Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels: Zadie Smith, Nadeem Aslam, Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell 9781441114273, 9781472543370, 9781441135568

Table of contents :
Title page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction
Empire
Fiction
Notes
Chapter 1 Zadie Smith
Two Directions: White Teeth
Two Experiments: The Autograph Man and On Beauty
Notes
Chapter 2 Hari Kunzru
Subjectivity: The Impressionist
Global Noise: Transmission
Notes
Chapter 3 Nadeem Aslam
Solitude: Maps for Lost Lovers
Terror: The Wasted Vigil
Notes
Chapter 4 David Mitchell
Amanuenses
Multitude: Cloud Atlas
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

Also available from Bloomsbury Aesthetic Afterlives, Andrew Eastham Angela Carter: New Critical Readings, edited by Sonya Andermahr and Lawrence Phillips Chance and the Modern British Novel, Julia Jordan Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space, David James Ethics and Desire in the Wake of Postmodernism, Graham Matthews Intention and Text, Kaye Mitchell Marginality in the Contemporary British Novel, Nicola Allen Money, Speculation and Finance in Contemporary British Fiction, Nicky Marsh Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain, Hywel Dix Reading Theories in Contemporary Fiction, Lisa McNally Scenes of Intimacy, Jennifer Cooke The Psychological Fictions of J.G. Ballard, Samuel Francis

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels Zadie Smith, Nadeem Aslam, Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell Peter Childs and James Green

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Peter Childs and James Green, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Peter Childs and James Green have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-1427-3 ePub: 978-1-6235-6469-8 ePDF: 978-1-4411-3556-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents Introduction Empire Fiction

17

1

31

2

3

4

1 9

Zadie Smith Two Directions: White Teeth Two Experiments: The Autograph Man and On Beauty

40

Hari Kunzru Subjectivity: The Impressionist Global Noise: Transmission

62

Nadeem Aslam Solitude: Maps for Lost Lovers Terror: The Wasted Vigil David Mitchell Amanuenses Multitude: Cloud Atlas

Bibliography Index

47 61 79 95 102 114 127 137 148 159 163

vi

Introduction

This book studies the work of four novelists whose writings illustrate approaches to fiction in the new century. David Mitchell, Nadeem Aslam, Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzru can be considered in terms of their place within the history of the national novel, but less in the sense that Graham Swift or Pat Barker might be, and more in the way that Conrad, James, Mansfield and Ford were instrumental in the refashioning of British fiction a century earlier. Each of these four novelists has set at least one novel in Britain, but each has also set a sizable proportion of their work elsewhere, and those sections of their fiction set in the United Kingdom more often consider migrant, second-generation and new ethnicities than the social classes of the traditional English novel. The studies that follow this Introduction thus attempt to describe the kinds of aesthetic approach and ethical concern that weave through the writings of four representative, but also different and distinctive authors whose fiction presumes a common backdrop, which can be described in terms of the forces of globalization, which a previous generation did not, for the most part, assume took precedence over national contexts. Most frequently, in the twenty-first century, discussion of globalization emerges from the perception of an unprecedented critical mass of interconnectedness across the world. Equally, seminal descriptions of globalization suggest that many of the key terms hinge on the belief in a growing escalation of this interconnectedness. Anthony Giddens thus defines globalization as ‘the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’.1 Roland Robertson similarly cites the ‘compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole’.2 Tempering the emphasis on contemporaneity, Giles Gunn argues that globalization should be seen in the long view and refers to the ‘historical process, by which the world has for several thousand years, rather than for several hundred, been woven and rewoven into an increasingly interconnected organism’.3 In previous centuries, cross-continental interactions were spurred by technology, travel and trade, but their expansion over the course of the twenty-

2

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

first century is often expected to constitute a mesh of mutual indebtedness that could make present levels of connectivity seem almost isolationist. In the last three decades, much of the world has come to a heightened consciousness of the forces of globalization – or mondialization, or planetarity or globality4 – even if, as Masao Miyoshi claims, ‘[t]he only novelty is in the degrees of expansion in the trade and transfer of capital, labour, production, consumption, information and technology, which might be enormous enough to amount to a qualitative change’.5 For Miyoshi, rather than the relations of the global economy, or even the awareness of hybridity explicit in Paul Gilroy’s exploration of roots/routes, it is the common bond to the planet that gestures beyond the ideology of the nation state that has dominated the last three centuries.6 For some critics, globalization is an economic phenomenon, for others, it is also cultural (e.g., Arjun Appadurai and Kwame Anthony Appiah). Some see globalization as having begun long ago (e.g., Roland Robertson and Malcolm Waters), arguably with colonial expansion in the sixteenth century; others argue it is a much more recent occurrence (e.g., David Harvey and Anthony Giddens).7 In this study, we take the latter view in each case, believing that it is the unprecedented degree of growing interconnectedness in the last century that has changed not only economic relations, but also, alongside critical theory and identity politics, cultural representation. Ulrich Beck concludes that the strengthening of these interconnections ‘means that from now on nothing which happens on our planet is only a limited local event; all inventions, victories and catastrophes affect the whole world, and we must reorient and reorganize our lives and actions, our organizations and institutions along a “local-global” axis’.8 Applied to fiction, there may result from such a conclusion a temptation to say that this returns literary focus to a rhetoric of universalism, diminishing the primacy of difference in lived realities. However, ‘globalitzation’ in literature is not best seen as an aesthetic representation of the universal in the local, but as a fiction staged against an awareness of the interconnected, interdependent, but unequal world. This is, for example, how we interpret the notions of political worldliness and terrestrial humanism in Edward Said’s discussions of secular criticism.9 Of additional importance is the sense in which literary studies, as well as literary production and consumption, is becoming globalized, both bolstering and radically challenging comparative literature.10 The newness of this lies in the spread of a globally disorganized capitalism, in the everyday interaction across national frontiers, in dense networks with a high degree of mutual dependence, as well as the self-perception of this transnationality (mass media/tourism/

Introduction

3

consumption), the ‘placelessness’ of community, labour and capital, and the pervasiveness of global ecological concern.11 Beck lists eight reasons that make globalization irreversible: 1. the geographical expansion and ever greater density of international trade, as well as the global networking of finance markets and the growing power of transnational corporations. 2. the ongoing revolution of information and communications technology. 3. the universal demands for human rights – the (lip service paid to the) principle of democracy. 4. the stream of images from the global culture industries. 5. the emergence of a postnational, polycentric world politics, in which transnational actors (corporations, non-governmental organizations, United Nations) are growing in power and number alongside governments. 6. the question of world poverty. 7. the issue of global environmental destruction. 8. transcultural conflicts in one and the same place.12 With regard to literature, fictional writing may convey the experience of living under these conditions as well as social alternatives and the opportunity to imagine the world otherwise. With an emphasis on interiority greater than almost any other art form, the novel disseminates intellect and affect within the actions and reactions of globalization, in or about which character-subjects may be unaware or seemingly uninvolved. ‘Globalization’, as simultaneously a periodizing term, an ideological project, a description of current geopolitical relations and a conjunction of wide-ranging historical and theoretical developments, has become central to understanding the complex transformations reshaping social, political, economic and cultural spheres at the beginning of the new century. Rapidly filtering into, and crossing between, both the academic and popular consciousness since the 1980s, the term at once seems to incorporate, render obsolete and open new vistas to the discourses that dominated critical theory in the last decades of the twentieth century. Yet, in comparison with the more sustained treatments of globalization elsewhere, particularly in the field of the social sciences, there has until recently been relatively little discussion of how these decisive changes have articulated themselves in the context of literature. The relationship between shifting sociocultural and literary currents is rarely isomorphic, but if there has indeed been a profound shift in the constitution of modern Western societies – and

4

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

the proliferation of academic interest in globalization as a prominent way of framing disparate social, economic, political and cultural trends implies that it does have an empirical reality – then these ontological transformations would seem to demand new forms of aesthetic reflection and creative inscription. The contentions of our study are thus twofold – first, that the complex of interrelated processes brought together under the sign of globalization opens up new frames of reference for literature and the reading of literary texts; second, that these new patterns of human interaction, interconnectedness and awareness intersect with several reorientations in the form and content of the work of contemporary novelists, including those framed as British in the context of nation states, broadly characterized as both a development of and a shift away from the preoccupations of postmodernism and the concerns raised by postcolonialism. The following chapters seek to understand how issues surrounding the material experiences of contemporary life have been both routed through and engaged with by twenty-first century literary texts, and what potential new directions for fictional narrative these texts bring to light. By its very nature, globalization insists on the supposedly unprecedented disposition of the present moment – suggesting that the new regimes of technocapitalist production and exchange, as well as a changed political cons­ titution, demand a deep-seated revision of the conceptual frameworks through which we make sense of the world as a collectivity spanning the local and the global. It also functions retrospectively, re-situating the long story of modernity in a more complex global configuration that acknowledges its location within a tangled meshwork of cultural exchanges and crossings, currents of interaction and mutual articulation, which unfold modernity’s static synchrony to reveal multiple temporalities. But whether or not a spike in globalization is seen as inaugurating a decisively new episteme that has broken even from the immediate past – and the rhetoric of novelty obscures an array of historical precedents and parallels – there is perhaps little dispute that world spaces are now interconnected in ways that are both more extensive and more intensive than before. The mobility and motility of culture – frequently understood in terms of ‘networks’, ‘flows’ or ‘routes’ – in the era of mass migration and electronic communication make the coupling of culture and geography ever more indeterminate and difficult to sustain, though this bond remains a potent perceptual commonplace. This is to suggest that globalization involves new and unprecedented forms of cultural intermingling, but also that it has, to borrow the words of Imre Szeman, ‘produced the conditions that might permit us to rethink culture in a larger historical frame, a process that would allow us to see that the concept of culture

Introduction

5

has always been other than what it claimed to be’.13 Far-flung parts of the globe have become interconnected in a historically unprecedented manner, such that geographically distant localities may be rapidly affected by developments in other parts of the world. Consequently, the conditions and processes bound up with the concept of globalization make it possible to imagine the world as a single space, though by no means an entirely integrated or unified one, which is striated by the intersecting trajectories of technological, economic, social and cultural forces operating together on a planetary, rather than merely transnational, scale. The overwhelming emphasis within globalization discourses has been on the impact of media and telecommunications technologies, popular culture and consumer culture – forms that reflect contemporary mass experience rather than the traditional objects of literary study and humanistic research. In addition, as the study of ‘literature’ has expanded to encompass different forms of cultural expression and the tools of literary theory have proliferated into a range of disciplinary contexts, the question of what is the appropriate object of literary analysis becomes ever more pressing. These concerns are, of course, hardly new – the past few decades have given rise to significant interrogations of the political, social and cultural role of the literary text, alongside probing self-reflections on the institutional foundations of literary studies. Indeed, the critical debates that continue to circulate, albeit less urgently, around the idea of postmodernity – as well as the issues raised by postcolonial criticism, such as (neo)cultural imperialism, diasporic modes of subjectivity, or global shifts in political power – may be seen as anticipating current discussions about globalization in complex ways. Similarly, from a contemporary standpoint, the expansions of academic discourses concerning the nation during the 1980s now appear as symptoms of the passage towards the contemporary re-figurations of the relationship between culture and geography. Yet, if what globalization represents is less the emergence of a coherent new group of theories than the extension and intensification of an array of ongoing problems within modernity itself, it has nevertheless produced the conditions through which it may become possible to re-situate culture – and the awkward conceptual object of ‘the West’ – within a larger spatio-historical framework. That there have been, with a few notable exceptions, relatively few attempts from within the Western academy to examine the intercultural dynamics of the literary as part of a networked field of global forces, suggests the gap that has yet to be bridged between the literary theoretical and the global.14

6

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

These issues notwithstanding, it is neither the intention of our study to analyse the impact of globalization on the cultural construction of the literary nor to produce a synoptic overview of the world system in which British fiction is produced and received. Keeping in mind that global forces are always articulated with and through local contextualities, this project’s rather more modest aspirations are to explore how the constellation of processes bound up with what Martin Albrow terms ‘globality’, particularly the consciousness of the world as a heterogeneous and densely interrelated field of entwined narratives and temporalities, have percolated into literary culture.15 If, as a range of theorists have suggested, this condition of globality has become the culturally-dominant expression of the West’s powerful imagination of space, it is through various cultural productions that it is at once performed, symbolized and comprehended, and literature remains a fertile medium for the articulation of such ideas. It is a critical commonplace, but one worth repeating, that literary fictions are not shaped in isolation, but are woven by the speculative issues that condition their production and reception, and thus may be interpreted in the borrowed light of larger sociocultural debates. The focus of our study will remain on contemporary fiction, and the main body of this study will be taken up with the analyses of several novels published since 1999. Though there have been a number of recent studies providing a broad overview of contemporary writing in Britain, these have tended to address globalization tangentially, approaching it through critiques of the parameters of nationhood or discussions of cultural transition and hybridity.16 In addition, the critical interventions offering detailed readings of ‘contemporary’ writers are only now introducing the voices of a younger generation in addition to analyses of work by the prominent authors who came to the fore in the 1980s. While acknowledging the diversity of contemporary fiction, it is intended that the work of four authors will provide a case study of some of the most resonant narrative approaches taken by recent novelists in Britain. In particular, we are interested in how subjects such as identity, history and geography are treated, and how these might be related to the notion of globalization as a culturally dominant rhetorical response to a range of material developments? Close readings of works by Smith, Kunzru, Aslam and Mitchell, seeking to draw affiliations between the contemporary cultural milieu and their various thematic concerns and modes of aesthetic representation, form the backbone of the analysis as we go on to suggest that their work articulates itself in illuminating ways with contemporary issues and concerns raised by globalization. In their disparate ways,

Introduction

7

these texts evince traits that exemplify the ongoing redirection away from the tropes and concerns of postmodernist fiction in terms of both form and content, the tentative move from the postcolonial to the diasporic within the global and the transformations in geopolitics and historical rewriting since the 1990s. Without wishing to pre-empt the individual chapters or to falsely homo­ genize the novelists’ distinctive aesthetic approaches, what connects the work considered here by Mitchell, Kunzru, Aslam and Smith, and also differentiates them from much writing of the previous generation, is a broadening of fictional perspective to reflect the fluidity of global relations. More specifically, the narrative strategies introduced in the work of the selected authors indicate significant changes in our consciousness of time-space and scattered global geographies. Though not entirely abandoning the framework of the nation, these novels re-fashion it as a nodal point in a proliferating network of connections, their narratives tracing the turbulent flows of people, images and texts whose disparate trajectories trace the emergence of new conceptual coordinates. On the cusp of the period of fiction we are examining, Lawrence Norfolk and Tibor Fischer make a similar point in their introduction to the eighth volume of the British Council’s New Writing series, suggesting that the diversity of contemporary writing refigures the nation as a ‘cultural entrepôt, a place of flux and reflux, differently connected to both Europe and the US, historically and more problematically to the Indian subcontinent and to Africa’.17 It is not merely that Kunzru, Aslam, Smith and Mitchell find fertile ground for their fictions in countries and cultural contexts outside of Britain, but that, in different ways, their work expresses a new understanding of the world as a web of heterogeneous but mutually interdependent histories and geographies. In this changed ontological context, new subjectivities are emerging that are constituted both by the general mixture and miscegenation of individuals and populations, and the cybernetic metamorphoses of bodies and societies under the aegis of new information and communications technologies. Their differences partly inhere in distinctive approaches that can be characterized, for example, in degrees of serious or comic presentation – Aslam and Mitchell have moments of levity, the latter more than the former, but they do not write in the comic mode, whereas Kunzru and Smith do. These sit alongside aspects of ironic distance and narratorial style that accentuate alternative emphases in the novels’ construction – for example, Smith has written almost exclusively in the third person, while Mitchell’s first four novels were written in the first. Another difference of nuance rather than substance is that Kunzru’s characters appear

8

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

to be entwined with ironic observations about politics, culture and ethnicity, whereas Aslam’s seem to be private individuals caught up in public history. That the four novelists studied here can be categorized as British highlights the obvious paradox in the retention of a national framework in which to situate analyses of supra-national themes; globalization involves not merely the acknowledgement of the multiplicity of extra-national influences contributing to the production and reception of literary texts, but a fundamental re-configuration of this geographic frame. Yet, what we hope will be borne out by our discussion of a selection of contemporary writing is precisely the extent to which the texts both situate themselves within and cut across broader cultural domains than the British, colonial or transatlantic contexts that have been predominant in postwar fiction. Representative of their generation, there are also questions about labelling these novelists, among very many others, ‘British’ in the way that writers in the twentieth century routinely were. Mitchell grew up in England, but has lived elsewhere for most of his adult life, in Japan and Ireland and has primarily written about other countries; Aslam came to Britain from Pakistan at the age of 14 and has set only one novel to date in the United Kingdom, noticeably refigured as a different country; Smith has a Jamaican mother and works as a professor in New York; Kunzru has an English mother and a Kashmiri father. This introductory chapter is intended to map out some of the key coordinates and lines of tension in the reflexive confrontation between the local and transcontinental, adumbrated by the idea of globalization. The impact of worldwide neo-liberal economics and mass communications technologies on contemporary reality, as well as the disembedded and disseminated character of contemporary ideas and cultures, poses new challenges for the cognitive frames used to narrate individual experience and joint history. The notion of a global epoch is potentially a persuasive one, but it should also be viewed with a healthy degree of suspicion, not least because, as David Lyon warns, the ‘global age’ critical position could easily slip into a totalizing mode, as was the fate of a good deal of the discourse around postmodernity.18 However, the analysis will necessarily be framed in general terms – by its very nature, ‘the global’ tends to invite rather abstract modes of contemplation – but, as far as it is possible, we hope to avoid flattening globalization into a single, all-embracing movement by acknowledging the multiplicity of its trajectories, as well as its fractures, ruptures and lines of tension contributing to the notion of new forms of global consciousness, including the economic advancement of the East; the renewed confrontation of monotheistic religions and the reappearance of Islam in the Western cultural imagination; the legacies of colonialism and continuing

Introduction

9

impact of imperialism; the extension of mass communications networks and information technologies; the spread of multivarious physical and immaterial flows; and the emergence of theories of non-linear and ‘complex’ systems as a way of making sense of such changes. The examination of these material and discursive transformations provides the grounding for the rest of this study, which will sketch the literary terrain of the authors explored in the main chapters. It is worth emphasizing that although we believe globalization does have a basis in material reality, bearing upon critical consciousness as a problem, or complex of problems, it is also something that is performed and constructed through discourse. Novels, of course, engage dialectically with our historical presence and cultural location, their imaginative reflections or re-articulations both generated from the essentially elusive and mutative circumstances of their ontological grounding, and playing their part, however imperfectly or provisionally, in the emotional and experiential framing of people’s life conditions. Even with the accelerated multiplication of modes of representation, particularly in the digital realm – which do not so much threaten the novel’s survival as open up innovative new forms of expression, the graphic novel or hypertext fiction, for example – the literary remains a fertile medium for disseminating ideas about the contemporary.

