Part III Narrative Constructions of Identity

Part III Narrative Constructions of Identity

Preface All the novelists considered in this book have grown up and published work in a poststructuralist climate. As noted earlier a number of them have explicitly acknowledged this fact in their fiction or in interviews and essays. So one finds Peter Ackroyd writing a book length study on poststructuralist theory, Notes for a New Culture, Mimi in Rushdie s The Satanic Verses insisting that she is conversant with postmodernist critiques of the West (189), Angela Carter discussing her use of metafiction ( my fiction is very often a kind of literary criticism [Haffenden 79]), or Martin Amis writing an essay on the sublime. A.S.Byatt, an academic for a considerable portion of her adult life, refers knowledgably in her essays to Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Hayden White et al., while deploring their influence on literary criticism. More importantly, all these novelists in different ways adopt a poststructuralist attitude to the way they view their own and their contemporaries writing. Byatt refers to a new playfulness in writers (On Histories 6). Jeanette Winterson, who claims to revert to modernism as a model, nevertheless reveals her simultaneous subscription to poststructuralism when categorically stating that the artist does consider reality as multiple and complex (Art Objects 136), and that for the writer words are not used for things, words are things (70). Especially relevant to the subject of this section are Martin Amis s remarks on the narrative construction of character: I have enough of the postmodernist in me to want to remind the reader that it is no use getting het-up about a character, since the character is only there to serve the fiction (Haffenden 19). In the same interview he claims that motivation has become depleted, a shagged-out force in modern life (5). Amis is referring in his way to the celebrated death of the subject in poststructuralist and posthumanist thinking. Virtually all of the most prominent structuralist and poststructuralist theorists are in agreement that the transcendental subject is no longer credible once we understand the extent to which we are all constructed by language/discourse. The subject as they see it is not a free agent, but an effect of the way language/discourse functions. They prefer the word subject due to its two-fold meaning, its post-enlightenment 157

158 English Fiction Since 1984 definition as transcendental agency, and its original meaning which, as Raymond Williams writes in Keywords (1983), had more to do with someone who is subjected to, or under, dominion or sovereignty (308). 1 So, as Louis Althusser saw it, the individual s illusory sense of freedom or agency disguises his or her determination by more powerful, external forces: the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection all by himself (Lenin 169). Those external forces are given different definitions by different theorists ideology by Althusser, the symbolic order by Lacan, textuality by Derrida, and discourse by Foucault. Whatever they are called these forces are necessarily partly shaped by the nation in which they operate. Individual identity is always dependent to some degree on hegemonic notions of national identity. The consequences of this approach to subjectivity are complex. For instance, identification with an individual, group, or nation is invariably incomplete, a fantasy of integration. Because the subject is constructed by language, it is subject to the forces of difference and deferral (Derrida s différance) by means of which language acquires meaning. This means that the subject requires its constitutive outside to differentiate itself from everything external to it. So the modern subject is necessarily split, and identification, as Freud said long ago, is ambivalent from the start ( Group 134). The assumption of unity that traditionally accompanied the term identity involves a form of closure that relies upon, even if unconsciously, its other, that which it lacks. The poststructuralist replacement of a transcendental subject by multiple subject positions constituted by linguistic/discursive forces largely ignored the obvious question of what makes up the individual who is thus multiply constructed by such external forces. For most of his life Foucault argued that the subject is an effect produced by and within various discursive formations (such as those of nation, class, race, or gender). Later in life his new emphasis on the connections between knowledge and power led him to dwell on the way in which the body has been regulated historically by discursive formations: the subject who knows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformation (Discipline 27 28). The body, like the nation, has come in this way to represent the locus of the various subjective positions constituting the individual being or nation, that which holds together the various subjective positions which otherwise rupture the unity of a subject or country. Stuart Hall argues that in the later two volumes of his (incomplete) History of Sexuality Foucault recognizes the flaws in his positing a docile body on which power operates without any corresponding production of a response from the subject ( Introduction 12). In the first chapter of The Use of Pleasure Foucault proposes to investigate how individuals were led to practice, on themselves and on others, a hermeneutics of desire (5). In addressing for the first time what Hall calls the existence of some interior

