says of their back-breaking digging. But they're unlike Marx in their celebration of the individual. In a later episode, unwatched (damn that technology), Tom encounters a fisherman who berates him for his anarchy in not playing by the rules of the sport, and throwing the small fish back--Tom wants to take them home and eat them. Tom retorts: "I'm not an anarchist, I'm a mind-your-own-businessist!" And it was the Goods' smug individualism and their desire to retreat from any kind of community that struck me most on rewatching these programs. I'm hesitant to criticize, let alone politicize The Good Life, probably because watching the program sends me back into a nostalgic haze of being seven years old, freshly bathed, watching TV past my bedtime on Fridays. But I couldn't help feeling, this time round, that it's an outrageous celebration of plucky little England, battening down its hatches and turning its back to the outside world (bye-bye EEC and oil crisis).

I wondered in the car on the way home whether Tom and Barbara illustrate the fundamental problem with "alternative culture" described (by two Canadians, no less) in The Rebel Sell: that the celebration of individual creativity, in supposed contrast to the humdrum homogeneity of corporate and consumer culture, is itself based on the very values it purportedly critiques. Capitalism in fact thrives on individuality, rather than homogeneity (certainly in its post-Fordist manifestations): we consume and work and earn and shop in order to distinguish ourselves from others through our taste, and in order to celebrate our individuality. It also thrives on the production of difference, of thousands of brands and models of cars, each subtly different from the other. The argument of The Rebel Sell is similar to Sarah Thornton's critique of subcultures because of their reliance on "subcultural capital"--the desire to distinguish oneself (the true individual, more hip, more cool) from the hoi polloi (think of Mark Renton in Trainspotting) is scarily similar to the kind of (suburban) snobbery exemplified by Margo Leadbetter.

From Tom Good to Margo Leadbetter to Mark Renton, with scarcely a degree of separation. Who would have thought?

Welcome

Welcome to the blog for English 382 at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. This course dedicated to the analysis of representations of suburbia in twentieth-century British literature, film and television.