Empire The preface to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s influential study, Empire, argues that we have seen a new epoch structured not by modern imperialist geographies, but through the deterritorialized flows released by the expansion of the world capitalist system. Empire is materialising before our very eyes. Over the past several decades, as colonial regimes were overthrown and then precipitously after the Soviet barriers to the capitalist world market finally collapsed, we have witnessed an irresistible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges. Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule – in short, a new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.19

This emergent regime of ‘Empire’ drawn by Hardt and Negri at the start of the twenty-first century represents something altogether different from the

10

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

colonial relations that structured the world at the beginning of the twentieth century. Colonial rule depended on the stable borders of the nation state to regulate the production and circulation of subjectivities, commodities and capital, administrating over distant territories from fixed centres of power. In contrast, Empire materializes in the twilight of modern political regimes, superseding, though not dissolving, the waning authority of the nation state with an apparatus of rule constituted by the growth of transnational corporations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and media conglomerates and the increasing predominance of post-industrial forms of accumulation, labour and production. Unlike the striated or gridded spaces of modernity, which depended on dialectical play between inside and outside, order and disorder, ‘civilized progress’ and ‘atavistic barbarism’, Empire is conceived as a smooth, networked space crisscrossed by complex fault lines of differentiation and homogenization.20 The realization of the world market means that exclusionary boundaries are perpetually reworked under the banner of universal inclusion and integration, for the new regime of Empire thrives on circuits of movement and mixture, functioning not through rigid structures of control, but flexible and contingent modulations across an abundant terrain. If, for Hardt and Negri, this apparatus of ‘governance without government’ generates a world order wielding enormous powers of oppression and destruction, its administrative logic penetrating almost every aspect of social life in a concrete realization of Foucault’s ‘biopower’, it also gives rise to emancipatory possibilities on a potentially worldwide scale. In the era of globalization, the creative forces of the ‘multitude’ that sustain Empire, in effect, a contemporary recasting of the Marxist proletariat, are also capable of constructing an oppositional ‘counter-Empire’, making use of the same planetary flows and exchanges to create a democratic alternative to global neo-liberalism.21 The prosthetic and informatic technologies of the new media permit the extension of ever more invasive mechanisms of surveillance and control, but according to the authors, they also open up opportunities for radically new forms of human cooperation and creativity. Under the processes of globalization, alternatives to capitalism are not defeated so much as given the chance to operate on an intercontinental scale. Certainly, there are objections and questions provoked by Hardt and Negri’s argument, such as whether an integrated social order could exist without also demanding conformity and shared values, how the multitude might really create an alternative global society, and what structures or organizations, especially non-hierarchical or rhizomatic, could maintain the counter-Empire? However,

Introduction

11

despite the questionable assertions, theirs remains a provocative intervention in debates surrounding globalization that obliges us to interrogate the scale of political and social change. Though their work has generated much discussion, they are also far from the only commentators to have suggested that we have entered an era of unprecedented global relations. In many ways foreshadowing Hardt and Negri’s argument, Martin Albrow’s earlier theorization of the ‘Global Age’ suggests conceptualization of this new epoch is held back by recourse to the theoretical models and terminology of post/modernity, which are unable to adequately frame the present configuration of human activities and the new conditions of existence.22 For both Albrow and Hardt and Negri, the proliferation of post-theories, such as postmodernism or postcolonialism, can merely gesture towards modernity’s transformation in a vague and confused way, and their political strategies are only effective on this old terrain. Though offering useful ways of re-reading the received narrative of modernity, these discourses’ deconstruction of the essentialist foundations of the universal humanist/ imperial subject, and their valorization of specificity, multiplicity and hybridity, are in fact easily assimilated into the logic of a new social order that depends on fluidity and the instability of every determinate ontological relationship. The affirmation of the free play of differences across boundaries, that recurrent trope in every ‘post’ discourse, is liberating only in a context where power works through fixed identities, binary divisions and stable oppositions, rather than through differential hierarchies and fragmented subjectivities. In many ways, this is merely to point towards the inevitable historicity of theory, which is never able to grasp fully the moment that it is trying to analyse, relying on concepts and narratives that only relate incompletely to empirical circumstances. But while Empire attempts to retain some of the revolutionary and utopian elements of the modern tradition, Albrow argues that passage into ‘globality’ signals the final decay of the modern project, which can no longer integrate alternative, non-Western frames of reference into its narrative. Here, the materiality of the globe is a collective frame of reference, not merely for a cosmopolitan elite or metropolitan ‘comprador intelligentsia’, but for a sizable proportion of people around the world.23 Far from homogenizing cultural expression, the intensification of global interconnectedness spawns a diverse constellation of worlds that may be inhabited simultaneously. As Julian Murphet observes, it is thus retrospectively possible to see the history of the twentieth century through to the present in terms of ‘broadening horizons of global consciousness and the dissolution or dilation of known

12

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

space’.24 In both academic and popular discourses, the concept of ‘globalization’ has become almost ubiquitous, accruing the authority of a master trope used to describe virtually every aspect of contemporary life. Thus, it refers at once to the complex transformations of production, consumption and labour in the capitalist system, to the erosion of the nation state as a coherent ‘imagined community’, to the struggle between the homogenizing effects of a global (North American) culture and various local cultures and traditions, to the rise of new information and communication technologies such as satellite broadcasting and the internet. Although there is little agreement about globalization’s historical specificity, geographic reach or even its dominant causes and effects, there is a degree of consensus regarding the general conception of the term. David Harvey’s notion of the ‘time-space compression’ brought about by the increased mobility of capital is well established, alongside Anthony Giddens’s suggestion that the emergence of such a consciousness entails the structurally significant interlacing of local contextualities with distant social events and relations.25 In essence, this concerns the idea of the world as one ‘place’, where social, political and economic activities are becoming stretched across the globe, and where the expanding scale, growing magnitude, speeding up and deepening impact of interregional flows produces new patterns of social organization and interaction. This shift is the consequence of many different factors, including the spread of consumer capitalism, Western imperialist expansion and the development of a global media system. But while the genealogy of globalization is a predominantly Eurocentric one, the product of a modernity that ripples outwards into more and more contexts and whose spread is accelerated by new technologies, it would be reductive to understand it merely as the unfolding of modern tendencies across passive planetary space. Indeed, globalization also involves a greater-than-ever interchange between differing historical narratives and images of global order, and is thus a severely contested terrain. This is not least because of the waning of occidental economic and political hegemony which, particularly from the viewpoint of those who live in Western societies, seems to signal the passage to a new stage of cultural fluidity and intermingling.26 Globalization, then, is perhaps most helpfully seen as at once a problem, a conflict about what or whose currency the world is being ‘worlded’ in and a complex of multidimensional and reflexive processes that are extraordinarily difficult to encapsulate. This reflexivity is also intimately bound together with the explosion of academic critical discourse about globalization. This is not to deny the objective reality of global transformations; rather, it is to keep in mind that our experience

Introduction

13

of them is inseparable from the carapace of explication and analysis, and the legacy of colonial history warns us against naturalizing geographical and spatial constructs such as progressive accounts of globalization.27 But, if the condition of globalization currently represents a culturally dominant frame of reference for the Western imagination, a condition that is simultaneously shared and made, it is through various cultural productions that it is symbolized and understood. Though these geo-historical trajectories are unstable and complex, we share Philip Tew’s confidence in the capacity of literary writing to reveal while veiling, to construct fictional worlds that stimulate new perspectives on our material realities: All thoughts, all theories, are about something. All perceptions are of some­thing. All texts have referents. These exist independently of our perceptions, thoughts and theories. All texts involve such thinking about our thinking about reality. This is so, however diffuse or complex the process becomes in the narrative and its relationship with the life-world.28

It is the premise of this study that the rapid changes to systems and structures that have long organized everyday life mean that we are currently living in a moment of extraordinary complexity, characterized by entrenched and enduring patterns of worldwide interconnectedness. Such profound changes challenge authors to develop new ways of interpreting the world, and in this sense place demands on fiction, which has always been a medium for making sense of the world through narrative. If it is to be meaningful for the kind of agenda outlined by Hardt and Negri or Albrow, discussion of globalization needs to be distanced from a ‘one world’ vision at the service of vested interests, where brands such as Nike and Coca Cola recycle ecumenical sentiments once the preserve of religious movements, imagining a humanity united under totemic commercial banners of the capitalist good life. Such discourses heighten the sense of connectedness and interdependency condensed into Marshall McLuhan’s communitarian vision of a ‘global village’ produced by the worldwide diffusion of communication technologies.29 The awareness of the finitude and territorial boundedness of the earth contributes to the erosion of the spatial distances that separate and insulate people from the imperatives of contiguity and coevalness. A world of discrete, internally cohesive national or regional spaces, their consistency structured by the dialectical play between inside and outside, is in the course of being re-conceptualized as a single plane shaped by the planetary circulations of

14

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

various flows – of information, ideas, money, commodities, people and images. For theorists such as Arjun Appadurai, the juxtaposition of these flows creates a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities, which in turn demands a form of analysis reliant on figures of process, uncertainty and the volatility of relations rather than older images of order, stability and systematicness. His own framework traces five dimensions of global flow that Appadurai terms ‘scapes’, consisting of ethnoscapes (the landscape of flows of people), mediascapes (the distribution of capabilities to disseminate information and narrative-based accounts of reality), ideoscapes (concatenations of political or ideological images), technoscapes (the global configuration of technology) and finanscapes (the fluid distribution of global capital).30 The suffix ‘-scape’ points towards the fluidity and irregularity of these diverse domains as well as indicating the formal commonalities that exist between them. These provide the building blocks for a multitude of disjunctive ‘imagined worlds’ constituted by their channelling into the historically situated contexts of persons and groups spread across the globe. In a way analogous to Benedict Anderson’s discussion of the relationship between the novel and the nation, the contemporary circulation of images and bodies, mediated by new technology, contributes to the emergence of a world space as an imaginative locus for competing visions of modernity on a global scale, an acknowledgement of multivocal world histories.31 Whether or not Appadurai’s delineation of this fractal landscape is convincing, his model does capture a sense of the complex negotiations between individual sites of agency and globally defined fields of possibility. It does seem to be increasingly the case that people based in dispersed locales, and especially the cadre of cosmopolitan elites, have come to share a common range of cultural referents, but if this amounts to a global hegemonic culture in the process of becoming, it is one that is very different from the past emergence of national cultures that were largely able to insinuate local differences in relation to an exterior of other apparently coherent national narratives.32 Unlike the economic and political assimilation carried out by the imperialist project, which aimed at expanding the sovereignty of European nation states, one of the most significant aspects of the notion of a global space of relations is that it is decreasingly possible to imagine a transcendental ‘outside’ to this process of integration. This is not to say that the various processes that constitute globalization are evenly distributed, or that they exert the same effects every­ where, merely that no place on the earth can opt out of these relations once exposed to them. After all, globalization is at once manifestly contested and

Introduction

15

deeply divisive, involving a massive, worldwide restratification that excludes entire segments of the world’s population from its benefits. Indeed, the very material transformations that promote the uniformity of the globe are – at the same time – causes of division, particularly for those who are unwilling to embrace fluidity, mobility and impermanence as fundamental conditions, or are simply not positioned to channel the circulation of global flows.33 Nevertheless, despite its uneven distribution, the global appears as a field of mutual entanglements, composed by a hybridized plurality of mobile and mutable cultures, the cybernetic interpenetrations of the ‘wetware’ of corporeal bodies with informatic and prosthetic machines, and the reflexive binding together of natural and human systems, in which difference is maintained through connection rather than dislocation. But how decisively new is this process; as we noted at the beginning, have populations not always existed in interconnection with others? Doreen Massey warns against making a false distinction between a past seen as marked by a unity of place, a pre-modern Elysium of authentic spatial consistency, and a contemporary space of flows where uniqueness emerges from a constellation of interrelations.34 Nostalgic responses to globalization that mourn the loss of old spatial coherences may be a longing for what never existed, part of the phantasmagoria of invented traditions and heritages that are not antithetical to the modern imagination, but actually created by it.35 If globalization is to mean something other than the completed universalization of Western modernity, retaining its tendency to loop spatial differentiation into a temporal sequence of historical ‘development’, then it is surely to bring into question the univocity of the occidental historical model. As Walter Mignolo suggests, the current form of technocapitalism is creating the conditions to think spatially and to relativize a modernity that, from its very inception, has denied the coevalness of various marginalized others, both external and internal to its self-constitution.36 That said, this is not to deny that the world is perhaps more riven by inequities than it has been at any point in human history. Rather, the linking together of globalization with the emphasis also found in the postcolonial on coeval historical narratives brings to the foreground the fact that there are no people in the present world living in the past, in contradistinction to the Hegelian model of universal history, and that this present makes manifest ‘a variety of chronological circles and temporal rhythms’.37 The acknowledgement of one’s own co-temporal becoming alongside others in time, of the mutual imbrication and enfolding of different time scales, is a field of perception that has doubtlessly been opened up

16

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

by the imperatives and technologies of global capitalism – what Steven Connor describes as a ‘pocket that crumples up the fabric of time’ – yet, this is not to propose that the corrugation of the contemporary by disjunct temporalities is merely an expression of universal capitalist synchronization.38 It is, however, to recognize that the light-speed of mediated representation and financial flow is only one strand constituting our saturated, turbulent present and to suggest in addition that these temporalities do not merely clash, but undergo continuous mutation as they filter into each other. One of the dangers of wholeheartedly embracing the ‘global age’ position as marking a clean break from modernity is that it could easily slip into a totalizing mode, much like modernity once did, and this could serve to obscure globalization’s complex and contradictory tendencies.39 Certainly, the rhetoric of newness that initially sustained globalizing discourse has been largely replaced by more diachronic narratives that insist on the development of these forces in the longue durée. In this sense, it may be that rather than producing anything ‘new’ in the sphere of economics, politics and culture, globalization has produced the conditions that might permit us to rethink culture in a larger historical frame. As Iain Chambers puts it: In the mutual complexities of the westernising of the world and the worlding of the West, each and every history bears witness to its particular worldly location, and the manner in which that has come to be represented and . . . repressed. So, in speaking from somewhere the voice that testifies to a particular past and present increasingly resonates in the channels of global amplification.40

One of the reasons why it became necessary, even urgent, to talk about the world as a whole is related to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc as an opposing force to the West in 1989. The ending of the Cold war that had underpinned international relations for over 40 years necessitated a rethinking of the entire system of global politics and the development of new discourses to explain the nature of this ‘new world order’. As well as removing the final significant barrier to the worldwide circulation of capitalism, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked a shift away from a global labour market stabilized by Cold War restrictions and orchestrated primarily by American interests. In this context, then, the concept of globalization has served as both a screen for the spread of neo-liberal capitalism and a justification for the emerging political and economic order – the ‘natural’ outcome of a history that ends, according to Francis Fukuyama’s controversial study, with the ‘victory’ of Western democracy.41 Of course, this perpetuates the tendency to read globalization merely as a homogenizing movement, one that eventually incorporates and integrates heterogeneous elements as it expands

Introduction

17

to reach the natural limits of the globe, and if it is comprehended solely in economic and political terms, then this may appear to be the case, though the rise and reach of Islam as an alternative vision of modernity does seem to present this evolutionary model with some particularly insistent problems. In cultural terms, too, globalization has been seen as an extension of the economic and political domination of the United States, which thrusts its hegemonic cultural productions to all parts of the world and effectively erases local forms of expression. Here, the West’s rapacious cultural imperialism is only intensified by the proliferation of media networks that permit its images and ideals to be beamed directly into distant people’s homes, threatening to corrode the integrity of all other particularities. This idea of the global as the final expansion of Western dominance to the natural limits of the world is cognate with the propensity to view globalization as a consequence of modernity, tending to see capitalist developments as happening in a linear fashion and producing standardized results everywhere, as in the refrains of McDonaldization and Coca-Colonization. But if there are integrative processes at work, and the logic of commodity consumption, for instance, defines much of modern cultural life around the globe, as do bureaucratic modes of organization, then this is not a one-way trajectory whereby the global penetration of Western culture inexorably leads to the effacement or evisceration of cultural differences, but a process of mutual – even if hugely unequal – hybridization over the coming decades in which the legacy of the American century gives way to the Asian. As Hardt and Negri are keen to stress, the materialization of a world market as a global field or totality does not equate to the totalization of scattered identities, such as the modernist nightmare of the industrial machine; rather, it thrives on the production of difference and is able to incorporate diverse forms of life, even those that oppose the global itself. Indeed, contingency, mobility and flexibility are the source of its power, and thus heterogeneity is less negated or attenuated than affirmed and arranged in a modulating apparatus of command.

Fiction Narrative fiction’s engagement with science and current technologies has also opened up new novelistic considerations of identity. Aside from more overt speculative fictions, there are Ishiguro’s humanist treatment of the posthuman in Never Let Me Go (2005) and Winterson’s exploration of intimacy and desire in cyberworld in The PowerBook (2001), but examples from less well-known

18

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

authors include Bo Fowler’s employment of a sentient supermarket trolley – implanted with a microchip of consciousness and a belief in God – to narrate his Scepticism Inc. (1998) or Simon Ings’s The Weight of Numbers (2006), whose dense interweaving of disparate narrative strands refigures 60 years of history in the light of contemporary connectivity. Certainly, the profound upheavals to world order within the recent history of modernity have transformed the way in which subjectivities are formed and represented, necessitating distinctive modes of narration that both respond to and help to shape our often ambivalent experiences of contemporary life. For Brian Finney, what this new generation of English writers have in common has less to do with a similar aesthetic than with a shared response to the changing world of the closing years of the millennium. They offer a bewildering variety of narrative modes, voices and tones. But all of them place their narratives within a context, not of one class on a small island, but of a world which is threatened by the very success of the project of modernity, a world which is so thoroughly interconnected that  it  is  no longer possible to treat any part of it as unaffected by everything else in it.42

Aside from the gradual relative decline in authority of many of the West’s hegemonic centres of influence, the simplistic yoking together of globalization and Westernization is also difficult to sustain because it relies on a largely static conception of cultural transmission. The dissemination of cultural artefacts is less a kind of blanket coverage that muffles all indigenous modes of expression than a dialectical process of mutual exchange, where cross-cultural contact reveals the permeability of numerous boundaries and produces new hybrid forms. If it is primarily economic and technological transformations that make it possible to visualize the world as a single space, it is not necessary to presume that other interrelated processes replicate the same patterns. The logic of integration and homogenization is simultaneously accompanied by opposed tendencies operating across all the primary domains of social power. Diversity and heterogeneity – the proliferation of alternative identities and differing orientations towards global dynamics – are equally constitutive of the contemporary world. Indeed, what the discourses of globalization make apparent is that notions of the universal and the particular are a dialectical nexus, and just as globalizing trends modify experiences of the local, so too do specific local practices have a determinate impact on the global. Roland Robertson coined the term ‘glocalisation’ to capture this sense of interdependency, which produces new identifications that are articulated through the ambiguous interlocking

Introduction

19

of presence and absence.43 Although for Robertson, this global–local nexus is by no means an unprecedented phenomenon – he traces a number of discrete phases of globalization stretching as far back as the early fifteenth century in Europe – the twenty-first and twentieth centuries’ technological innovations have resulted in an unmatched compression of world geography, accentuating issues of universalization and particularization. This presents certain challenges to our consciousness of place, and the rise of various reactionary nationalisms, fundamentalist discourses, obsessions with ‘heritage’, struggles to recover ‘authentic’ ethnic identities and increasingly fine-grained modes of identity presentation – to name just a few examples – may all be seen as responses to the speed and fluidity of global change that, for many, appears to be sweeping away established psychic geographies, not least the domesticity of the nation state. What these represent are not anti-modern resurgences of primordial identities and values, but powerful refusals of aspects of the contemporary. Just as, on the one hand, globalization dissolves the constraints of territory, the world opened up by the weightless circulation of capital, information and human actors generating a kind of intoxicating vertigo for those able to take advantage of this mobility, on the other, it is both fuelled by ‘archaic’ sentiments of parochialism and insularity and generates intensified space-fixing processes, such as augmented surveillance and tighter border controls.44 A world population whose disparate experiences, practices and economic and environmental fates seem ever more closely linked together thus necessitates alternative modes of conceptualization, based on an awareness of what John Tomlinson terms ‘complex connectivity’.45 Though the rapid development of cybernetic, information and telematic technologies since the Second World War has undoubtedly produced new stratifications alongside invasive forms of surveillance, it has simultaneously opened up novel possibilities for collective action, albeit in radically different terms from those of the civil society that took shape in the two previous centuries. In this global context, the medium and metaphor of the network has come to define our ways of understanding the world and acting in it, a form expressed through social movements, military/terrorist organizations, business formations, communication systems, migration patterns and even personal relationships. For Manuel Castells, the diffusion of network logic is not merely a technological phenomenon, but in itself constitutes a new social morphology operating largely outside of national regulation – one that is also dependent on cultural, political and economic factors.46 Common to all of these formulations is the emphasis on an intensified reflexivity whereby the density and global extension of new information and

20

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

communication technologies create a historically unparalleled interdependence of social relations. In a networked space of flows, boundaries become thresholds and sites of exchange fluctuate between opposition and cooperation – a situation that has been evocatively described as marking the advent of the ‘age of universal contagion’.47 This is to suggest that behind the utopian spectacle of unfettered connectivity – a world of diversity, mobility and apparently limitless opportunity – the consciousness of increased contact also generates a profound sense of anxiety, and not merely restricted to the spectres of biological pandemics such as AIDS, SARS and avian flu or the proliferation of electronic viruses. Indeed, awareness of risk, as well as systematic attempts to manage it, are integral elements of a modernity that has grown progressively more reflexive as social and institutional practices become susceptible to chronic revision in the light of future information.48 Feelings of ontological insecurity and ambivalence are, at least in part, the consequence of an epistemology that has been rendered provisional and contingent, and it is one of the ironies of the ‘information society’ that the intensified commodification and circulation of various forms of information has served to induce greater degrees of uncertainty. But if the informational saturation of the contemporary frequently seems indistinguishable from background noise, one does not necessarily have to submit to the idea of being cast adrift in a universe of dislocated signs and images. In attempting to provide, in Jameson’s terminology, a ‘cognitive map’ of the global totality, a number of theorists have found inspiration in the highly interdisciplinary science of dynamic systems – specifically ideas drawn from complexity theory and its various sobriquets, of which chaos theory is perhaps best known.49 Indeed, it has been suggested that it is the increased awareness of the ‘global’ that contributed to the turn towards complexity within the social and cultural sciences, the explosion of academic and popular discourses about globalization over the last 25 years authorizing a return to concepts of ‘system’ that had fallen out of fashion.50 In a world of intricate and mutually defining connections, traditional models that focus on the interaction between discrete and relatively stable entities, such as between individuals or national societies, have come to seem overly unified, static and reductive. Contrastingly, theories of complex systems offer a less mechanical and comparative approach, one that sees relations in terms of ongoing processes and trajectories of becoming that are fundamentally open-ended, and where local and global phenomena are linked in complicated and often non-linear ways. One familiar illustration of such non-linear processes is the planet’s weather system, where small changes