Preface 159 landscape of the subject, the technologies of which are most effectively demonstrated in the practices of self-production, in a kind of performativity ( Introduction 13), Foucault recognizes that the decentering of the self needs to be complemented by an account of the ways in which the subject constitutes itself. Hall proceeds to argue that after Foucault s death Judith Butler has gone on to partially develop this concept of performativity stripped of its associations with volition, choice, and intentionality. In Bodies That Matter she sees performativity as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains (3). Drawing on Lacan, Butler concludes that identifications (with subject positions such as heterosexuality) belong to the imaginary and are never fully and finally made; they are incessantly reconstituted, and, as such, are subject to the logic of iterability (Bodies 105). The relevance of these poststructuralist theories of subjectivity and identity to the world of fiction is obvious. If subjects are constituted by and within a world of language and if subjects accept imaginary positions offered them by a process of repetitive performance (meaning that our identifications with such positions have to be constantly restaged), then subjectivity itself is indebted to just those processes of textualization and dramatization that novelists employ in their writing. But obviously the poststructuralist conception of a discontinuous, fractured subject, subjected to linguistic forces beyond its control and raised to perform acts of closure that subject it to that which has been excluded, calls for a very different kind of fiction from what Catherine Belsey terms classic realist fiction of the nineteenth century. Classic realism, she writes, performs the work of ideology, not only in its representation of a world of consistent subjects who are the origin of meaning, knowledge and action, but also in offering the reader, as the position from which the text is most readily intelligible, the position of the subject as the origin both of understanding and of action in accordance with that understanding (Critical 67). She goes on to suggest that classic realism is characterized by illusionism, narrative which leads to closure, and a hierarchy of discourses which establishes the truth of the story (70). By contrast the fiction produced by the writers featured in this book tends to expose fiction s illusionism, resist closure and openly acknowledge, sometimes also challenge, its hierarchy of discourses. Martin Amis s Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) serves as a representative example of the reaction against realism (understood differently by different writers) that all these novelists share in different ways. Other People opens with a confessional Prologue by the narrator. I didn t want to have to do it to her (9). This narrator never allows the reader to forget his controlling presence for long. Every chapter except the first and the final four has a section in which the narrator directly addresses the reader in the second person and these sections clearly claim the status of a privileged discourse. While admitting his responsibility for the sadistic treatment meted out to

160 English Fiction Since 1984 the female protagonist, the narrator who also participates in the narrative implicates the reader in the desire to subject the protagonist to the horrific experiences that she undergoes. In repeatedly breaking off the narrative to address the reader Amis is deliberately forcing the reader to abandon the illusion of inhabiting an alternative real world. Far from effacing its status as discourse, as does the classic realist novel, Amis s novel forces readers to be constantly aware of the narrative as a linguistic construct, which is just what the characters are. They are linguistic puppets that are ruthlessly manipulated by a narrator in full view of the reader. Real people, he has said, don t fit in fiction. They re the wrong shape ( Martin Amis 79). This mystery story ends so enigmatically that many reviewers declared that the mystery was unsolvable. In the Epilogue, Amis has explained, the allpowerful narrator has reverted to someone as automaton-like as she was, and didn t realize what was going on (Haffenden 18). He is a prisoner of his own fiction and is returned to the hellish cycle from which only a reformed protagonist can set him free. Both the narrator and the reader (who has been implicated with him) end up caught in the web of the fictional construct they have been conspiring together to weave around the hapless protagonist. This is a refusal of narrative closure with a vengeance. At the same time it allows for the possibility of assuming a different identity in the next lifetime around itself a fictive conception. The narrator has returned to the status of pure body which can be subjected to different forms of performativity next time. The subject then is seen to be the site of contradiction, perpetually in the process of construction (Belsey 65). For Amis the free, unified, autonomous subject that realism has traditionally employed does not exist. The same is true for most of the writers considered in this book. Rushdie constantly reminds the reader of Shame that he is only telling a sort of modern fairy-tale (68). The subjectivity of the protagonist of Midnight s Children is constructed by Indian history, linked to it both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively (272). Here the connection between national and individual identity is central. But it remains an important factor in every novel treated here. In Ian McEwan s Atonement two characters, Robbie and Cecilia, turn out to be linguistic constructs of the novelist-protagonist s fantasy; their post 1940 lives prove to be doubly the invention of a novelist of English history who is herself the invention of McEwan. Angela Carter has the winged heroine of Nights at the Circus adopt as her slogan, Is she fact or is she fiction? (7). Whether fact or fiction, Fevvers is the construct of her own and others language (part Cockney, part Oxbridge), a series of identifications with a number of possible subject positions which are mutable. Jeanette Winterson explores an even more radical subject position when she constructs a narrator stripped of gender in Written on the Body. This move undermines the Western discourse of heterosexuality which marginalizes any individual seeking to place him- or herself outside

Preface 161 its parameters. The narrator of undetermined gender is wholly a construct of the novelist who has used language against itself to undermine its normal gendering of subjects. In Last Orders Graham Swift explores another common form of identification with the subject position of class, an identification which has always especially exercised its hegemonic influence over the English and received renewed impetus under Thatcherism just when its power appeared to be receding. All the characters of this novel belong to the working class and Swift is largely constrained to use their limited vocabulary to explore their inner lives. Their use of a relatively homogenous language suggests the way they have all been interpellated in the same way by the ideology of the English class system. All three novels considered in this section explore ways in which modern, conflicted subjectivity is constructed by the forces of a nation s dominant discourses. All of them celebrate the power of language that has contributed to the construction of identity by staging consciously textual endings that resist obligatory narrative closure.