Introduction

21

to atmospheric pressure in one part can produce massive effects elsewhere, and the system’s sensitivity to initial conditions makes it almost impossible to predict weather changes more than a few days in advance. This has given rise to the concept of the ‘butterfly effect’, a term first coined by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz, but one that has since entered popular discourse, which proposes that the microscopic disturbances at one location may be amplified exponentially, and could set off a chain of events ultimately leading to the formation of large-scale phenomena far away in time and/or space from the original site of disruption. Here, the classical mechanics of the Newtonian universe based on principles of equilibrium and the reversibility of cause and effect are replaced by theoretical models of unpredictability, fluctuation, fields of probability, feedback loops and patterns of emergence and decay. Complexity therefore points beyond complication to the many emergent and dynamic systems whose collective properties are irreducible to the working of individual components, and which have the capacity to adapt and co-evolve as they organize themselves through time. Though not all networks are complex by definition, the new media and information technologies underpinning concepts of the ‘network society’ are the kinds of flexible and adaptive forms that display emergent characteristics. As John Urry observes, such structures involve a sense of contingent openness and multiple futures, of the unpredictability of outcomes in time-space, of a charity towards objects and nature, of diverse and non-linear changes in relationships, households and persons across huge distances in time and space, of the systemic nature of processes, and of the growing hypercomplexity of organizations, products, technologies and socialities.51 Put briefly, then, the notion of emergence posits that complex, non-linear systems are able to develop collective properties or patterns that emerge from, yet are not simply reducible to, the micro-dynamic relationships between individual components or actors. Consequently, the spatial metaphor of the network should be understood not as an instantaneity of interconnections or an already constituted holism, but as a mobile process of ongoing interconnection and disconnection, a shift from gridded hierarchies to a proliferating latticework of distribution. As opposed to systems structured by the imperatives of efficiency and centralized modes of control, the physics of non-linear processes understands instability and change as constitutive elements of adaptive systems rather than aberrant disruptions of the ‘natural’ state of harmonious balance. These systemic structures emerge from the dynamic interplay between order and chaos, and as such, reject the dichotomy between an arbitrary world of chance and one that

22

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

is mechanically deterministic. Indeed, whether or not the turn to complexity signifies, or even enhances, a new ‘structure of feeling’ for the disorderly flux of global capitalism, it does reinstate the openness of spatial relations that repudiates the notion of a fully integrated world. Complexity thus represents a shift in the way that nature itself is conceived, proposing that, even without the influence of human activities, ‘natural’ ecological systems do not normally tend towards stable equilibrium, but are extremely sensitive to the surrounding world and influenced by small fluctuations in their environment. Furthermore, the enormous interdependencies and convergences between supposedly distinct natural and human systems place under erasure the very notion of a stable division between the physical and social domains. The dissolution of the nature/culture duality is at the nub of Donna Haraway’s posthumanist ontology, which imagines the emergence of cybernetic forms of life on the plastic and fluid terrain of new communicative, biological and mechanical technologies.52 This is to suggest that, at the nexus between commercial and technological revolutions, a particular form of hybrid subjectivity is being produced that problematizes the distinction between ‘natural’ organisms and ‘artificial’ machines. Although Haraway’s declaration that we are cyborgs may sound like the stuff of science fiction, our collective entanglements with technology and the imperatives of the market are now so intimate and so blurred as to produce new determinations of the human. On the one hand, the extensity and intensity of technological automation, alongside the sovereignty of abstract market forces, threatens to expropriate, perhaps fatally, our ability to both understand and exert control over the world in which we live. In place of individual autonomy or collective action, we are compelled to adopt flexible strategies of continual adaptation to cope with the dispersed and highly mobile operation of power, ‘stretching [ourselves] ever more tautly over time and space simply to survive’.53 But on the other hand, the sheer density of networks that incorporate and pass through us may themselves open up hitherto unimaginable spaces of political agency, to rehearse Hardt and Negri’s position.54 Far from evacuating the possibility of autonomy from the social field, complexity’s emphasis on emergence and nonlinear relations implies that even small-scale actions at a local level can have massive global effects, though with the proviso that outcomes are generally unpredictable and difficult to control. Small fluctuations may grow and change the overall systemic structure; yet, with this hope that an understanding of complex systems could restore the potential for individual agency flattened by modern mechanistic structures comes a threat, since the security of stable and permanent rules appears to have vanished forever.

Introduction

23

The notion of order-making on a universal scale that drove the classic modern thinking, from the architectural grids of Le Courbusier and Mies Van Der Rohe to the structuralist anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, has been replaced, then, by models that attempt to chart global effects, acknowledging unevenness, asymmetry and unpredictability as structurally inescapable. However, the neoliberal proselytizing of the ‘information society’ and the pleasures of cyberspace still retain traces of the modern desire to overcome the complexities of material space through its abstraction. An idealized universe of absolute transparency and unlimited traversability underpins much of the rhetoric of contemporary technocapitalism, specifically the utopian potential of a wired world to overcome the ‘friction’ or ‘noise’ of spatial distance/difference that acts as a barrier to mutual dialogue. Indeed, Kevin Robins and Frank Webster draw attention to the ‘strange affinity between virtual futurism and communitarian nostalgia’, proposing that the cybernetic ideals of virtual culture actively suppress the complexities and material density of real geographies.55 This detachment from experiential engagement constitutes a retreat into a purified and pacified space of relations, a wholly transparent and ethereal, not to say illusory, medium of exchange, where any trace of the world’s material inertia is thoroughly effaced. According to this logic, virtual technologies may also be seen as a kind of ‘unworlding’ of the world, for the ideal horizon of the networked space of flows is, paradoxically, the transcendence of the fraught passage of mediation – a world of spatial uniformity and immaterial, telepresent intimacy that is deprived of any sense of nearness and remoteness. Of course, technoscapes cannot exist without the material apparatus of copper cables, fibre-optic wires, transmitters and receivers  – the fluidity of cyberspace through which the human body diffuses or amplifies itself beyond its limits remains at some level dependent on spatial fixity – and with this comes the potential for interference, breakdown and distortion, various forms of ‘noise’ that continue to disrupt the medial space of communications  – exemplified in the second author we will study, Hari Kunzru, with his interest in the boundaries of the human and the liminality of technology, and in the last, David Mitchell, with his critique of hierarchy and predacity twinned with a reinvigorated attention to form, introducing new narrative strategies through which significant changes in our perceptions of time-space and scattered global geographies are represented. The other authors we will examine, Zadie Smith and Nadeem Aslam, point towards a different direction for the novel, with Aslam especially intimating the dark side of Hardt and Negri’s description of the contemporary, inscribing narratives of exile and loss against the backdrop of migration, glocalization and

24

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

cosmopolitan space. With her admiration for the liberal humanist tradition in literature, Zadie Smith begins our study with a more optimistic set of narratives, though nonetheless based on displacement and the search for credible identity. But it is Smith’s concern with the relation between aesthetic sensibility and morality that is most arresting in taking aspects of literary realism and fictional experimentation and trying to shape them for the contemporary, drawing for her critical and creative practice on the idea of the novel(ist) at the crossroads once again at the start of the twenty-first century. However, as we will discuss in the next chapter, for many novelists, the crossroads at which they find themselves is defined far more by two lines of descent from the fictional tradition behind them than by a fork in the road lying ahead. For example, David James’s essay ‘The New Purism’ picks up on David Lodge’s seminal essay on ‘The Novelist at the Crossroads’, which identifies writers with a ‘loyalty’ to fabulation or orthodox realism. James updates this for today to identify ‘the experimental writer as negotiator, one who strives to sustain a balancing-act between inventiveness and plot, formal rupture and figurative realism’.56 James calls this ‘the dual-pronged approach of the purist writer today, an approach based around the desire to invent in the knowledge of the compromises that invention might avail for the pleasures of readerly absorption’. In the next chapter, we will discuss how Zadie Smith is also attentive to this strain of experimentation in the contemporary novel while acknowledging her debt to key writers in the English tradition from Eliot to Forster.

Notes 1 Anthony Giddens, Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 64. 2 Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), p. 8. 3 Giles Gunn, “Introduction: Globalizing Literary Studies”. PMLA, 116:1 (January 2001), pp. 16–31 (p. 21). 4 The alternatively conceptualized words are favoured by different theorists – mondialization by Derrida, planetarity by Spivak, globality by Martin Albrow and Ulrich Beck. 5 Masao Miyoshi, “ ‘Globalization,’ Culture and the University”, in The Cultures of Globalization. Ed. by F. Jameson and M. Miyoshi (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 247–71 (p. 248).

Introduction

25

6 See Paul Gilroy, ‘It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at: The Dialectics of Diasporic Identification’. Third Text, 13 (1991), pp. 3–17. 7 See Paul Jay, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010), pp. 2–3. 8 Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? Trans. by P. Camiller (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), p. 11. 9 Said’s oeuvre contains an ongoing dialogue over these terms and their referents. For an overview, see Rill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia, Edward Said: the Paradox of identity (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 31–56. 10 By this, we mean that globalization broadens the appeal of and interest in comparative literature, but also queries its premises in Europeanness in a post-European age (see Simon Gikandi, ‘Contested Grammars: Comparative Literature, Translation and the Challenge of Locality’, in The Blackwell Companion to Comparative Literature. Ed. by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), pp. 254–72 (p. 252)). 11 For example, see the story collection to which David Mitchell contributed – I’m with the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet (London: Verso, 2011). 12 Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? Trans. by P. Camiller (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), p. 13. 13 ‘Culture and Globalization, or, The Humanities in Ruins’. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3:2 (2003), pp. 91–115 (p. 92). Italics in original. 14 Some examples include Timothy Brennan’s At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (London: Harvard University Press, 1997); Emily Apter’s Continental Drift (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and Neil Lazarus’s Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 15 See The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). 16 For example, see Andrzej Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London: Edward Arnold, 1995); Steven Connor, The English Novel in History: 1950–1995 (London: Routledge, 1996); Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel: 1878–2001, rev. edn (London: Penguin, 2001); John Brannigan, Orwell to the Present: Literature in England, 1945–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Jago Morrison, Contemporary Fiction (London: Routledge, 2003); Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel (London: Continuum, 2004); Peter Childs, Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); Brian Finney, English Fiction Since 1984: Narrating a Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 17 Lawrence Norfolk and Tibor Fischer (eds), New Writing 8 (London: Vintage, 1999).

26

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

18 Postmodernity, 2nd edn (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999), p. 65. 19 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. xi. 20 For a comparison between the spatial tropes of the modern ‘grid’ and the contemporary ‘network’, see Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 3–23. 21 The idea of the ‘multitude’ derives from the philosophical writings of Spinoza; see Empire, pp. 60–6. While Empire is mainly concerned with mapping the new imperial order, tracing its continuities with European modernity, the ‘multitude’ remains a powerful but hazily delimited figure. Hardt and Negri’s companionpiece, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004), focuses more explicitly on the constitution of the multitude as the vitalistic motor of history. 22 The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). 23 Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘The Postcolonial and the Postmodern’, in The PostColonial Studies Reader. Ed. by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 119–24 (p. 119). 24 ‘Postmodernism and Space’, in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Ed. by Steven Connor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 116–35 (p. 127). 25 See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 240–2; and Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). 26 Jonathan Friedman argues against seeing globalization as part of a general evolutionary process, suggesting instead that it constitutes a temporary phase that should be understood in relation to hegemonic decline, as evidenced by increasing competition as capital shifts to East Asia, and the growth of transnational corporations. Although Friedman does admit that the world is more globally connected than ever before, he rejects the idea that the mobility and mixing of cultures is a substantively new phenomenon, arguing that the consciousness of impermanence and the emergence of the discourse of hybridity are social products of a self-identified cosmopolitan elite. See ‘The Hybridisation of Roots and the Abhorrence of the Bush’, in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World. Ed. by Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (London: Sage, 1999), pp. 230–55. 27 John Hegglund, ‘Modernism, Africa and the Myth of Continents’, in Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces. Ed. by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 43–53.

Introduction

27

28 ‘Reconsidering Literary Interpretation’, in After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism. Ed. by José López and Garry Potter (London and New York: Athlone, 2001), pp. 196–205 (p. 202). 29 See The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (London: Routledge, 1962). 30 Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996), pp. 27–47. 31 See Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 32 For a discussion of the tension between local and global cultures, see Mike Featherstone, Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity (London: Sage, 1995), especially pp. 86–101. 33 See Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), p. 2. 34 For Space (London: Sage, 2005), pp. 62–9. Massey takes particular issue with Anthony Giddens’s linear model of modernization based on a contrast between traditional (pre-modern) culture and post-traditional (modern) culture, since this flattens space of its dynamic multiplicity by imagining it as a set of pre-constituted variations where differences are purely the result of internal characteristics. 35 See Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives (London: Profile Books, 1999), pp. 36–50. 36 ‘Globalization, Civilisation and Languages’, in The Cultures of Globalization. Ed. by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 32–53. 37 Ibid., p. 37. 38 ‘The Impossibility of the Present’, in Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present. Ed. by Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 15–35 (p. 28). 39 In this sense, we echo David Lyon’s desire to retain elements from the concept of postmodernity as a material social, as well as cultural, formation. See Postmodernity, 2nd edn, pp. 46–68. 40 Culture After Humanism: History, Culture, Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 15. Ellipsis in original. 41 See End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992). 42 English Fiction Since 1984, p. 2. 43 Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992). 44 Indeed, Zygmunt Bauman frames the duality of the global–local nexus in terms of an increased polarization, where the impact of global mobility and speed has divergent effects in different social and geographical contexts. For the ‘global elite’ with access to travel and communication technologies, the freedom to move

28

45 46 47 48

49

50 51 52 53 54

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels coupled with the new deterritorialization of power serves only to consolidate their position further, becoming virtually immune from local interference. In contrast, those unable to wield these disembedded global flows are further disempowered and isolated, confined to ghettoized localities that are shaped from without by anonymous global forces. See Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity, 1998) and Bauman’s follow-up, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), which further refines this position. Though Bauman perhaps overstates the dichotomy between the worlds at the top and bottom of this emergent hierarchy of mobility, and sees little hope of a rapprochement between them, his analysis is valuable in drawing attention to the uneven effects of globalizing processes. Globalization and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 2. The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 1 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 136. For a discussion of risk society and its relationship with reflexive modernisation, see Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992) and Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers’s, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (London: Flamingo, 1984) was perhaps the breakthrough text in the popularization of complexity theory. Their ideas have been placed in the context of literary and cultural theory by N. Katherine Hayles in Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) and in William R. Paulson’s The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). More recently, the journal Theory, Culture and Society devoted a special issue to discussions of complex systems; see TCS 22(5) 2005, and both Mark C. Taylor’s The Moment of Complexity and John Urry’s Global Complexity (Cambridge: Polity, 2003) have explored the implications of complexity for emerging global networks. John Urry, ‘The Complexity Turn’. Theory, Culture and Society, 22:5 (2005), pp. 1–14. John Urry, ‘The Complexity Turn’, 3. See Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), especially pp. 149–81. Robert Hassan, Media, Politics and the Network Society (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2004), p. 98. This optimism may be tempered by the startling statistic that between a third and a half of the world’s population live more than two hours away from the nearest telephone. See Nick Bingham, ‘Unthinkable Complexity? Cyberspace Otherwise’, in Virtual Geographies: Bodies, Space and Relations. Ed. by Mike Crang, Phil Crang and Jon May (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 244–60 (p. 255)

Introduction

29

55 Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 243. 56 David James, ‘The New Purism’. Textual Practice, 21:4 (December 2007), pp. 687–714 (p. 696). Lodge’s essay is included in his 1971 collection The Novelist at the Crossroads.

30

1

Zadie Smith

The most well-known of the four writers discussed in this study, Zadie Smith, more than any other British novelist of her generation, is an author whose fiction has grown up in the glare of critical opinion. Her first novel, White Teeth (2000), was greeted as that of a prodigy, her voice that of the spokesperson for a new vanguard of writers who would plot the coordinates of cosmopolitan urban living. Time described it as ‘the first novel ever written that truly feels at home in our borderless, globalized, intermarried, post-colonial age’.1 Her two subsequent novels, The Autograph Man (2002) and On Beauty (2005), put her narratives in a transatlantic context, with American as well as British settings, and showed more overtly how her literary heritage influences aspects of the writing and plotting. After a seven-year gap in which she proved herself to be an accomplished literary and cultural critic, Smith returned with the more modernistic NW (2012) to rework the ethnically diverse north London picture created in her first novel and its snapshot of the state of the nation in the capital at the turn of the century. There is a danger of the literature of the nation supporting hierarchical divisions between, for example, migrant and national. As Spivak points out, this is the aggressive attitudinal thrust of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). Conversely, there can be dangers in eliding the association of the cosmopolitan imagination, if narrowly defined, with particular class positions, cultural privileges and educational opportunities, such that some writers see cosmopolitanism as a mask for first-world nationalism and a synonym for the culture of Westernized consumerism, rather than as an ‘unconditional hospitality’, in Derrida’s phrase, or Timothy Brennan’s delineation of a quasi existential apprehension of being ‘not-quite at-home’ in the world.2 Hence the attack on a writer like Smith (e.g. see Schoene) because a book such as White Teeth (2000) seems to position itself far from the forces of globalization and chiefly gestures towards cosmopolitanism through slang and style. Thus, in

32

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

the words of one chapter title, the Chalfen family are taken to be ‘more English than the English’ because of their liberal middle-class values. However, they are third-generation Poles, originally Chalfenovskys – not more English than the English, but as English as anyone else. Smith rings this theme of hybridity and cross-fertilization through numerous parallels, drawn from horticulture, eugenics and meteorology. One of the dominant extended metaphors belongs to Joyce Chalfen’s 1976 book, entitled The New Flower Power: Where once gardeners swore by the reliability of the self-pollinating plant in which pollen is transferred from the stamen to the stigma of the same flower (autogamy), now we are more adventurous, positively singing the praises of cross-pollination where pollen is transferred from one flower to another on the same plant (geitonogamy), or to a flower of another plant of the same species (xenogamy) . . . Yes, self-pollination is the simpler and more certain of the two fertilization processes, especially for many species that colonize by copiously repeating the same parental strain. But a species cloning such uniform offspring runs the risk of having its entire population wiped out by a single evolutionary event. In the garden, as in the social and political arena, change should be the only constant. Our parents and our parents’ petunias have learnt this lesson the hard way. The March of History is unsentimental, tramping over a generation and its annuals with ruthless determination.3

As the title of Joyce Chalfen’s book suggests, being English for the Chalfens is rooted in a set of 1960s images, such that they emerge as ‘an ageing hippy couple both dressed in pseudo-Indian garb’ (131). Joyce expresses the idea that miscegenation is valuable in itself, and her marriage to Marcus Chalfen is an expression of their shared belief in ‘good genes’ rather than ‘pure blood’. Consequently, Smith has been accused of advocating in the novel little more than the rhetoric of the multicultural ‘greenandpleasantlibertarianlandofthefree’ she satirizes (465). Making a contrasting point, Padmaja Chatterjee concludes on the approach used in many books, including White Teeth, that ‘cosmopolitan political subjectivity as represented in contemporary fiction is conservative because it is fundamentally spectatorial’.4 This is exploited in Nirpal Singh’s 2006 debut, Tourism – a novel that attempts a kind of reverse colonization in its depiction of the consumer lifestyle of a young Asian man living in London.5 In Singh’s novel, the capital and the English countryside are, as his title suggests, as susceptible to packaged commodification as Mumbai or Bangkok. A canonical example in British fiction that seems to justify Chatterjee’s accusation of spectatorial conservatism is Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), which

Zadie Smith

33

takes place on the day of the February 2003 protest march in London against the second Gulf War. This was the largest protest march that has ever been staged in the British Isles, yet McEwan’s interest appears to be in the course of a family’s private life that runs in parallel, but not in sympathy, with the protestors’ spirit of global concern watched from behind expensive facades by the protagonist, Henry Perowne. However, there are alternative examples conducive to a planetary understanding in the work of other contemporary writers. Thus, for instance, there is a contrast to McEwan’s use of an anti-war march as backdrop to illustrate the threat to the western bourgeois home in Robert Newman’s The Fountain at the Centre of the World (2006). This is another novel that begins in London, but its narrative snakes across the world, describing the lives of different communities affected by the flows of labour and capital. It concludes in a long final section detailing the excessive repression of the anti-World Trade Organization protestors in Seattle in 1999, and draws in numerous mythological allusions in its story of the fight for the centrality of water or oil supplies in global negotiations. Very different again, a work that evokes the cosmopolitan non-hierarchically is Geoff Ryman’s 253 from 1998.6 Ryman describes the inner and outer life of passengers on a London tube journey. 252 passengers are described, randomly arranged on all the seats in seven cars. Again intimating the unique quality of the novel form to render the familiar strange and the different same, the book scans the appearance of each person in each compartment, as though the reader is also a passenger seeing the apparition of these faces in the crowd, but it also describes their inner life, making plain the human as well as multinational heterogeneity within shared urban living. Most interestingly, Ryman’s novel uses the train compartment as contact zone in which the world travels through London, almost as though to dramatize the contention that London is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. A book that does something similar by absence and omission is John Lanchester’s Mr Phillips (2000). It is an unusual novel – because so utterly banal and entertaining at the same time – which has drawn comparisons even with Ulysses. This is in no way because of its style or complexity, but because it charts a day in the life of a pointedly unexceptional man who wanders around the capital in a way that seems reminiscent of Bloom in Dublin. Mr Phillips is a newly unemployed 50-year-old accountant who feels redundant in almost every sense. The entire book, with its world of Neighbourhood Watch Associations, commuter belts and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, has a sense of suburban faux gentility attaching to it. Mr Phillips himself conforms to an archetype of the

34

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

reserved, undemonstrative, insular, repressed white Englishman. The original book cover shows an improbably clean white unoccupied bench in a green and pleasant spot. Mr Phillips is a book that self-consciously marginalizes issues of community and ethnicity to unexplored side lines, implying them almost exclusively through their conspicuous absence. The book glosses Mr Phillips with the sheen of Ulysses, but his odyssey is one that contains no informal intimacy, no narrative high points, and nothing but quiet amusement as its protagonist walks through London’s emblematic spaces of Britishness. These places, ranging from Battersea Park to the Tate Gallery via the sex-cinemas of Soho, are actually quite unfamiliar to the novel’s protagonist; and when Mr Phillips travels on the bus through what he calls the ‘glamorous parts of London’, he feels an outsider again. Pointing up Mr Phillips’ sense of unbelonging, Lanchester’s choice of epigraph is a quotation from the French philosopher Simone Weil’s book entitled The Need for Roots (L’Enracinement (1949)) – ‘A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatsoever, but he would have obligations’. With a deracinated man at its centre, Lanchester’s novel is a highly conscious exercise in nostalgia, filtering received images of behaviour through the mind of a man who feels he has lived his life, if not his national identity, vicariously, and now takes a day to explore the capital, where he feels he is an outsider. Mr Phillips is an individual who is in almost every sense in the middle of life, but who Lanchester appears to have made step out of the Britain of 1945, the year Mr Phillips was in fact born. Mr Phillips’s embodiment of traditional, formal Anglicized Britishness is expressed in the narrator’s refusal to address him by his forename from first page to last. Even Mr Phillips, whose ironic first name is Victor, thinks of himself as ‘Mr Phillips’. Edward Said argued in Culture and Imperialism that the imposition of national identity is implicit in the domestic novel in its boundaries, exclusions and silences – the Imperial interstices of society that contrapuntal reading can reveal by turning the narrative inside out, temporarily centralizing its supposed margins. This is what Zadie Smith in White Teeth seems to have done with the archaic version of London in Mr Phillips. White Teeth, by contrast to the satirical consideration of the national stereotype in Mr Phillips, presents a series of metaphors for the mondialized heterogeneity of Britain since the war. And Smith’s title, of course, plays with the idea that everyone is the same under the skin, but the novel charts the variety of molars, canines, incisors, root canals, false teeth, dental work and damage that constitute the history behind different

Zadie Smith

35

smiles. The commonsensical idea of the uniformity of teeth, which can also be divided into a host of shades from pearly to black, is as much a fiction in Smith’s novel as the template of ‘Britishness’ exposed with tender affection in Mr Phillips. The negative of Mr Phillips might be Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006), which tells the story of a section of the Asian population of Hounslow, in West London, near Heathrow. This narrative overturns the image of Englishness and the reader’s assumptions by revealing at its close that the Hindu Desi gang hero of the novel, who speaks an urban argot fusing Hindi, cockney and black American hip hop, is in fact white.7 Londonstani is ultimately not about Asian acculturation in Britain, but the chutnification, in Rushdie’s words, of English identity. But these novels still fail to give a sense of glocal interconnectedness in their cosmopolitan pictures of London. In a Time review, Pico Iyer uses the term ‘planetary novel’ to describe David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999) (Iyer n.p.), which we will consider in the final chapter. The subtitle of Ghostwritten presents it as ‘a Novel in Nine Parts’, its formal arrangement comprising nine discrete first-person narratives that trace an imaginative passage from East to West, encircling the globe’s northern hemisphere. Though the narrative does come to pass through the more familiar ‘centres’ of the global cultural economy, such as London and New York, much of the novel concentrates on places that have been perceived as alien and mysterious by the Western cultural imagination. Japan, Hong Kong, China and Mongolia have all found themselves refracted through a prism of Eurocentric discourse that has world history radiating outwards from its ‘over-developed’ centres. Ghostwritten’s trajectory is not a reversal of this, as in the familiar postcolonial trope of the former empire ‘writing back’ to the centre, but rather seems to be an alternative recognition of planetary contemporality and dynamic synchronicity, where people and places are inextricably linked, regardless of distance. The novel does not merely show events happening around the world at the same time for purposes of comparison; it animates an entire circuitry of global interaction and interdependence between seemingly unconnected characters and events. Against readings of globalization that frame it as a process of integration and assimilation homogenizing cultural difference, Mitchell’s novel suggests that the site of the local is crisscrossed by innumerable paths of movement with varying speeds and directions. Mitchell encapsulates this most directly in the dramatization of a literally disembodied spirit in his chapter entitled ‘Mongolia’.

36

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

The narrator here is a ‘noncorpum’, who transfers through touch from one host’s mind to another’s. It says: I drift, often on a whim, searching for something to search for. . . . My incredulous Chinese hosts who saw the first backpackers regarded them as quite alien entities. Which is exactly how humans would regard me. All minds pulse in a unique way, just as every lighthouse in the world has a unique signature. (Mitchell 160)

An unacknowledged intertext for Mitchell is Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days (1873), which has a ‘passage’ in which the Englishman Phileas Fogg sojourns aboard the steamer Mongolia on his way to India, sailing from Brindisi to Bombay. Fogg’s journey is arranged in eight legs and has nine departure and arrival points – London, Suez, Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco, New York and London again. As he circles the world, Fogg remains the archetypal travelling colonial Englishman, maintaining at all times his reserve, dignity and assurance. Published on the eve of the millennium, Ghostwritten has a similar scope and number of key locations, but is energized by the mutability of identity created by mass migration and communications – ‘contemporary nomadism’, in Iain Chambers’s phrase.8 Mitchell’s ‘Mongolia’ ends with the noncorpum tracing a non-genetic family history and weighing up whether to exchange the freedom of disembodied levity, endlessly mindhopping between ‘presidents, astronauts, messiahs’, for the vicissitudes of mortality (Mitchell 202). Its identity cycled through a potentially endless process of transit, transformation and translation seems a potent symbol for the advent of a historically unprecedented mode of planetary subjectivity constituted by constant mediation.9 One way of approaching this may be as a literary expression of Hardt and Negri’s concept of the global Spinozan multitude we examined in the Introduction. Hardt and Negri suggest that the ultimate extension of the circuits of production and exchange has propagated this new logic of structure and rule that they term ‘Empire’, incorporating the entire world within its open, expanding frontiers, regulating the flows of commodities and labour while seeking to exert its control over all human interactions, even human nature itself. The multitude is the other side to these global networks of power; it is the productive, creative subjectivities of globalization whose movements, modulations of form and processes of mixture and hybridization express the desire for liberation from the hierarchies imposed by transnational capitalism. In a similar way, Mitchell’s narrators are connected through common needs and desires that have little regard for the borders and boundaries that parcel up their world. Though separated

Zadie Smith

37

from each other by enormous geographical and temporal distances, their struggle against various forms of subordination is presented as a universal impulse. A strong sense of allegiance to this comes across in Smith’s novels, from the broad canvas of White Teeth to the questioning of liberal values, updating Forster’s goodwill and tolerance, in On Beauty. Smith makes the point in NW also, but as the approach is two-edged. For example, the commitment towards helping the underprivileged is presented as patronage, but also a benign recognition of the melting pot of modern London, when class-conscious Natalie Blake is accepted by the ‘Middle Temple Fold’ under the worthy heading ‘E Pluribus Unum’ – ‘Something about Natalie inspired patronage, as if by helping her you helped an unseen multitude’.10 However, as her career progresses, if Natalie herself takes instructions from a multinational company, she receives from her friend Leah Hanwell ‘self-righteous, ill-informed lectures about the evils of globalization’. (235) There are layers of reflection in these observations about the modern world made to a black London lawyer and mother who is aware of her success as a vehicle of alienation that takes her away from Leah and her roots towards a new identity born of a new status, represented most clearly in the renunciation of her childhood name of Keisha. Building on aspects of the approach in Smith’s previous novels, NW seeks to portray the multitude in the modern metropolis, its fractured style both presenting characters in free flow across the pages and structuring, for example, the longest narrative section in numbered gobbets that suggest the collages of modernism blended with the sound bites of social media to chronicle the ordered progression of Natalie’s view of her life. The novel also builds on some of the less remarked upon influences coursing through her earlier fiction to give a far more modernistic novel, that uses the techniques of London’s early twentieth-century chroniclers, from Woolf to Eliot, to offset its depictions of four Willesden residents with a backdrop of uninvited estate drug users who come visiting and dinner parties thrown by middle-class watchers of boxsets of The Wire, slyly suggesting for some a voyeuristic escapism into an American parallel to the underbelly of their own community. The cosmopolitan nature of London is celebrated while its paradoxes of place and status are constantly pointed up as Natalie is tempted to ‘slip’ into the lives of others – ‘Follow the Somali kid home? Sit with the old Russian lady at the bus stop outside Poundland? Join the Ukrainian gangster at his table in the cake shop’? (245) Hardt and Negri describe the multitude as ‘constellations of singularities’, and this also seems an approximation of the version of subjectivity dominant in Mitchell’s novel, whose overall effect is to insinuate that these stories are merely

38

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

selected actualizations of myriad possible ‘untold tales’ within one fictional universe (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 60). Characters and events seem at once to be distinct and yet tied to each other in ways that reveal a small part of the pattern while implying that nothing less than the full multitude of interwoven stories would be sufficient to explain the world, which exists as much in the interior imagination as in external materiality. As noted above, in his study Modernity at Large (1996), Appadurai captures this fluid quality of global relations with the analogy of planetary space as an amalgam of shifting landscapes, or, rather, seascapes, composed of financial, cultural, technological and demographic movements (Appadurai 27–47). A fine fictional engagement with this comes in Hari Kunzru’s novel Transmission, examined in the next chapter, where the spread of a computer retrovirus becomes the occasion for a meditation on the complexities of transcultural and transnational people movements. The virus code hides behind a picture of a Bollywood star, Leela, and conveys an Eastern threat of cultural, viral and terrorist transmission that instantly connects the world in a way that only the internet can. Kunzru also satirizes the West’s perception of news that we alluded to earlier in the Introduction, when discussing Ulrich Beck. The day of the virus is introduced thus: Around the world, Thursday the twelfth of June was a quiet day. Bombs went off in Jakarta, Jenin and Tashkent. An old single-hulled tanker sank off Manila, releasing its load of crude oil into the South China Sea. In Malawi a man was diagnosed with a previously unknown retroviral infection. At London’s Heathrow Airport, two Ghanean boys were found frozen to death in the undercarriage of a Boeing 747.11

By exploiting the West’s reliance on communication technologies, Kunzru intimates that transmission is one aspect to Apparadurai’s scapes, but other aspects are noise and interference, which interrupt and seemingly distort the signal of pure communication, and thus control. The retro virus is an autonomous figure of disobedience and dysfunction, a noise in the network, epitomizing Hardt and Negri’s declaration that ‘[t]he age of globalisation is the age of universal contagion’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 136). Kunzru’s novel ends in a dissolution of identity as the virus begins to affect knowledges in the real world, leading to the erosion of myriad world borders that otherwise seem to hold existing systems, hierarchies and discriminations in place. A final and more far-reaching envisaging of this dissolution occurs in fiction that steps beyond the present. An example of this is Maggie Gee’s The Ice People

Zadie Smith

39

(1998). Told from a future in the middle of the twenty-first century, Gee’s novel reviews the story of one family from the late twentieth century, with its growing threat of global warming, into the dawning of the new ice age, which starts around 2030. The Ice People of the title are the Europeans who seek refuge in Africa, fleeing the descending cold to a southern continent that suddenly represents freedom. The northern hemisphere sinks into violent conflict between the remaining de-civilized humans and an increasingly sentient robot class. Gee’s novel implicitly criticizes the current generation for its failure to balance human liberties and technological advances, dramatizing this primarily through an ideological and political split between women and men. The narrator, Saul, tries to justify his kidnapping of their son to his ex-wife: She didn’t know I had sacrificed everything to try to give to Luke a life in the sun, him and his children, our grandchildren, for surely in Africa there would have been children. She didn’t understand I was trying to save him from the nanomachines, the thrumming headsets, the speaking buildings and technobirths, the rare sickly children, the lonely sexes, she didn’t understand that I wanted to free him from all the debris of the ice people. (Gee 230)

Gee’s narrative ends with the contemplation of an uncertain future, with or without humans, who may not survive through another ice age – a metaphor for Euro American indifference to planetarity in its many forms. Each of the novels we have touched on above instantiates a conceptual envisioning of responses to mondialization – turning into fiction economic migrancy and the G8 protests; charting the unpredictable outcomes of hybridity and exogamy; documenting the nostalgic response to change and the intense conflicts of internecine ethnic rivalry or using the predictions of climate change to allegorize cultural failure. Most empowering for fiction studies, some writers also attempt to re-envision the linear form of the novel in ways that communicate the effects of transmigration, mass circulation and the multiple scapes of the twenty-first century. These are contours that were only imagined in terms of imperialism as the rise of the novel accompanied what in the long view may seem to have been the short-lived historical phase of the formation and dominance of the nation state. In the context of a twenty-first-century awareness of ethical responsibility that inspires the impulse towards framing global aesthetics, while it must be remembered that the novel has always had a propensity towards social documentation and interrelation with a fluid historical landscape, alongside a self-reflexive interest in fictionality and form, Philip Tew, for one, suggests that we

40

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

are shifting back from an overemphasis on the latter cluster of characteristics.12 This is not to say that many contemporary novelists reject formal adventure or experimentation, but that this is balanced with a desire to make important points about contemporary existence against an awareness of increased and intensified global interconnections. In broad terms, these are the perspectives and concepts that will be explored in relation to selected fiction produced by the exemplary writers analysed in the body of this study. The authors we examine have all been classified as British writers, but all exceed this label, exemplifying in their different ways not just the inadequacy of the category of national literatures in the twentyfirst century, but also the turn in aesthetic representation at a time of transition when an accelerated and intensified interconnectedness is starting to shape an emergent cultural ethics informed by the perspective of global awareness.

Two Directions: White Teeth Despite Dominic Head’s helpful querying of a persistence in characterizing contemporary fiction in a dichotomy,13 for many critics, there are two discernible trajectories, or at least standpoints, pointed out in discussions of the anglophone novel’s direction of travel as a genre, and they tend towards a preference for refinements of classic realist fiction in the light of technique, even more than theory, pioneered in modernism and postmodernism, and a more pronounced inclination towards experimentation – the new, the innovative, the novel. On the publication of his 650-page novel, Capital (2012), John Lanchester, an author who sits comfortably at the much-vaunted crossroads of these two trajectories, suggested that the novel was looking in one direction more than the other: If we had been having the conversation in 1970, we’d have been talking about the avant-garde, the nouveau roman, Robbe-Grillet and how Joyce had permanently reconfigured the domain of the novel. . . . [T]he novel has swerved back from all that . . . back towards the readers. So I gave myself permission not to think about the formal things I would normally think about.14

There is a sense in which Zadie Smith is another author at this crossroads, highly aware of the novel’s development and its history of experimentation as well as conscious of the debates over styles of contemporary writing, but not always agonizing over formal questions. Where she differs from Lanchester is in her greater unease in this position, and her greater inclination towards arranging

Zadie Smith

41

her novels around the politics of identity, which is, to different degrees, common to all the authors in this study. In her essay ‘Two Directions for the Novel’, Smith asserts that identity politics are ‘the only authenticity to survive the twentieth century’.15 Analysis of her own fiction would be hard pressed to ignore at this point, and indeed, many essays have been aimed at an assessment of Smith’s treat­ ment of this subject.16 The three novels she has produced to date are structured in terms of inquiries into neither interiority nor subjectivity, but cultural politics – the struggle over national, racial, religious and genealogical authentic identity in White Teeth, the search for personal origins and the reality of others in The Autograph Man, the transatlantic investigation into community and roots in On Beauty. But there is also an enquiry into other forms of genuineness, linked to the historical and the aesthetic – the heirloom, the autograph, the painting. Smith’s ‘two directions’ are experimentalism and an aesthetic lyricism she notes is prevalent in contemporary realism, epitomized by the lush fetishization of quotidian reality in Joseph O’Neill’s post 9/11 novel, Netherland, where apposite adjectives pile up to draw literary attention to every object in a quasitraumatized prose that accentuates the extraordinary nature of existence after tragedy. Significance attaches to everything in the wake of personal and collective catastrophe. Smith does not object strongly to this kind of novel as such, and even admits to writing in this vein herself, but she does question whether its near monopoly on claims to the terrain of representing reality is limiting, its solemn presentation through codes of literary realism of an ‘authentic story of a self ’ somewhat aesthetically restricting because so pervasive.17 Smith’s counter example to lyrical realism is Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, which ‘works by accumulation and repetition, closing in on its subject in everdecreasing revolutions, like a trauma victim circling the blank horror of the traumatic event.’18 The unnamed first-person protagonist is indeed recovering from a head injury and receives a large payout. However, McCarthy’s protagonist lacks the interiority that the novel is arguably best able to represent. The emptying out of authenticity results in a search for self through repetition and recycling, recreating the past and then re-enacting it before moving to the pleasure of short-circuits, repeating actions over and over in series of re-enactments that aim to reanimate feeling in the way a child imposes its desire to experience with guaranteed certainty again and again the residual pleasure of the first time. Smith believes that Remainder seeks to destroy the myth of cultural authenticity through the flattening of any appeal to selfhood or affect. Smith concludes that Remainder is intended to ‘shake the novel out of its present complacency’

42

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

through its emphasis on materiality rather than psychology, secular immanence rather than metaphysical transcendence.19 Smith is an astute critic and her reading of Remainder throws light on her interests – theory and practice, realism and experimentalism, tradition and newness. Her own works seem to explore repeatedly the question of authentic identity, but they do so from a middle position. Like the authors she most admires from Eliot to Forster, she is situated between social realism (the state of the nation from Middlemarch to Howards End) and the challenges from Flaubert to Woolf presented by modernism, which she gestures towards most clearly in NW. Like Eliot and Forster, she seems to be intellectually interested in new paths for fiction, but write in a way that courts popular appeal by its soothing storylines, familiar characters and comfortingly reasonable as well as gently authoritative narratorial tone. Yet, in her essay ‘Middlemarch and Everybody’, Smith is also aware that the novel currently exists in conservative times – ‘These days, writer of ideas has become a term of abuse: we think “Ideas” are the opposite of something we call “Life” ’.20 Or, again in ‘Two Directions for the Novel’ – ‘The literary economy sets up its stall on the road that leads to Netherland, along which one might wave to Jane Austen, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Yates, Saul Bellow. Rarely has it been less aware (or less interested) in seeing what’s new on the road to Remainder, that skewed side road where we meet Georges Perec, Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard’.21 She thinks extraordinary writers sit between the two traditions, from Melville and Conrad to Kafka and Joyce, but it would be hard to place Smith even here. We will move on to examining the content of her novels in the context of authenticity, but she seems less amenable to formal experimentation, though she admires it: What is not universal or timeless, though, is form. Forms, styles, structures  – whatever word you prefer – should change like skirt lengths. They have to; otherwise we make a rule, a religion, of one form; we say, ‘This form here, this is what reality is like, . . . . What twenty-first-century novelists inherit from Eliot is the radical freedom to push the novel’s form to its limits, wherever they may be.22

Her own approach to form is architectural, along the Jamesian line of designing and erecting a House of Fiction. ‘Each time I’ve written a long piece of fiction I’ve felt the need for an enormous amount of scaffolding.’23 This is partly evident in the borrowing of structure, whether from the Kabbalah or from Forster’s

Zadie Smith

43

Howards End, which seems to be a way Smith conceives of developing the scaffold to help provide a framework as well as construct a goal or end point. While we would argue Smith is more accomplished as a writer of fiction than a novelist, form in Smith’s novels is thus arguably far from radical or claimed to be original, but partly brought in to support and contain the construction of sentences. This is also the case with her essays, which are frequently broken into sections, declaratively, like ‘Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend’ or, less explicitly, like the daily diary of ‘One Week in Liberia’, both in Changing My Mind. Smith has also said, ‘Because I am an English novelist enslaved to an ancient tradition, with each novel I have ended up exactly where I began: third person, past tense’.24 Added to such comments, there is a sense with Smith’s writing that she is immersed in her training as a reader and critic, and therefore is more likely to look outside than inside for form and direction. Hence, she can write the following with a seeming lack of self-consciousness – ‘For where is our fiction, our twenty-first century fiction? We glimpse it here and there. Certainly not as often as you might expect, given the times we live in’.25 Her admiration for writers such as Tom McCarthy and David Foster Wallace, as opposed to her influence from Forster and Eliot, for example, suggests where Smith glimpses the anglophone Anglo-American twenty-first-century novel – in writers who asks questions of identity and authenticity. Wallace, she says, in his concern with solipsism, ‘was always asking essentially the same question. How do I recognize that other people are real, as I am’?26 In McCarthy’s Remainder, ‘the narrator finds all his own gestures to be inauthentic, and everyone else’s too’.27 Anticipating our discussion of mediated identity in Kunzru’s work, this provides a lens through which to view Smith’s own fiction alongside her view with which this chapter opened, that identity politics are ‘the only authenticity to survive the twentieth century’. White Teeth (2000), which garnered both critical acclaim and commercial popularity as a precocious debut novel, expresses an optimistic vision of contemporary Britain’s ethnic heterogeneity, at once looking back into the imperial past and towards a time to come when ‘roots won’t matter anymore’ (527). The phrase ‘past tense, future perfect’ recurs throughout the novel as shorthand for a diverse multiculturalism in which history is an inescapable source of conflict, its ebb and flow constantly lapping against the here and now, but where there is also a utopian impulse for a new kind of shared future beyond given codes of differentiation. The ‘White Teeth’ of the title, then, may be read as a metaphor for both personal and collective memory  –  of the novel’s four sections, the first three have a chapter on ‘root

44

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

canals’ that loop back to significant dates in a shared colonial past – and as a device that reminds us of a baseline humanity, the commonplace idea that we are all the same under the skin.28 Yet, this notion of the uniformity of teeth is something that is invoked while being subtly undercut, and the text consciously avoids such bland humanist sentiments by emphasizing the importance of the individual histories that lie behind similar smiles. Resonant with the work of Paul Gilroy, Smith’s spectrum of characters are shown to be both rooted and routed – Samad Iqbal’s sense of identity is determined in part through his pride in a great-grandfather, Mangal Pande, who Samad believes to have triggered the 1857 sepoy rebellion; the middle-class Chalfens are depicted as the epitome of liberal Englishness, but are third-generation Polish migrants; Millat, one of Samad’s sons, joins a militant Islamic group whose guiding principles include the need ‘to purge oneself of the taint of the West’ (380), yet fashions his persona from gangsta-rap and Hollywood mafia flicks, while his brother, Magid, is brought up in Bangladesh to be educated in the old ways, only to return as a hyperbolically ‘pukka Englishman’ (407). Such unexpected twists in histories and cultural identifications exemplify the novel’s valorization of contingency and coincidence above discourses that are seduced by the mirage of pure ethnic origins and so easily slide into various kinds of temporally-oriented fundamentalism, most noticeably in Millat’s rejection of secular modernity for the essentialist doctrinalism of KEVIN. Just as it sympathizes and jokes with Samad’s fear that cultural diversification necessarily entails the corruption of an imagined purity that leads him to send Magid to recover a past and tradition that was never his own – an attempt at social engineering that is spectacularly unsuccessful – so too does White Teeth satirize Marcus Chalfen’s genetic engineering of the FutureMouse© (a fiction that has a real-life counterpart in the laboratory-bred OncoMouse™).29 The text’s final episode, which weaves together several important plot strands, involves the launch of this high-profile genetic experiment, a mouse designed to live for precisely seven years and to suffer predetermined genetic defects, including a susceptibility to develop tumours. The novel’s criticism of technoscience, which is explicitly linked with Nazism’s eugenicist policies through the dubious figure of Perret, centres on its desire to organize an inauthentic future according to rational principles, the manufacturing of a patented, programmed identity foreshadowing more extensive forms of control that close down the vibrant haphazardness of social life. In this sense, Smith’s millennial worldview differs sharply from the apocalypticism of Hortense Bowden, whose certainty of the

Zadie Smith

45

impending world’s end depends on a single-track teleology comparable with the genetically predestined life and death of the FutureMouse©. It is through the chaotic vicissitudes and random permutations of cultural collisions and intertwinings that the excesses of illiberalism are challenged, but also the sterile liberal imaginings of a fairy-tale Britain, satirized as ‘Happy Multicultural Land’ (465). The escape of Marcus Chalfen’s experimental rodent in the confusion of Millat’s attempted shooting of the ‘blasphemous’ genetic scientists is certainly an ambivalent one – after all, the mouse’s future is, to some degree, already encoded – but its triumphant getaway leaves the novel’s ending crucially unresolved. In doing so, Smith offers up a continued faith in the gradual, accidental changes and unexpected conjugations of everyday life as key to the liberation from entrenched positions for a polyethnic world in which neither the social engineering of multicultural experimentation nor discourses rooted in religious or racial purity will be adequate for the life experience or reflective scepticism of characters such as Irie, Smith’s surrogate younger voice in the novel. The attempt at a progressive visualization is present in Smith’s conception of future history – ‘In a vision, Iris has seen a time, a time not far from now, when roots won’t matter any more because they can’t because they mustn’t because they’re too long and they’re too tortuous and they’re just buried too damn deep. She looks forward to it’ (527). Whether this is an end to identity politics, Smith’s only authenticity to survive the twentieth century, is less clear, except inasmuch as it arguably envisages the eclipse of claims to authenticity within identity politics. In this, it seems to take up the baton from Rushdie’s hymn to mongrelization in The Satanic Verses and convey it to a logical conclusion of sorts where identity is the opposite of purity – so infinitely divisible as to become indivisible, in her allusion to Zeno’s paradox (465–6). In this respect, it is interesting that Fred Botting’s reading of the text situates it in the wake of Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ study – an intertext alluded to by one of Smith’s chapter titles, where the book’s commitment to self-determination, ordinary possibility and gradual social transformation against those scientific or theological forces that would eliminate randomness merely rehearses the ‘victory of liberal democracy’.30 For Botting, White Teeth’s messy pluralism is little more than the achieved spectacle of consumer capitalism, its various histories and stories, migrations and returns, temporal displacements and loops, a kind of narratorial sleight of hand that conceals the immobility of its setting. Here, the hyperreal logic of simulation supersedes modern relationships, and

46

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

the new millennium into which the FutureMouse© escapes is thoroughly mediatized and marketized, a kind of projective blankness where humanity’s freedom from the material anchors of land, kinship and history, its postcolonial, diasporic hybridity, inaugurates a new order where the only momentum is the homogenizing circulation of commodities. Whether or not one agrees with Botting’s interpretation, and we would suggest he understates the subtleties of Smith’s novel, it does prompt some interesting questions about what history now means in a contemporary setting that is littered with the theoretical debris of various ‘posts’. For Fredric Jameson, globalization can be seen in terms of cultural pluralism and cross-fertilization, which it is easy to endorse and welcome, or in terms of economic realities, which turn the concept into a name for something troubling and unwelcome.31 These are not exclusive; indeed, they are arguably inextricable, but Smith has been accused in White Teeth of taking the former view, with too little recognition of the latter. White Teeth is a local novel about global flows since the Second World War, with which it begins, acknowledging histories that both shape and are (re-)shaped by contemporary lives. Its message that no one is pure does not mean that no one is poor and the historical prejudices that lie behind the realities of globalization seem underplayed by the comic mode Smith adopts, but her subsequent novels, like Hari Kunzru’s, confirm that social comedy is an appropriate mode in which to ironize the contemporary, perhaps the only mode as Rushdie and Kureishi suggested, but that it is also an uncomfortable one for a post 9/11 world. Smith’s position, like that all of the authors in this book, takes us back to Said’s idea of political worldliness: (a) what role as a producer of criticism and historical knowledge does the Western intellectual play given the background of Occidental domination and oppression of the non-Occidental world; (b) what is the meaning of community given the construction and abuse of Others – women, blacks, Palestinians, etc. – and given also the sustained production of alienating technological discourses (colluded in by liberal intellectuals) in the advanced capitalist world? To this cluster of problems the critical consciousness can respond only with: the study of history, a belief in rational knowledge, a strong sense of what political life is all about, a set of values grounded absolutely in human community, democracy, and faith in the future. Thus do theory and praxis become aspects of each other, when intellectual work more closely approaches political worldliness.32

Zadie Smith

47

Two Experiments: The Autograph Man and On Beauty The Autograph Man appeared in 2002. Divided into two parts, with an epilogue and a prologue, it charts the passages rites of Chinese Jewish north Londoner Alex-Li Tandem, the professional autograph collector of the title. In the prologue, the young Alex and two friends attend a wrestling match with his father Li-Jin at the Royal Albert Hall. This is a building of great cultural significance, explicitly ‘ERECTED FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF THE ARTS AND SCIENCES’, but currently being used for neither, because wrestling is not an art or a science – ‘It’s TV’.33 Like his teenage friends, Mark Rubinfine and Adam Jacobs, Alex ‘deals in a shorthand of experience. The TV version. He is one of this generation who watch themselves’ (2). At the wrestling match, Alex  also meets another boy, Joseph Klein, who turns him on to philography – a love of writing. Like the ‘International Gestures’ that pepper the book, collecting autographs thus becomes the ultimate expression of a soundbite culture and the cult of celebrity where aura masquerades as authenticity. Literalizing Alex’s shift to a surrogate filiation within popular culture, Li-Jin collapses and dies from a brain tumour at the end of the bout as Alex runs to get the autograph of the wrestler ‘Big Daddy’, in a flight from the real to the artificial that characterizes Alex’s life until he returns to the memory of his father at the narrative’s close. Book I, set 15 years later in Mountjoy, the fictional London suburb in which Alex lives, is subtitled ‘The Kabbalah of Alex-Li Tandem’. The chapters proceed according to Alex’s version of his friend Adam’s diagram of the Jewish mystical tradition: ten circles in strange formation. These were, according to Adam, the ten holy spheres, each containing a divine attribute, one of the sefirot. Or else they were the ten branches of the Tree of Life, each showing an aspect of divine power. Or they were the ten names of God, ten ways in which he is made manifest. They were also the ten body parts of Adam, the first man. The Ten Commandments. The ten globes of light from which the world was made. Also known as the ten faces of the king. Also known as the Path of Spheres. (93)

A professional autograph man, the 27-year-old Alex is immersed in a lucrative economy of images where everyone he knows is obsessed with celebrity value, commodified identities and potential forgeries. Alex has the form of ‘tunnel vision’ called ‘fandom’ (215), and partly in consequence, also has ‘no love, no transportation, no ambitions, no faith, no community, no expectation of

48

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

forgiveness or reward’. While there is too little love or purpose in  Alex’s life, ‘There is so much fame in the world’ (202). Alex is also writing a mammoth book that divides the world into all things Jewish and all things Boyish (88–91). Similarly, he has a long-term girlfriend in Adam’s sister Esther, children of ‘black Harlem Jews’ living in Mountjoy, but is fixated on the Russian-Italian-American star, Kitty Alexander, an aging 1950s Hollywood actress to whom he has written weekly for 13  years.34 Book One ends with the arrival of the first response he has ever received from Kitty – an autograph. Alex, who now trades in sign(ature)s of authenticity, is inevitably personally enthralled and professionally intrigued by this token of existential identity, but necessarily unsure if it is genuine. Smith’s second novel is a more meditative and personal one than her first, but once more interrogates the identity codes that ironize discourses of authenticity and problematize ethical agency. Caught in a more populist vein of the mediated realities that we will see Hari Kunzru depict, it does not aim towards broad social critique though it is a satire on an individual interpellated by popular culture within a generation that Smith thinks needs repeatedly reminding, ‘YOU ARE NOT WATCHING TV’ (181). Arguably, Alex’s voice is muted by the mediating presence of the third-person narrator, who speeds knowingly from one shorthand cultural observation to another. The book is as inventive as White Teeth, but in a very different way, presenting more believable characters, but fewer sociocultural perspectives. Its range of literary as well as contemporary cultural reference is extraordinarily wide, drawing on the writings of authors such as Woolf and Kafka, included in Alex’s Kabbalah, but also, for example, T. S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land is a touchstone for Smith’s depiction of twenty-first century twenty-somethings succumbing to emotional virtual reality and in as much need of spiritual regrowth as Eliot’s Londoners. Book II has a similar structure to book I. Called ‘Roebling Heights: The Zen of Alex-Li Tandem’, it is modelled on the ‘ten bulls’ of Zen Buddhism, representing steps in the realization of Alex’s ‘true nature’, presumably in recognition of his Chinese patrilineal heritage after the Book I’s emphasis on his matrilineal Jewishness. Showing that he has not developed far, Alex guiltily uses the ‘phrase routine procedure, copied from a long-running television show’ (267) when Esther undergoes an operation to remove her pacemaker. Instead of engaging with this real-life situation, Alex flies off to New York, ostensibly for an autograph fair, but actually to chase down a celluloid fantasy and uncover the reality of Kitty in Brooklyn, in one of the many postmodern Eliotic quests within the novel.

Zadie Smith

49

When they are taking a cab from the airport, Alex’s travelling companion remarks that he feels he has been in New York before. Alex responds with a list of movies, to which the cab driver then adds several more, with the implication that Hollywood has made the American metropolis instantly familiar to every cinema-goer, such that it is inevitably both pre-known and radically unknowable. ‘Everyone’s been here before’ is Alex’s final comment on the matter (226), emphasizing the totality of his ontological immersion in screen reality in distinction from the life experience he repeatedly turns away from. The exchange highlights the narrative’s interest in vicarious living, but also how almost nothing in the book is expressed directly; feelings and thoughts have to be mediated and the individual has to be aware of their mediation, such that ‘It is impossible these days to follow a man or quit a job without an encyclopedia of cinematic gestures crowding you out’ (268). It is also a world in which value is traded in a currency of celebrity and worth is gauged by the individual’s proximity to fame: Alex’s autograph friends are immensely impressed when he meets Honey Smith/ Richardson, a Zen Buddhist prostitute notorious for having been caught having sex with a celebrity (the contemporary obsession with the commodification of sex is discussed in Smith’s Introduction to the collection Piece of Flesh). Honey enlightens Alex as to what celebrity means: More people know you than you know people . . . see, that’s all it is. Ain’t nothing more than that, really. It’s for amputee people, fame. I mean, people who’re missing something vital. That’s all. I’ll tell you what’s messed up too. In my neighbourhood, I’m a celebrity. Do you believe that? In certain areas of Brooklyn, I’m Elizabeth Taylor. (255)

Together, Honey and Alex track down Kitty, who, presumably in an allusion to Gloria Swanson’s role in the film Sunset Boulevard, is now a recluse shielded from the world by a controlling ‘fan’ called Max. They persuade Kitty to return with Alex to London, where he can make her rich by auctioning her autographs and letters. The auction raises even more money than expected because a television news story conveniently, but falsely, claims that Kitty has died, increasing her market value through simultaneously raising her profile and adding to her cultural capital by announcing her transition from mortality to immortality. In terms of Smith’s scaffolding to support the structure of the novel, Alex meanwhile is progressing sufficiently along his Zen steps away from egotistical behaviour to make the gestures of altruism that will take him closer to enlightenment. Having helped Kitty, he donates his £15,000 commission to a fellow autograph man who

50

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

is in hospital – Brian Duchamp, an individual seemingly named to epitomize the meeting of popular culture and the artistic tradition. It is in this way that The Autograph Man moves beyond White Teeth, by allowing Alex to develop as a human being, to grow in wisdom in ways denied to the characters of Smith’s first novel. Overall, Smith’s second novel addresses the effects of popular culture and of the legacy of the American century on the imagination of characters who, in other respects, point both to older religious traditions and a miscegenized future, itself rooted in centuries of history that predate the discovery of the Americas. The novel’s opening set-piece at a wrestling match staged in the imperial surroundings of the Royal Albert Hall intimates the struggle for identity in a twenty-first-century world that sits at the heart of Smith’s most ambitious and most schematic novel, in which ancient tradition collides with modern media in drawing up a map of the future. The book ends with Alex realizing that the 10th branch, the place at the Crown of the Kabbalah, has to be taken by the hero of his life, his father – the person who most loved him and whose memory he has neglected in pursuit of signs of fame in a world of transience and artifice. The epilogue is Alex’s Kaddish, a Jewish prayer recited in the daily ritual of the synagogue and by mourners at public services after the death of a close relative. With this ritual performed, Alex may be able, the book implies, to come to terms with the loss of his father and make some commitments in his own life, his journey through the Barthesian Cool America of fame having brought him home, again in an Eliotic gesture among others, to recognize it for the first time. On Beauty has a strong debt to a contemporary of Eliot’s, E.  M. Forster. Smith places herself in the humanist tradition by modelling the structure of her narrative on Forster’s 1910 Condition-of-England novel, Howards End, and examining whether its liberal values, cultural critique and narrational approach apply well to a twenty-first-century transatlantic world. The Autograph Man has concentrated on an individual journey and its tighter focus may appear an attempt to contain the bagginess many critics found in White Teeth, most notably James Wood in a 2001 attack that labelled fiction, including David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Smith’s novel, as ‘hysterical realism’. Smith responded to the criticism in a way that suggested The Autograph Man, to appear in 2002, represented a working out rather than a move away from the self-conscious cleverness and arch comedy Wood decried after 9/11 – ‘He says: tell us how it feels. Well, we are trying. I am trying. But as DeLillo dramatized (again, in White Noise), it is difficult to discuss feelings when the TV speaks so loudly; cries so

Zadie Smith

51

operatically; seems always, in everything, one step ahead. Yet people continue to manage this awesome trick of wrestling sentiment away from TV’s colonisation of all things soulful and human’.35 The writers Smith included here are those Anglo-American intellectual writers that she argues trade in both knowledge and feeling, Franzen, Moody, Foster Wallace, Eggers and Lorrie Moore in the United States, Toby Litt, Lawrence Norfolk, Diran Adebayo, Tibor Fischer in the United Kingdom. But if any sea change was to be expected in her own writing, it would be in her admiration for non-anglophone writers – ‘I find myself more and more struck by controlled little gasps of prose, as opposed to the baggy novel. I admire the high reverence for the blank page shown by Kafka, Borges and Cortázar.’ Explaining where she disagrees with Wood and why she selects writers who are not necessarily noted for their displays of feeling, she says that Cortázar writes as if every extra word is a sort of sacrilege. The instinct is almost religious, as if to say: and if it is to be stained, proceed slowly and with the utmost care. Which seems the exact opposite of the American/English instinct: I must cover the world in my shit immediately. Is it this reverence, this care, this suppression of ego that Wood wants to see from us? It is what I want to see from myself, but whether I will manage it is another matter. It will take sympathy - a natural instinct, a sentimental reflex - but it will also take empathy, which I still contend is largely a matter for the intellect. Your brain must be up for it, for making that necessary leap.36

In her ongoing concern with authenticity and the prevalence of identity politics, there is a question here as to whether Smith exhibits this marriage of sympathy and empathy that she traces in her response to Wood, in her only novel written since then. Signalling its indebtedness, On Beauty commences with a pastiche of the initial line of Forster’s Howards End, swapping emails for Forster’s letters between Helen and Margaret Schlegel. Smith sees herself as a micro manager of a writer – someone who does not have a grand plan, but who frets over questions of perspective and tone until they emerge from an obsessional process of writing and reshaping, which partially explains the attraction of borrowing a structure from another novel. On Beauty is a tripartite novel and its first section takes its title from the two families at its centre, the Belseys and the Kippses. These are akin to the Schlegels and Wilcoxes of Howards End, reinforcing a sense that it is the wellplotted realist tradition more than anything contemporary that functions as

52

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

Smith’s prototype for the character-driven novel of social anatomy.37 On Beauty is informed by the same ethical emphasis Forster places on the priority of human relationships and the importance of connection between people, between actions and consequences, between culture and economics. A transatlantic novel bringing together cosmopolitan families, it is mainly set in the fictional Wellington College, near Boston. Howard Belsey is the white English liberal and atheist professor at Wellington, whose arch rival is the Christian and conservative Trinidadian, Monty Kipps. Their children have a brief affair when Jerome Belsey works as an intern for Kipps, and falls for his daughter Victoria. Nearly a year later, Kipps comes to work at Wellington College and the two families socialize. A friendship develops between Mrs Carlene Kipps and Mrs Kiki Belsey, who is gifted a painting by Carlene via a scrap of paper, in homage to the bequest of Howards End by Ruth Wilcox to Margaret Schlegel. Like Forster, Smith seems interested in the fine lines of social and sexual behaviour, couched in terms of discussion of work and money as well as art and culture, or more accurately aesthetic and cultural differences. Where Beethoven features as shorthand for Arnoldian values in Howards End, Smith places Rembrandt at the centre of her consideration of authenticity and value.38 Part Two of the novel is entitled ‘the anatomy lesson’ and named after the 1632 Rembrandt painting, ‘Dr. Nicolaes Tulp Demonstrating the Anatomy of the Arm’ – ‘that clarion call of an enlightenment not yet arrived’ whose moral message for Smith is Nosce te ipsum – ‘Know thyself ’ (144; contrasted soon after with the Belseys’ daughter’s motto, ‘know thy enemy’, 148). This middle section develops among the characters’ public and private knowledge of a relationship between Howard and another tutor, Claire Malcolm, that will test the Belseys’ beliefs in the primacy of the ethical conduct of personal relationships, as Howard’s liberal values are challenged by the conservative Kipps at the college and his professional standing feels diminished alongside Monty’s growing reputation, based on published work. It is also apparent that the rigorous high-mindedness and institutional professionalism they aspire to evince in their academic lives is not matched by a similar attentiveness in their personal ones, causing grief to both families as their conservative and liberal personae are shown to be all but irrelevant to their personal conduct. The Belseys’ other children, Zora and Levi, become friends with a poor African American man called Carl, but while Zora champions him as a prime candidate for the inclusion of local gifted non-students in college classes, Levi enshrines street-rapper Carl as the template for an authentic black identity to which he aspires – ‘Levi treasured the urban the same way previous generations

Zadie Smith

53

worshipped the pastoral’, Smith writes in distinction from the elevation of the countryside in Howards End, slowly disappearing before the ‘red rust’ of urban expansion (79). The third part of the novel is entitled ‘on beauty and being wrong’. This is an allusion to an intertext that Smith found that raised interesting political philosophical questions about the ethics of aesthetic effects – Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (1999). Scarry was also in the English department of the university when Smith was a Harvard Fellow in 2002–03, working on issues of ‘morality and the novel’, after the name of an essay by D. H. Lawrence. The debt to Scarry, and to an extent, to Forster and Lawrence, lies in the development of Smith’s thinking about morality and its relation to aesthetics, particularly to literature, but transposed onto fine art and Rembrandt in the novel. Beautiful objects, houses, paintings, books and ideas, as in the ideals of liberalism or the idea of a university, can have a grandeur and a value beyond that invested in them by a mercantile society. Smith’s bedrock in the novel is thus that the worth of human relationships lies in seeing life ‘whole’, in the words of Forster’s Margaret Schlegel, not in fragments. It is here that Forster’s influence on Smith might be most interesting for her interest in authenticity and identity politics across the three novels. Despite its limitations, many acknowledged by Forster, Forster’s vision at the end of Howards End is for a future time when social class is reconciled with social class, the yeomanry of the country with the intelligentsia of the city, the Basts, Wilcoxes and Schlegels all contributing to the future condition of England. Updated for the twenty-first century, each of Smith’s novels is underpinned by Forster’s comic realism and also social vision in a narratorial style that is self-conscious and semi-apologetic in its hierarchy of discourse. On Beauty is only more explicit in building the model into the architecture of the novel. Smith takes the rainbow vision evident in Lawrence and Forster and imbues it with a different sensibility, realizing the often unacknowledged socio-logic of modernism’s exiles and émigrés in the ethnic light of postcolonial diasporas. Not only substituting ethnicity for class, where Lawrence and Forster continued the focus of Hardy’s ache of modernism on the country and the city, the incursions of red rust over the land, Smith’s spotlight is almost exclusively thrown on the metropolitan and the proliferation of hyphenated identities that provide commonality in the shared investment in the urban locus, following present routes over past roots. Such a vision is not of the ‘Happy Multicultural Land’ Smith thinks is at present endorsed by public discourse, but nor is it akin to the recognition of global economic and identitarian realities that Hari Kunzru’s work traffics in. While Smith’s novels reach towards a future where identity can

54

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

be free from past and present appeals to actual and perceived hierarchies, we will see that Kunzru’s work implies that the noise around signals of identity allows for viral transmissions that might result in increasingly inaccurate, but authoritarian policing of borders as identity both dissolves into a multiplicity of imitable signs and is insisted upon as monolithic by governments and agencies. As Frank Kermode noted in his review of the novel, behind both On Beauty and Howards End ‘is an idea of the novel as what Lawrence called the one bright book of life – a source of truth and otherworldliness and prophecy.’39 Which is partly to say that in Smith’s fiction, the aesthetic is entwined with the ethical, as broadly understood – the question of how to live and act. Each of the Belseys ponders this question, contesting the claims of aesthetics against street politics (Levi), intellect (Zora), religion (Jerome), aging (Kiki) and radical liberalism (Howard). All the Belseys, like the male Wilcoxes, are for most of the novel blind to beauty. This might be compared with Lawrence’s view, which Howard Belsey would castigate as naive – ‘art is treated all wrong. It is treated as if it were a science, which it is not. . . . Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness and atonement – meaning at-oneness, the state of being at one with the object. . . . I can never look on art save as a form of delight’.40 The connection between beauty and being just is also presented in Forster, for example when Mrs Wilcox bequeaths her house to Margaret Schlegel because Margaret appreciates the beauty of the house, unlike Henry Wilcox, and is herself about to be made homeless. Scarry presents this as the impulse to share beauty, which is proposed as a democratizing and progressive influence. Consequently, one argument in Scarry and Smith is that the university has a place in arguing for what is aesthetically valuable, but that Humanities departments abrogated this responsibility during the theory wars of the 1980s and 1990s – ‘The banishing of beauty from the humanities in the last two decades has been carried out by a set of political complaints against it’41 (Scarry 57). Howard adduces critical theory in his classroom sermon to ‘recast Aesthetics as a rarefied language of exclusion’ (155). Beauty is not associated with truth for Howard, or with moral aspiration, but with hierarchy and elitism.42 His intellectualization refuses to countenance the pleasure of the text, seeing it as at best idealization, and at worst, depoliticization. Scarry instead sees the relationship that beauty has with education, in that the liberal arts might seek to lead the student towards aesthetic appreciation as an impetus to creativity and replication – ‘Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people.’43

Zadie Smith

55

Scarry is not the only recent critic interested in the retrieval of aesthetics after the onslaught of theory on affective readings, because they seem resistant to analysis.44 Several writers have turned to a post-theoretical recuperation of the Aristotelian notion of aesthetics within an ‘education of the emotions’, of the kind that is present in Howards End, where Leonard Bast willingly seeks to learn and Henry Wilcox is unwillingly taught. Smith’s novel argues that in the academy, Howard’s sceptical attitude to art’s affect has led to a Forsterian ‘muddle’, where professional orthodoxy has become divorced from the realities of life. Thus, for all his denial of the place of beauty in education, Howard admits to Kiki, ‘It’s true that men – they respond to beauty . . . it doesn’t end for them, this . . . this concern with beauty as a physical actuality in the world – and that’s clearly imprisoning and it infantilizes . . . but it’s true and . . . I don’t know how else to explain’ (207). Howard’s inability to see the hypocrisy of his professional denial of beauty finally leads Kiki to upbraid him for his theoretical dogmatism – ‘everyone’s scared to speak in case you think it’s clichéd or dull – you’re like the thought police. And you don’t care about anything, you don’t care about us’ (393). The university setting of On Beauty, a crucible for liberal values, also says something about Smith’s comfort zone. After several fellowship and teaching positions, she joined the creative writing programme at New York University as tenured professor in 2010. Though she has not produced a new novel for five years, Smith has become an important commentator and practitioner, bringing the novel’s concerns into a twenty-first-century frame of reference. Using a distinctly contemporary perspective and idiom, Smith writes from a vein of the comic novel that descends through Austen and Forster, with their shaping narratorial voices. She agrees with ‘the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s strong Aristotelian claim’ that literature can invite truly altruistic instincts, ‘genuine acknowledgement of the otherness of the other’.45 Smith is a comic novelist of serious moral intent and her novels reiterate a transcendent faith in ethical living, including the practical possibility of ‘the ethical alchemy of beauty’ in Elaine Scarry’s words.46 Her first novel was intended to be a book about a man who ‘lives a good life by accident’; On Beauty is authorially intended to be about ‘personal ethics’, and according to David James, all her books have been concerned with ‘her own parable of ethical consequence’.47 This is the way in which Smith believes fiction usually works, not a peculiarity of some authors – ‘Fiction always  applies for that same “fine awareness”, which Henry James recognised we must employ in order to fully inhabit our ethical lives; to become,

56

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

as he put it “richly responsible” ’.48 Smith sees this in Austen, Eliot, James and Forster, but also in Pynchon and DeLillo. In her own writing, it accentuates the role of the third-person narrator who seeks to ask the reader questions about the characters and situations presented, to seek engagement with the moral dilemmas or ethical choices made by Howard or Zora. This makes of the novel a theatre, in which the characters elicit sympathy or scepticism for the reader, and Smith as much as Forster presents characters whose certainties are their weaknesses. While Alex is taken on a sentimental education, Smith’s text seeks to both show and tell the reader that Howard’s subscription to critical politics leaves him well-versed in the arguments against aesthetic values, but deeply flawed and unfeeling in his personal life, dogmatic and blinkered in his professional. Her novels have thus increasingly come to be concerned with the education of feeling, where her model is not only Howards End, but other Forster’s novels, such as A Room With a View – ‘[Lucy Honeychurch] starts off very certain, and in her certainty she lies to George, she lies to Mr Beebe, to her mother, to her brother Freddy and the servants. She tells all of them that she is certain of her own heart and mind. But it is by a process of growing less “certain”, less consistent, less morally enthusiastic, that she moves closer to the good she is barely aware of desiring’.49 Alex finds Esther and reconnects with the memory of his father while pursuing a quest for what Smith presents as proper feeling although he thinks he is in search of his screen idol. Howard Belsey is led back to his wife Kiki through his errors in agency, not through his adherence to an abstract intellectualism. This is Smith’s indebtedness to the rainbow vision, to seeing ‘the whole of everything at once’, as Mr Beebe reveals to Lucy Honeychurch or Margaret Schlegel tries to show Henry Wilcox. It is, in other words, what Lawrence decided fiction was for in ‘Morality in the Novel’, that ‘The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live, as nothing else can’.50 As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, Smith is well versed in arguments over directions for the novel and is a champion of more avant-garde writers among her contemporaries, yet she herself appears a more conservative writer, despite the debts her novels show to the narrational experimentation of modernism and the playfulness of postmodernism. Her contribution to the twenty-first-century novel rests on an attempt to reconnect ethics and aesthetics, drawing on comic and social realism to address a globalized world of social and ethnic complexity. Along with other contemporary writers, such as Rachel Cusk, Smith participates in an attempt among novelists to reconcile the consolatory power of form with a more interrogative, reflexive and therefore more dynamic,

Zadie Smith

57

sense of fiction’s capacity to stage ethical scenarios and invite ethically responsive readings. She therefore argues that ‘the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretative possibility of those actions. Narrative itself is the performance of that very procedure’.51 What these writers are arguably simulating at the level of plot and replicating as a condition for readerly engagement is what Iris Murdoch calls moments of ‘unutterable particularity’,52 to reconcile this demonstration of individual aesthetic apprehension with responsibility, by highlighting the ethical ramifications of the way characters behave rather than think.53 After postmodernism, such fiction seeks to renew the novel’s capacity to intensify attention to the aesthetic dimensions of ordinary experience, and to interrogate the ethical implications of inhabiting those dimensions anew. Sometimes more evident in her criticism than her fiction, in Smith’s approach to writing the present, there is also a concern for materiality, resisting the impulse to transcendence and personal redemption that characterizes the white middleclass novel for a more rooted and realistic social engagement with the plurality of identity politics over the search for an authentic self. As John J. Su notes, in On Beauty, Smith eschews the language of hybridity and roots that has characterized British multiethnic discourse since the 1980s for a consideration of humanistic aesthetics that Dominic Head has argued is, in fact, also present in White Teeth, though overlooked in many critical discussions.54 This envisages a fiction that can move away from the rhetoric of the twentieth century towards an understanding of a globalized world that is steeped in diasporic experience; and in this context, Su and Head both cite Gilroy’s notion of ‘planetary humanity’.55 Before considering what kind of writing the strategic universalism of planetary humanism might encompass, through a discussion of David Mitchell’s fiction, we will look in the next two chapters at contrasting perspectives, which describe the less optimistic effects of the contemporary world situation on individuals set against, respectively, the macro scale of global movements and the smaller scale of local communities.

Notes 1 Lev Grossman, ‘All-time 100 Novels’, Time, 16 October 2005. 2 See Padmaja Challakere, ‘Aesthetics of Globalization in Contemporary Fiction’, in Literature and Globalization. Ed. by Liam Connell, and Nicky Marsh (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 227.

58

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

3 Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000), p. 309. Further references to this edition will include the page number in parentheses after the quotation. 4 Padmaja Challakere, ‘Aesthetics of Globalization in Contemporary Fiction’, in Literature and Globalization. Ed. by Liam Connell and Nicky Marsh (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 229. 5 Like White Teeth, the examples we give here will be taken from novels that are located, at least in part, in London. The degree to which fictions perceived as novels of the nation are almost invariably set in London is certainly notable and seems indicative of an unhealthy division between the capital and regional novel, which shades into perceptions of the central and peripheral, if not parochial. 6 Ryman originally developed the book as a website at http://www.ryman-novel. com/ [accessed 10 October 2012]. 7 ‘Desi’ means indigenous, local or pure, and comes from the Sankrit word ‘deśa’, which translates as ‘country’ or ‘land’. 8 Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 50. 9 See Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000), especially pp. 353–69; for a more involved discussion of this new global body, also see Hardt and Negri’s Multitude (2004). 10 Zadie Smith, NW (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012), p. 219. Further page references will be given in the text. 11 Hari Kunzru, Transmission (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005), p. 119. 12 Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel (London: Continuum, 2004), p. xii. 13 In The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction 1950–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Head notes the ‘falsity of the realism/ experimentalism dichotomy’ (p. 10). 14 John Lanchester, ‘A Capital Fellow’, Culture Section, The Sunday Times, 19 February 2012, pp. 8–9. 15 Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009), p. 76. 16 E.g., see Dominic Head, ‘Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: Multiculturalism for the Millennium’, in Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. by Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew (Cambridge: Polity 2003), pp. 106–19, and Bart MooreGilbert, ‘Postcolonialism and the ‘the Figure of the Jew’: Caryl Phillips and Zadie Smith’, in The Contemporary British Novel. Ed. by James Acheson and Sarah C. E. Ross (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 106–17. 17 Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009), p. 81. 18 Changing My Mind, p. 83. 19 Ibid., p. 93. 20 Ibid., p. 34. 21 Ibid., p. 93.

Zadie Smith 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43

59

Ibid., pp. 38–40. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 291. Ibid., p. 84. Peter Childs discusses the motif of teeth in Smith’s novel in Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 212–14. For a discussion of Smith’s FutureMouse© in relation to Donna Haraway’s exploration of the transgressive implications of such ‘transgenic’ creatures in Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouse™ (London: Routledge, 1997), see Dominic Head, ‘Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: Multiculturalism for the Millenium’, in Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. by Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), pp. 106–19; see also Fred Botting, ‘From Excess to the New World Order’, in British Fiction of the 1990s. Ed. by Nick Bentley (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 21–41. Botting, ‘From Excess to the New World Order’, p. 28. Fredric Jameson, ‘Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue’, in The Cultures of Globalization. Ed. by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 54–77 (pp. 56–7). Edward Said, ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims’. Social Text, 1 (1979), 7–58 (p. 56). Zadie Smith, The Autograph Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002), p. 21. Further page references will be given in the text. Smith writes of her own childhood adoration of Katherine Hepburn in her essay ‘Hepburn and Garbo’, included in Changing My Mind, pp. 153–67. ‘This is how it feels to me’, The Guardian, 13 October 2001, http://www.guardian. co.uk/books/2001/oct/13/fiction.afghanistan [accessed 14 February 2012]. Ibid. Zadie Smith, On Beauty (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005). Page references will be given in the text. This is despite Smith’s structural equivalent for Forster’s Beethoven concert being a ‘Mozart in the park’ event. Frank Kermode, ‘Here She Is’. London Review of Books, 6 October 2005, p. 13. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Making Pictures’, in Selected Critical Writings. Ed. by Michael Herbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 292. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Duckworth: London, 2000). p. 57. For an extended discussion, see Fiona Tolan, ‘Identifying the Precious in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty’, in British Fiction Today. Ed. by Philip Tew and Rod Mengham (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 128–38. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Duckworth: London, 2000), p. 3.

60

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

44 For examples, also see Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (2000) and John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas (eds) The New Aestheticism (2003). 45 Zadie Smith, ‘Love, Actually’, The Guardian, 1 November 2003. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/nov/01/classics. zadiesmith [accessed 10 December 2010]. 46 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Duckworth: London, 2000), p. 113. 47 This quotation from Smith is cited in Philip Tew, Zadie Smith (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2010), p. 117; David James, ‘The New Purism’. Textual Practice, 21:4 (December 2007), 687–714. 48 Zadie Smith, ‘Love, Actually’, The Guardian, 1 November 2003. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/nov/01/classics. zadiesmith [accessed 10 December 2010]. 49 Ibid. 50 D. H. Lawrence, ‘Morality and the Novel’, in Selected Critical Writings. Ed. by Michael Herbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 178. 51 Zadie Smith, ‘Love, Actually’, The Guardian, 1 November 2003. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/nov/01/classics. zadiesmith [accessed 10 December 2010]. 52 Iris Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good’ p. 51. 53 Murdoch says in ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’ that ‘Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize, the minute and absolutely random detail of the world’, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, ARK, 1985), p. 86. 54 John J. Su, Imagination and the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 106, and Dominic Head, ‘Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: Multiculturalism for the Millennium’, in Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. by Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), pp. 106–19. 55 See Paul Gilroy, Between Camps (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 2000), pp. 327–58. Gilroy’s planetary humanism draws on Fanon and Cesaire to consider the role of diaspora in contemporary identity politics, in distinction from European humanism’s involvement with fascism and racial discourse.

2

Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru’s writing is fascinated by the porousness and speed of the contemporary world, where identity is uprooted from its geographical soil and dispersed through the circuits of global capital. But if the fluidity and mobility of subjecthood is a recurrent figure, so too are the oppressive structures of empire, and in his first novel, The Impressionist (2002), Kunzru draws a twenty-firstcentury portrait of the pre-conditions of globalization, spanning continents and crossing ethnic borders. At its centre is the figure of an intercontinental shapeshifter in an age obsessed with fixed national and racial identities. Both technological capital and the fraught legacies of colonialism motivate Kunzru’s early writings in the ways that his novels explore the formation of identities and questions of individual agency in regimes of exploitation and control. In particular, the changing form of imperialism – understood as an evolving global structure through which subjectivities are produced and managed – provides the backdrop for the migrant lines of displacement scoring the narratives of Kunzru’s debut, The Impressionist, and its follow-up, Transmission (2004). A revisioning of the identity politics of colonial discourse from the era of globalization, The Impressionist demonstrates the absurdity of a world divided according to racial hierarchies and ethnic classifications, its Kashmiri protagonist continually transforming himself as he is interpellated by the institutions of the British Empire and the dominant social forms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kunzru’s second novel, Transmission, turns its focus away from the imperialism of European authority and capitalist expansion towards contemporary modes of sovereignty – the global order of transnational corporations, non-governmental organizations and media conglomerates that Hardt and Negri suggest constitutes a new imperial paradigm. In  2006, Kunzru produced a slim book of five short stories entitled Noise, which tease away at the cybernetic intertwining of bodies and machines in today’s networked and mass-mediated world, and thus enquire into the very nature of

62

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

the human. One story has a man gradually replace his all body parts with plastic and robotic components, including a final unit to complete his transformation; another comprises the installation instructions for a universe creation utility and a third is told by an immaterial pan-religious ‘guardian angel’. Most sinister is a piece told by a security employee of an edutainment infrastructure corporation bidding for post-war cultural contracts to a government who have pitched the United States against a ‘Canada’ where they have ‘no tradition of human rights and follow a cruel and judgemental religion’.1 The impression, cemented by the middle story of a time of ‘Decadence’ that resonates with comparatively high living of the baby boomer generation in the West, is of a diminution of human agency before corporate, technological or preternatural forces. As well as his fictional writings, including two more recent novels, Kunzru has been an outspoken figure on the subject of economic and cultural globalization that informs his work, producing articles and making public statements on issues of social justice, immigration, technology and democracy. In addition, he is an active member of the English PEN association, an international community of writers and readers that campaigns for freedom of expression as a fundamental human right.

Subjectivity: The Impressionist Contrasting sharply with the emphasis on the continuation into the multiethnic urban present of Forsterian personal values that we discussed in Smith’s work, for Kunzru, questions of literary value have been inseparable from politics – his high-profile refusal of one of Britain’s most established literary accolades – the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize – for The Impressionist was prompted by the sponsorship of the award by the Mail on Sunday, which, according to Kunzru, was responsible for pursuing ‘an editorial policy of vilifying and demonising refugees and asylum-seekers’.2 Though the furore created certainly helped to raise the author’s profile, with Kunzru’s refusal generating a good deal more media coverage than that afforded to the eventual winner – Mary Laven’s novel, Virgins of Venice – Kunzru felt that allowing The Impressionist to be connected with a publication that fostered xenophobic attitudes would be hypocritical considering the novel’s challenge to the legitimacy of racial definitions. In many respects, however, precisely what The Impressionist exposes is the difficulty of avoiding the effects of typification and transcending the layers of expectation

Hari Kunzru

63

and prejudice that have accreted over hundreds of years of colonial contact and cultural exchange. Indeed, despite the fact that Kunzru’s novel journeys back to the early decades of the twentieth century, the narratorial viewpoint is inflected by the pressures of our contemporary hyper-mediated world, where the rapid circulation of signs, images and sensations means that representations take place in a penumbral field of mutually constitutive discourses and intertexts. This is to follow Peter Morey in suggesting that The Impressionist, like a number of other British Indian novels, such as Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989), displays an acute awareness of postcolonial subjectivity’s ‘overdetermination by textuality’, which views identity as a performance that is inevitably shadowed by a multitude of other performances.3 In common with many recent novels that explore the shaping of identity by imperial literary and cultural hegemony, Kunzru’s text articulates the hybridity of post/colonial relations in opposition to the notions of authenticity and purity ambivalently fostered by imperial discourse. The overcoded, ‘already-read’ quality of the British Indian relationship – intensely conscious of its dialogic association with the discursive field of framing representations that precedes the encounter between self and other – made manifest in works such as The Buddha of Suburbia, The Satanic Verses and The Enigma of Arrival, not to mention earlier novels by writers such as J. G. Farrell and Paul Scott, frequently becomes a site of ironic subversion, as the shortfall between stereotypes or imagined constructions of people and places is exposed. In opening this ironic gap, however, these novels are, at the same time, continually drawn back to the spectre of a truer and more essential self that may be rehabilitated, and though Kureishi’s text emphasizes the performativity of ethnic and cultural identities, the problem of how to resist the objectifying gaze of white Britain remains central. What differentiates The Impressionist from these novels is that its layering of intertextual allusions and self-consciously derivative characters, incidents and narrative modes suggests both an uneasiness with the interstitial, in-between position of the migrant subject and a deep scepticism towards the possibility of producing authentic subjectivities independent of the assumptions and desires of others. The novel opens with a scene of miscegenation and mixity that has mythic resonances, a tableau of alchemical intermingling that – by bringing together the superficially monolithic structures of opposed culture, ‘race’ and nation – mimics the insinuation of histories that colonial contact at once performs and represses. Three years after the turn of the twentieth century, Ronald Forrester, who is, appropriately, a forester conducting ordnance work for the British

64

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

government in southern India, is caught in a monsoon with the daughter of a wealthy, high-caste Kashmiri Pandit and her train of bearers, who are travelling to Agra to consummate her arranged marriage. As she lies in her dripping-wet palanquin, Amrita’s opium-soaked daydream of an apocalyptic deluge that will drown the earth and save her from her narrowly circumscribed future takes on concrete form as the party are engulfed by a torrent that the rains force down the mountainside. Miraculously, both Forrester and Amrita survive and take shelter in a cave that is figured as a womblike space of creation, where the accreted detritus of the old world has been swept away, and in a reversal of the sacred doctrine of the First Man, Amrita is transfigured into the ‘mother of the new’.4 This scene is suffused with the exoticism of imperialist perceptions – to Forrester, the naked, mud-smeared body of Amrita resolves into the vision of a ‘native mother goddess’, whose ‘wild tangle of hair’ and ‘black-tipped breasts’ exude an untamed and intoxicating sexuality that seems so much more real than the ‘milk-white and rosy-cheeked’ girls who populate his fantasies (13). Of course, Amrita’s earthy eroticism is no less filtered through colonial stereotypes than these ‘picture-postcard’ English roses, for the commingling of fertility and licentiousness in the spectacle of the native female pervades any number of metropolitan cultural productions. Indeed, Forrester ‘wonders if he has created her, sculpted her with his sleepless nights and his meanderings through the desert’, and thus whether what he sees is merely the projection of his own desire for a black sexuality lacking the inhibitions of the demure English (14). But rather than simply offering the exoticizing perspective of the white male, the novel also replays the encounter from Amrita’s point of view, through which the paleness of Forrester’s skin likewise becomes an object of fascination and concupiscence. The frisson associated with the transgressive combination of blackness and whiteness is a motif that runs throughout the text – signalling in the central progenitor-figure, For(re)ster, a part of Kunzru’s own acknowledgement of Forsterian cultural heritage in a very different way from Smith– and as Amrita and Forrester succumb to their scandalous sexual union, each unaware of the other’s name, they are rendered down into potent icons of skin colouration. Even as racial and ethnic boundaries are reinforced, however, the text simultaneously undermines them – the mingling of sweat and dust turns their entwined bodies ‘an identical red-brown colour. The colour of the earth’, revealing both the arbitrariness of colonial regimes of discrimination, and setting against its hierarchical modes of classification a primal moment of syncretism and mixity (15).

Hari Kunzru

65

The novel is organized around the opposition between such tropes of transgressive interpenetration and the rationalism of Western modernity that produces fixed, intractable categories precisely in order to justify the existing hierarchies of power. For instance, the figure of the Scottish missionary, Reverend Macfarlane, is emblematic of the incestuous self-legitimation that underpinned the knowledge production of imperialism’s civilizing mission. His research follows in the footsteps of early psychologists and anthropometrists such as Francis Galton by arranging spurious racial typologies into a quasi-divine ladder of Being. It is hardly surprising that at the top of this list, he places the white European, whose superiority and ‘civilisation’ now has ‘scientific’ credence. In many ways, then, the opening section of The Impressionist can be considered the portrayal of the fear that threatens to deconstruct such rigid hierarchies – for the mingling of different races signifies the contamination of the West’s dream of its own purity, effacing the very dividing lines that structure its putatively ontological authority. If it is against this repressed fear – not the dread of absolute otherness, but a lingering awareness of the kind of ‘remote kinship’ that Conrad’s Marlow finds so unsettling5 – that the rhetoric of colonialism constructs itself, it is the undeniable presence of such syncretic border crossings within post/colonial space that subverts the hegemony of a homogeneously defined subjectivity. The novel’s central character and product of the brief encounter between Forrester and Amrita, Pran Nath, encapsulates these themes of hybridity and mongrelization, the revelation of his mixed biological background radically overturning his sense of identity.6 To be a ‘blackie-white’ in Kunzru’s novel is to have one’s humanity irredeemably tainted, a visible source of shame that attests to a biological inferiority circulating through contaminated blood (46). While this marks a dangerous blurring of the boundaries between settler and native, undermining a binarism fundamental to imperial power, the doubled identity of the Anglo-Indian is conceived as an atavistic pollution, both by the Indians who construct themselves as indigenous and the English themselves. When it comes to light that the milky white skin of Amrita’s son is not, as it was assumed by his Kashmiri relatives, somatic evidence of the family’s ‘superior blood’, but rather the legacy of Pran’s secret English paternity, the boy is summarily cast out of his palatial home in Agra by the Brahmin Pandit who believed himself to be Pran’s father (21). It is interesting to note the potency, but also the instability, of the transcendental signifier of whiteness, operating simultaneously as a guarantee of authenticity and the preservation of deep-rooted lineage, but also, paradoxically, as shameful marker of foreignness. Although the family’s perspective, couched

66

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

in the rhetoric of Indian nationalism, neatly reverses the imperial gaze that aligns whiteness with an inherently superior English identity, it can only do so from within the same paradigms of a homogeneous and intransigent nationhood, Pran’s expulsion representing the crude barring to an Indian subjectivity that appears incommensurable with a similarly arbitrarily-defined Englishness. Unused to having to fend for himself, Pran becomes a shape-shifter in order to survive, inhabiting and jettisoning a string of different incarnations as a mode of self-preservation, attempting to blend, chameleon-like, into his surroundings. After being expelled from his home, Pran is forced to beg ignominiously, and unsuccessfully, on the streets outside its walls. Desperate for food, he finds work in a brothel run by hermaphrodites (or hijras), who force him to wear women’s apparel and give him the name Rukhsana. The atrophy of Pran’s selfhood leaves its ‘residue dispersed in a sea of sensation, just a spark, an impulse waiting to be reassembled from a primal soup of emotions and memories’, and this process of dissolution and coagulation is repeated throughout the novel (65). Pran is subsequently sold to a representative from the princely state of Fatehpur, becoming the pawn in a web of conspiracy and political blackmail that is intended to ensure the succession of the Raja’s profligate younger brother. In particular, Pran’s role is to employ his waiflike charms and newly acquired sexual skills to compromise the position of the powerful British resident, Major Privett-Clampe, who has the power to decide who will be inaugurated as heir to the kingdom. Finally making his escape during a carefully stage-managed hunting expedition that descends into farcical confusion – having been tutored in the English language and aspects of culture by the smitten Major – Pran becomes caught up in the aftermath of the 1919 massacre in Amritsar, where a peaceful gathering framed as an anti-colonial demonstration results in the slaughter of hundreds as General Dyer orders his troops to open fire on the crowd. Pran’s unusually pale skin allows him to pass as an English child through the chaos, and fearing for his life in a climate of elevated racial tension, he is able to slip aboard a train heading south to Bombay. Exhilarated by the association of his whiteness with Englishness, and attracted to what he sees as a superior way of life, Pran cultivates his English persona and disguises traces of his Indian origins, fascinated by the assurance and rigidity of a society ‘built according to the blueprints of class and membership that are almost noble in their invariance’, in preference to his own ungrounded and formless mode of existence (251). Taken in by a Christian missionary – the aforementioned enthusiast of anthropometry – Pran is re-christened Robert,

Hari Kunzru

67

though he is also known by other appellations – the Reverend’s wife who, unlike her husband, is intoxicated by the exoticism of Indian spirituality, gives him the Hindu name Chandra, while to the habitués of the city’s red-light district where Pran finds work on the side, he is Pretty Bobby (222). As Pran’s passing and posing as ‘an Englishman’ becomes increasingly sophisticated, allowing him to gain entry to the most exclusive hotels and soirées, so too do his desires to possess and inhabit the mythical abstraction of England become ever more fervent. The opportunity to complete his transformation arrives when a young Englishman who he has briefly met is killed during nationalistic rioting; Pran steals the man’s steamer ticket and personal documents, all the necessary paperwork to legitimate his new identity as one ‘Jonathan Bridgeman’. Upon reaching England, Pran attends a minor public school, graduates to Oxford, and embarks on an ill-fated love affair with Star Chapel, the daughter of an anthropology don. Hoping to win her favour, Pran agrees to assist on the professor’s anthropological expedition to a remote part of Africa, and despite their relationship coming to an abrupt end, Pran embarks on his final journey – this time away from the metropolis  and towards a confrontation with the blackness that he has repressed for so long. As this brief précis of the novel makes clear, Pran’s initial banishment from his home and expulsion from a ‘pure’ Indian ethnicity, impelled by the discovery of his true father’s ‘blinding alien whiteness’, signals the beginning of the text’s destabilization of any fixed notion of subjectivity (64). Significantly, the astrologer employed by Pran’s father to compile a chart for his new-born son foresees a future that is a latticework of random mutations and puzzling discontinuities: The chart was strange and frightening. The stars had contorted themselves, wrung themselves into a frightening shape. Their pattern of influences had no equilibrium. It was skewed towards passion and change. To the astrologer this distribution looked impossible. Forces tugged in  all directions, the malefic qualities of the moon and Saturn auguring transmutations of every kind. It was a shape-shifting chart. A chart full of lies. (26)

On one level, the novel launches a familiar postcolonial attack on Manichean identity structures and essentialist fetishizations of purity. Indeed, it is precisely the total authority, yet absolute meaninglessness, of the construction of ‘race’ structuring the colonial relationship that allows Pran to exploit its contradictions – his almost flawless mimicry of the English indicates both the precariousness

68

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

of a cultural identity that may be acquired and exchanged for another, and the equally fabulated quality of racial discriminations. Pran’s disconcerting impersonations make manifest the hybridity of forms produced in the contact zone of imperialism – when he arrives at the mission in Bombay, Reverend Macfarlane is troubled by the boy’s ambiguous appearance as ‘white yet not white’ (234), immediately recalling Homi Bhabha’s near-identical formulation of the radically split status of the colonial subject – yet, these masquerades are not directed towards overturning existing structures and discourses.7 Quite the opposite, for Pran’s motivation is less a wish to mock the colonial master than a product of his adulation for Lily Parry – a strikingly beautiful socialite whom he believes to be English – whose radiant skin appears ‘indecent in its whiteness’ and holds out the promise of entry into the venerated centre of the Empire (258). Pran’s clumsy wooing campaign is founded on the pretence of his Englishness, but when he finally comes face to face with the object of his affection, Lily is entirely unconvinced by the façade and vigorously rebuffs his overtures. It emerges that, like Pran, Lily is concealing the secret of her own status as a ‘half-and-half ’, and the momentary slippage of her clipped English accent to reveal unmistakeably Indian tones demonstrates that her prominent social standing is upheld by a performance even more highly polished than Pran’s (265). Both Lily and Pran seemingly appropriate the racialized discourse of empire, where appearance is a resonant, yet perversely empty signifier of difference that constantly segues into the tyranny of essence and purity. Although their strategy is a subversive one, this is far from its intention; Lily and Pran’s struggle towards the white Englishness at the apex of the evolutionary ladder only has meaning so long as existing colonial structures are retained and the mutability of identity concealed. There is an obvious paradox here that goes to the heart of the colonial project itself – while the Europeans legitimated their civilizing mission through recourse to a constructed ethnic hierarchy, the process of civilization itself suggested that cultural identity could be exchanged and acquired, and therefore the very notion of authenticity became deeply problematic. Indeed, Pran’s assumption of the biography of the murdered Jonathan Bridgeman attests to the instability of the codes of ‘race’, culture and nation. The novel in many ways works on the overlap between ‘passing’ and ‘parsing’ – Pran’s attempts to become the perfect Englishman are themselves based on textually transmitted, circumscribed and practised versions of Englishness. Pran learns poetry by rote and improves his accent and grammar with PrivettClampe, gains a working knowledge of English history from Macfarlane,

Hari Kunzru

69

and upon arriving in England, keeps a notebook in which he records his observations and compares them with the social and cultural texts that he has learnt about second-hand. By modifying his behaviour and continually refining aspects of his infinitely malleable self, Pran becomes a consummate imitator of Englishness, albeit of the kind that allows him to blend in with the England of Public School and Oxbridge. Though in London, he briefly glimpses another version of Englishness that is entirely new to him – a form that, ‘washed out and poor’, is not exported to the colonies – Pran also finds what he believes to be ‘the originals of copies he has grown up with’, and thus a recognizable context into which he is able to insert himself (299). Indeed, he merges with the fabric of middle-England so convincingly that his love affair with Professor Chapel’s daughter, Star, unravels precisely because she sees him as being ‘exactly like everybody else’, rejecting him for being simply too conventionally English to satisfy her eclectic, cosmopolitan tastes (415). Pran’s success at once confirms the inevitably performative nature of identity, and is predicated on the fact that others also think in terms of, and recognize, the stereotypes that he embodies, intimating how an entire empire is built on impressions. On the level of form and content, The Impressionist reflects both the polyphonic multiplicity of its protagonist and his interpellation through the textual codes of imperialism. Empire is portrayed as a vast machine in which subjectivities are produced, fixed in place and re-circulated, and Kunzru’s novel ­suggests the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility, of extricating colonial representations from the networks of texts and images that inevitably mediate our understanding of the imperial system. The novel reproduces the hollowness and absurdity of the rituals on which colonial power depends; yet, for the individuals who are enmeshed in this structure – flattened into symbols or ciphers – it seems that identity may only be affirmed through the endless reproduction of such performances. Indeed, as Pran’s carefully constructed persona begins to dissolve in the African desert, he dreams that ‘cables and wires are strung between every object and person in the darkness around him, forming a single interconnected mechanism’, in which he is also implicated and whose complexity outstrips his attempts to understand it (469). However, whether it is possible to escape from the cat’s cradle of the imperial system is, as we shall see, a point about which Kunzru’s text remains equivocal. In tracking the diachronic arc of its protagonist’s life history – which is also a spatial movement from the imperial periphery to the metropolitan centre – Kunzru’s novel plays with the evolutionary trajectory of the Bildungsroman, although Pran’s growth and maturation is far from the conventional spiritual,

70

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

moral and psychological development that gradually leads to an accommoda­ tion between self and society. The novel is split into distinct sections that bear the  name of his present incarnation, this formal discontinuity mimicking the ruptural transformations of Pran’s identity. Rather than cohering into the unified whole that is the apotheosis of the humanist subject, Pran spawns incommensurable versions of himself that are connected together only in memory, as opposed to a more organic rootedness in a wider cultural history. To emphasize the disjunctive, happenstance nature of his journey, each part of the novel tends towards the tumultuous collapse of the moorings that have momentarily anchored Pran in place – the tiger hunt that transforms into a massacre or the anti-British riot in Bombay are rites of purgation out of which he emerges in a new form.8 On the one hand, the fragmentation of Pran’s biography into a disjointed series of subject positions – each of which disturbs the stability of the conventional elements through which selfhood is constituted – does offer the liberating vision of identity as a ‘continuum’ that is also an incessant process of becoming (251). This is in tune with the declaration of the sexually polymorphous Khwaja-sara – the eunuch who oversees the harem at Fatehpur – that ‘we are all as mutable as the air’ once released from the spectacular tyranny of the body and the conventions of language (82). But, on the other hand, as has been already suggested, Pran’s transformations are politically ambiguous, at once posing a challenge to the essentialist discourse of empire, yet couched in its ideological terms. Freedom from the fixity of a rigidly-demarcated subjectivity constitutes, in part, a defiance of the reductive concepts of purity and authenticity; yet, seen from another side, it forecloses the very possibility of forging a stable location from which to articulate any kind of resistance. For Pran-as-Bobby, the cultural transit to the Englishness of Jonathan Bridgeman, colonized to colonizer, is unnaturally smooth because he has no moorings in the world, no ontological connection to place or history: How easy it is to slough off one life and take up another! Easy when there is nothing to anchor you. He marvels at the existence of people who can know themselves by kneeling down and picking up a handful of soil. Man was created out of dust, says the Reverend. But if men and women are made of dust, then he is not one of them. If they feel a pulse through their bare feet and call it home, if they look out on a familiar landscape and see themselves reflected back, he is not one of them. (285)

As if composed of ‘some other element’, Pran feels that ‘he has nothing of the earth in him at all’, his feet skimming just above its surface and leaving no trace

Hari Kunzru

71

upon it. Pran’s avowal of a deracinated, in-between position projected beyond the time/space of the nation permits him to jettison the baggage of ethnicity and indigeneity, but the extent to which this liminal zone may offer itself as a site of dwelling is doubtful, and whether this journey can ultimately have a destination is a question that resounds throughout the novel. The trajectory of the narrative gradually homes in on the imaginative possession of the imperial centre that has hitherto been little more than a mental abstraction mediated through the teachings of Pran’s several father figures. Despite the fact that Pran’s understanding of England and Englishness is textually preconceived, his physical and cultural transit into the metropolis is some way short of a triumphal homecoming. Confronted by the vision of the white cliffs of Dover as he gazes from the deck of the steamer, Pran ‘tries to feel what the others feel’, but as much as his English persona is able to convince others of its authenticity, he is never able to inhabit it fully, neither properly inside or outside the culture whose grammar and social codes are meticulously transcribed into his notebooks (293). The postcolonial preconception of ‘home’ as a gateway towards re-inscription and re-invention, rather than a repository of intransigent essences and origins, is thus at once taken up by Kunzru’s novel and qualified by it. On one level, Pran never really arrives in England; or, more accurately, his journey brings into question the very notion of a deep, underlying connection between identity and territory. Indeed, the seamless cultural translation made achievable by Pran’s ontological mutability forecloses the very possibility of settling anywhere, for there can be no terminus to this process, and no final destination. The hairline gap that exists between Pran and his partially invented second self – a gap that remains crucially visible to himself – means that his enfoldment into the mythical body of the imperium only obtains at the level of spectacle. Of course, as a creature that is described as existing ‘only when being observed’, to what extent there is an interior density concealed beneath Pran’s layered selves, or merely an echoing vacancy, remains equivocal (347). On the other hand, Kunzru’s unease with the psychological and political implications of an identity defined solely through its performance is clear; despite the authority of exterior form in the novel, the flattening of identity into a depthless style or image to be appropriated and exchanged seems less a mode of freedom than the sweeping away of the material staging grounds of resistance. The liberating possibilities of endless transition expounded by the Khwaja-sara find their logical extension in the absolute erasure of grounded subjectivity – all that is solid melts into air, as in Marx’s assessment of capitalist modernity.

72

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

It is significant that at the very moment Pran-as-Jonathan feels he has tunnelled into the inner sanctum of the Empire’s metropolitan space – conceiving of himself, as he dines at the Chapels’ table, at the hallowed centre of imperialism’s ‘huge apparatus of name-conjuring and name-arranging’ – his ‘arrival’ as an Englishman is almost immediately unsettled (375). In an ironic twist, Pran’s amorous advances towards Star, his archetypal English rose, are rejected in favour of the allure of the black Jazz pianist, Sweets, who in contrast to Pran’s staid Englishness, Star informs us, has ‘soul’. Star’s understanding of precisely what this denotes is less than coherent, interweaving economic dispossession, historical suffering and ‘primitive emotions’ with her own modern desire for novelty and distaste for conformity; and her exoticization of blackness, in fact, only replicates a colonial discourse that associates it with primitiveness, albeit now with a positive spin (415). Pran’s response is a desperate attempt to renounce his English construct and reprise his hidden status as both foreigner and colonial victim – ‘though I may not be as black as him, I’m blacker than you think’ (416) – but he cannot jettison the mask of whiteness that he has cultivated for so long. Just as Star is blind to the ambiguities of Sweets’s blackness, which is produced, consumed and articulated in the context of a dominant metropolitan culture, Pran cannot disentangle his assumed whiteness that constitutes more than simple pigmentation from the hybrid conjunction of histories. And it is this realization of the instability of the ladder of ethnic superiority in whose image Pran has re-made himself – founded on the rigid demarcation of race with ‘something shining and white at the top, and sticky blackness at the bottom’  – that unleashes the colonial nightmare of in-differentiation – ‘this terrible blurring is what happens when boundaries are breached. Pigment leaks through the skin like ink through blotting paper. It becomes impossible to tell what is valuable and what is not’ (417). No longer able to calibrate the shifting signifiers of blackness and whiteness, the scaffold around which Pran’s life has been organized begins to collapse in on itself. In a drunken haze, he stumbles into a Parisian cabaret bar whose performers entertain the tourists by recycling facile ethnic stereotypes. The evening’s main act is, appropriately, an impressionist whose skilful mimicry throws into relief Pran’s own decentred, dislocated existence, and reflects back at him the grotesque tableau of an identity seen as a succession of hyper real performances: One after the other, characters appear. One with a deep baritone voice. Another with a little cap and a hectoring way of talking. Each lasts a few seconds, a minute. Each erases the last. The man becomes these other people so completely that

Hari Kunzru

73

nothing of his own is visible. A coldness starts to rise in Jonathan’s gut, cutting through the vodka. He watches intently, praying that he is wrong, that he has missed something. There is no escaping it. In between each impression, just at the moment when one person falls away and the next has yet to take possession, the impressionist is completely blank. There is nothing there at all. (419)

While this is certainly not a vision of cultural hybridity as Homi Bhabha conceives it – evoking instead the concept of identity as a chain of discontinuities, each assimilating the last – it does take the joint postcolonial and postmodernist assault on the imperial/humanist subject to its logical conclusion. If Pran’s various transformations attest to the arbitrariness and fragility of the dividing lines of ‘race’ or culture, they also disallow the possibility of any kind of return to the language of essences as a means of anchoring selfhood in place. Pran’s loosening of all material ties to place or history permits him to make himself ‘giddily, vertiginously new’, but this comes at the price of stripping his incarnations of any ontological weight (298). As Simon During observes, the potential for the perfect translation of one element, whether linguistic or cultural, into another form elides the residue of specificity created through the play of sameness and difference that weaves one society into another, and serves to flatten coeval identities and histories beneath the concepts of the dominant regime.9 During’s ethical appeal to what remains unexchangeable and untranslatable in the economy of imperialism carries particular force in the contemporary era of capitalist globalization and its networks of commodified images and diasporic flows, through which the stability of roots is displaced by the transience of routes. Just as the contingency and radical relativism of postmodernity produces an ambivalent politics that can only maintain the structure of the status quo, Pran’s own impermanence means that there is no solid foundation for him to resist the objectifying gaze of the colonial other. As gradually becomes clear to Pran after arriving in the alien environment of Africa as part of Professor Chapel’s anthropological expedition, to be in an endlessly provisional state of becoming is a mode of existential evasiveness: Becoming someone else is just a question of changing tailor and remembering to touch the bottom lip to the ridge of teeth above. Easy, except when becoming is involuntary, when fingers lose their grip and the panic sets in that nothing will  stop the slide. Then becoming is flight, running knowing that stopping will be worse because then the suspicion will surface again that there is no one running. No one running. No one stopping. No one there at all. (463; italics in original)

74

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

Although assimilation is precisely what Pran aspires to, by fading inconspicuously into the background, he cannot intervene in the political changes that happen all around him. With no stable position to occupy, and no investment in any larger social movement outside himself, he is as distanced from the Hindu nationalism that erupts in the ‘Pretty Bobby’ section as the anti-fascist demonstrations led by his school roommate, Paul Gertler. Indeed, Gertler’s marginal location – he is both a Jew and a communist, a combination that leads to his social ostracism at Clopham Hall, and his unjust expulsion – provides an ironic contrast to Pran, who seeks only to divest himself of his marginality in order to be absorbed into the cultural centre. The anti-Semitism that Gertler struggles against is another face of the exported colonial racism that Pran experienced in India, yet Pran’s overwhelming desire to conform leads to what he later regards as a ‘betrayal’ of his friend when he joins a number of other students in attending a fascist political rally (385). Whether the profoundly disturbing blankness that the impressionist’s own cabaret act reveals may be viewed as a simple nothingness or a void where regeneration may be possible is a tension towards which the novel moves in its final part. Pran’s journey from Europe to Africa represents an uncanny re-encounter with the colonial difference that his masquerade as Jonathan Bridgeman attempted to protect himself against, where ‘objects that England made familiar, ledgers and ink pads and uniforms, have been thrown back into strangeness’ (424). The acute sense of foreignness that Pran experiences during his sojourn in Paris is magnified dramatically in a West Africa that offers few cultural reference points or a recognizable context into which to mould himself. The passage to the metropolitan centre that occupies much of Kunzru’s novel – the homing-in of the colonized subject that consolidates the dream of Britain as a transcendental site of wholeness – is thus accompanied by a reverse trajectory, the recursive movement of the white man to the Empire’s periphery. Unlike the early parts of the novel set in India, where Englishness is regarded as an exotic object of desire, here, the ambivalent overlap between colonial mimicry and mockery observed by Homi Bhabha becomes ever more insistent. The ‘sharp and oversized’ features of the topiwearing dolls purchased by Pran at the port at which the anthropologists first arrive are suggestive both of their crudity and of their intention to caricature the imperial master (425). Similarly, during the tribal dance performed by the Fotse people, whom Professor Chapel’s team have come to study, traditional portrayals of the tribe’s ancestors give way to impersonations of the white soldiers and missionaries, understood by

Hari Kunzru

75

the Fotse as ‘European spirits’ whose presence has catastrophically disrupted their collective history (455). Though, in the latter instance, the mimicry of the colonizer is less explicitly parodic, in both cases, the spectacle of cross-cultural translation has a profoundly unsettling effect as a typified Englishness is offered back for the consumption of the imperial gaze. Led by the professor, whose research into the social structures and customs of the Fotse has built his prestigious academic reputation, the group of anthropologists and cartographers set off from the coast towards the fictitious region of Fotseland. The expedition travels into the interior aboard a rusting steamer whose name, the Nelly, is one of the many intertextual allusions to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that shadow Kunzru’s depiction of their riverine journey. As in Conrad’s text, the party make stopovers at various trading-posts to gather supplies, but Kunzru’s novel explicitly distances its representation of the landscape from the impenetrable density of Conrad’s Africa that threatens to crush the imperial subject: Jonathan is waiting to be swallowed by the towering forest trees, to feel he is approaching the primeval heart of a little-known continent: this is what happens when you go up an African river. Yet instead of closing in, the country opens up, the skies widening and the foliage on the banks thinning to tracts of low acacia scrub. (437)

Indeed, in spite of the professor’s assertions that the Fotse have remained entirely cut off from the wider world, unpolluted by modernity and therefore in a condition that is ethnically ‘pristine’ – very much the holy grail of imperial anthropology  – their association with primitiveness is continually undercut (364). Far from the primordial isolation imagined by Conrad, Fotseland is a place that is in flux, combining both indigenous traditions with rapid development – the group are astonished to learn of the ongoing construction of roads and telephone lines, attracting hundreds of people to the area in search of work. Instead of being presented as those of primitive savages, the Fotse’s customs and social structure prefigure twenty-first-century modes of social organization, specifically that of the network. The tribe are described as ‘highly decentralised, and more or less deregulated’, neither living in villages nor having an obvious system of local government (460). In addition, the Fotse elder who nurses Pran back to health towards the end of the novel reveals that the tribe believe themselves to be part of a ‘new society’ named after an indigenous plant called ‘needle grass’ whose underground roots have ‘no beginning and

76

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

no end’, thus reflecting the morphology of their society ‘which has no head, no centre, which runs under the earth of Fotseland, and when the time is right will shoot up and destroy sorcery forever’ (475). The term ‘rhizome’ is never explicitly used to denote this non-hierarchical social structure, but Deleuze and Guattari’s influential concept – a foundation for much cultural research into networked subjectivities and various kinds of global flows – is certainly being gestured towards by Kunzru’s text.10 While this society has no single centre of governance, like Hardt and Negri’s theorization of their contemporary ‘Empire’, it is organized around a complex web of economic transactions, negotiations and obligations that the Fotse term ‘Fo’, and whose practise underpins and structures their relationships and customs.11 The Fotse, then, are shown to be twenty-first-century consumers avant la lettre, not least because the principle of Fo also encompasses abstract commodities, such as the potential outcomes of future Fo transactions, on which it is possible to speculate in order to generate capital. Much like the hyper real exchanges of the futures market – and the very name of the tribe and their goddess, Neshdaqa, playfully allude to the titles of the British and American stock exchanges (the FTSE-100 and the NASDAQ) – wealth in Fotseland is primarily defined virtually. But if the decentred and deregulated form of the Fotse’s needle-grass society seems to offer the revolutionary potential of a mode of life liberated from colonialism’s binary logic, this is tinged with the contemporary reader’s awareness of how the modulation of planetary space from a gridded to a networked structure has enabled capitalism to penetrate ever more deeply into social life.12 As we shall see when the discussion turns to Kunzru’s second novel, Transmission, the Fotse’s non-hierarchical mode of sovereignty becomes a far more dubious proposition when placed in the context of technocapitalism’s global networks, where power operates through channels that have become similarly flexible and contingent. The notion of Fotseland as a fertile source from which new formations of the present may emerge provides one way of reading the gradual atrophy of Pran’s selfhood that is staged in the final section of The Impressionist – the deconstruction of the subject positions produced by colonialism. As the expedition journeys deeper into the rocky interior of Fotseland, Pran becomes increasingly disorientated, the tremulous contours of his identity beginning to dissolve. Pran is overtaken by an impression of radical decentring during his two-hour stint on watch, a consciousness of being not so much of being ‘lost’, which implies the existence of an existentially complete self to be found, as ‘dispersed through the darkness’ (443). However, it is after he splits up from the group, leaving the

Hari Kunzru

77

camp on a futile endeavour to gather census data on the Fotse, that the lack of fit between Pran and Jonathan Bridgeman grows impossible to bear. Pran’s awareness that his journey has brought him to the edge of his assumed persona is intriguingly framed as an ultimate lack of belief in the cultural abstractions that serve to stitch it together: Why count the Fotse? Who could be upside down? Of course he knows why – for God and England and the Empire and Civilization and Progress and Uplift and Morality and Honour. He has it all written down in his notebooks; but though it is in his notebooks, it is not in him. He finds that he does not really care about any of those words. He does not feel them, and that lack of feeling marks the tiled bottom of the pool. Jonathan Bridgeman can go so deep but no deeper. (462)

Unable to continue his allotted duties, Pran abandons the professor and the rest of the group and wanders aimlessly into the wilderness, shedding his equipment as he goes, and before long, exhausting his supply of water. Suffering from feverish hallucinations and overcome by sunstroke, a barely-conscious Pran is dimly aware of the group of Fotse tribesmen who stumble upon his body and carry him into a cave, where a nameless sage performs a rite of healing that involves wrapping him in a cocoon of mud. This scene, which has parallels with the conclusion of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, is suggestive of an exorcism of the ‘evil’ taint of whiteness that has both possessed Pran’s body and threatens to spread into Fotse society (475). Yet, the ‘uterine darkness’ of the cave simultaneously figures this as a moment of rebirth – Pran’s encasement in the clay mould inside which all becomes ‘molten, formless and in flux’ evokes the potent image of a crucible or chrysalis where the rigidities of imperial structurings are annihilated. There are perhaps echoes, too, of Wilson Harris’s concept of the generative void of the cross-cultural imagination, where apparently monolithic categories, such as cultural differences or the diachronic binary of past and future, interpenetrate and consume each other.13 But what remains when Pran is stripped of his carefully refined identities – the tangled bundle of experiences, memories and desires that constitutes a self – is perhaps inexpressible in the language of imperialism, described by the text, in turn, as an ‘abyss’ and a ‘monstrous disorder’ (477). Pran’s final metamorphosis, then, is a profoundly ambiguous one. The apparent expulsion of what the Fotse understand to be a ‘European spirit’ leaves behind a nameless and nomadic figure who wanders across the African desert with ‘no thoughts of arriving anywhere’ (473; 481). Whether the deracinated traveller that Pran becomes has submitted to an eternal condition of unbelonging, since ‘now

78

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

the journey is everything’, or has reconnected with a mode of being that either subsists beneath or is tangential to the colonizing impetus of modernity is a moot point (481). Amongst other things, colonialism involves the catastrophic rupturing of indigenous histories, therefore the ‘braille of scar tissue’ on the now nameless Pran’s neck is richly symbolic – the patterns left on the skin by the Fotse ­mystic’s brand are intended to irrevocably reconnect the body ‘to the time and place these marks are being made, so that wherever he may drift or fall asleep, he will always be in relation to this instant’ (481, 477). Colonialism itself has obviously been rejected in some sense here, although its scarring is still visible; yet, the political connotations of this gesture remain ambiguous, and it is unclear whether the scene represents a prelude to the construction of a new subjectivity uninflected by the modernity with which colonialism is imbricated, or reveals an eternally-silent aporia in consciousness that is the legacy of colonial contact. The novel’s portrayal of the Fotse is significant in this respect, for their desire to return to a time of wholeness before the fissure created by imperialism reflects Jonathan’s ceremonial transfiguration. However, the attempt is made by the Fotse to forever destroy the alien white sorcery that has invaded their ancestral lands, and to suture this wound in their history is fraught with a sense of futility – the creeping incursion of modernity is evidenced by the nearby construction of roads and power lines, and the perception that change has pervaded everything suggests an epistemic leap that cannot be undone. The Fotse’s realization that ‘perhaps time is something that, once broken, cannot be put back together again’ signals the impossibility of discarding Western modernity and forging a cultural identity that is not in some way permeated by imperial subjectivity (479). And yet, if this represents a coming to terms with the fact of cultural hybridity, taking the reader back to the novel’s opening moment of colonial syncretism involving Forrester and Amrita in the cave, then what is implied by Jonathan’s deconstructive journey and transformation into the nameless figure apparently outside of the post/colonial structure? While this may appear to constitute a reactionary retreat from the challenge of postcoloniality, culminating in the logic of reverse ethnocentrism that replaces an inauthentic imperial subjectivity with the fantasy of a recovered pre-colonial being, this would seem at odds with the novel’s challenge to notions of cultural purity. To again invoke Homi Bhabha, particularly his essay ‘ “Race”, Time and the Revision of Modernity’, it is possible to read the ending of Kunzru’s novel as the confrontation between the universalizing impetus of imperial modernity and an alternative temporality that it has both interrupted and attempted to assimilate as an adjunct to its own narrative – summoning the terms ‘­pre-modern’ or

Hari Kunzru

79

‘pre-colonial’ to produce a sense of ontological belatedness that marks colonial superiority.14 Jonathan’s transformation is not an escape, but a movement into the space of difference that allows a universalized modernity itself to undergo the process of translation. From the perspective of this other temporality, the enveloping imperial construction of humanity and ‘civilisation’ founded on ideologies of rationalism and progress is revealed to be an ‘upside down’ interruption, a reversal of the colonial gaze in order that it may see itself from the space of otherness (p.  462). By opening up the temporal disjunction that modernity includes only to mark its own authority, Kunzru’s novel gestures towards the forging of a space where the colonized subject, and indeed the colonial signifier of whiteness, may be rearticulated in other forms than those delimited by the structures of post/colonialism. This new site of enunciation cannot be entirely outside the post/colonial, for it depends on its terms to affirm its own sense of difference, but it perhaps operates as a space-clearing gesture that recognizes the mutually constitutive histories of colonialism and anti-colonialism as shaping forces of the global age while looking towards the development of new modes of historical understanding. What precise form these modes will take, however, remains as indistinct as the closing image of the traveller receding into the desert horizon.

Global Noise: Transmission While it is similarly concerned with questions of identity under modern forms of sovereignty, Transmission has been described by Kunzru as ‘a straighter attempt to talk about the condition of under a globalized world’.15 His second novel thus engages a contemporary digital arena that has, at its core, a dynamic model of subjectivity that is a more dislocated and dispersed version of his first novel’s self-conscious experimentation with intertextuality and exoticism within imperial identity. The colonial system from which Pran disentangles himself by mutating into a version of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad has, in the present-day setting of Transmission, itself taken on a new shape, generating twenty-first-century conceptions of identity and difference alongside accelerated networks of communication and control, a regime that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have given the appellation ‘Empire’. If The Impressionist tracks its protagonist’s fluid movement through the relatively stable structures of the imperium – occupying the various spaces and subject positions that the colonial world makes available – Transmission explores the

80

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

mediation of identity in the contemporary context of global capitalism, which is sustained by considerably more mobile flows of commodities, images and diasporic bodies across the globe. As outlined in the Introduction, Hardt and Negri argue in Empire and its companion piece, Multitude, that a new logic of structure and rule has emerged to replace the imperialism of the modern era, demanding the formation of radically new discourses in order to both comprehend and challenge it. Transformations in systemic processes of capital accumulation, production and labour, most obviously expressed by the informatic and prosthetic technologies of the new media, have, they propose, led to the integration of discrete territories into a single spatial totality, giving rise to a cohesive world system composed of open, expanding frontiers and striated by rapid exchanges of data across material space. The declining sovereignty of the nation state system, which is increasingly unable to regulate the global flows of economic and cultural material that crisscross its fixed territorial borders, is one of the foremost symptoms of the emergence of Empire. In contrast to the regime of European colonialism, which managed economic expansion and cultural difference by setting up rigid, if always fragile, channels and barriers between centre and periphery, Empire is a smooth, fluid space of rhizomatic interconnection where there is neither an ontological ‘outside’ nor governing centre. These networks constantly forge new global links that accelerate the mobility of capital and open innovative, but precarious, channels of ever more profitable circulation. The various processes brought together under the sign of globalization, then, unleash the spectacle of unlimited contact and exchange – the unfettered circulation of cultural productions, information and affects across an unbounded global space. Whereas in the age of colonialism – which was a gridded system of relatively stable hierarchies and binary oppositions – mobility, contingency and hybridity operated subversively, today, these are constitutive elements of a regime that ruptures every determinate ontological relationship and thrives on circuits of transfer and translation. In this changed imperial context explored in Kunzru’s second novel, the belief in the revolutionary potential of the Fotse tribe’s networked ‘needle-grass’ society finds almost perfect correspondence in the ideology of corporate capital that is similarly opposed to fixed boundaries and operates through highly differentiated and mobile structures. The image of the network may be emancipatory when set against the backdrop of the binarisms and dualistic hierarchies of modern political regimes – modes of sovereignty that trace their roots back to the European Enlightenment – yet,

Hari Kunzru

81

Hardt and Negri argue that political strategies affirming multiplicity, diversity and difference are only effective against the remnants of this earlier form of rule: When we begin to consider the ideologies of corporate capital and the world market, it certainly appears that the postmodernist and postcolonialist theorists who advance a politics of difference, fluidity and hybridity in order to challenge the binaries and essentialisms of modern sovereignty have been outflanked by the strategies of power. Power has evacuated the bastion they are attacking and has circled around their rear to join them in the assault in the name of difference. . . . This new enemy is not only resistant to the old weapons but actually thrives on them, and thus joins its would-be antagonists in applying them to the fullest. Long live difference! Down with essentialist binaries!16

To put Hardt and Negri’s vision in the more succinct terms of the economist Thomas Friedman, ‘the world is flat’.17 This is not to say that political hierarchies have disappeared or sovereignty has itself vanished, but rather that these have modulated into a decentred and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that permeates all human interactions, and thus creates the very social world that it inhabits. Properly understood, Empire is a biopolitical regime directed towards the production, regulation and re-articulation of bodies and subjectivities – its control reaches into the depths of individual and collective consciousness, and its object is the administration of life itself.18 For Hardt and Negri, contemporary subjectivities are more intensively mediated than at any point in human history; the material and immaterial web of information and communications that envelops us is not merely a technological prosthesis that extends the sensory reach of the body, but itself forms a new environment – or better, a matrix – in which our bodies and minds are reconfigured. The dispersal of power through flexible and mobile channels means that the tendrils of the capitalist world system proliferate everywhere, extending into all registers of the social order and producing new hierarchies of exclusion. If we find ourselves enmeshed in these networks, subject to repressive mechanisms of surveillance and biopolitical control, then this also cuts the other way, with information and communication technologies opening a space of possibility for more powerful means of interaction and commonality. And this is the nub of Hardt and Negri’s argument – that the medium of the network has come to define our ways of understanding the world and acting in it, and that it offers at once more insidious technologies for the maintenance of order and the revolutionary potential for

82

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

global liberation from the pernicious regime of Empire. The vehicle for this emancipation is the ‘multitude’ – arguably a re-casting of the Marxist proleteriat for a present dominated by transnational institutions and forms of immaterial labour – whose diverse movements and modulations of form force continual global reconfigurations of the capitalist system. The multitude subverts Empire from within, its innumerable acts of resistance and insurrection not merely posed against imperial rule, but aimed at the creation of alternative forms of life. Both of Kunzru’s early novels examine the construction and management of subjectivities by powers that have rendered it an object of discipline, and explore the implications of the loosening of material anchorage on its constitution. His work thus sets up comparisons between the colonized body that emerges from negated history and place and the cybernetic body that materializes from the contemporary alliance between technology and capitalism. In The Impressionist, Pran’s unmooring from the constraints of place or history, his exchange of cultural roots for migratory routes, is the catalyst for an existential mutability that, by the end of the novel, has become a terrifying slide through the machinery of empire. Despite the fact that Pran’s shape-shifting permits him to occupy the cultural centre of white middle-class Englishness from which he is excluded by his ethnicity, the very fact of his ontological weightlessness means that he is never able to fully inhabit his assumed persona. After becoming liquid, Pran cannot simply reverse the process to return to a more solid incarnation, for his journey brings to light the artificiality of the very notion of a stable, homogeneous and unified self. But while in Kunzru’s first novel, Pran’s mode of existence is an exception rather than the rule, in the changed global context of the contemporary mass-mediated world that provides the setting for Transmission, it has become virtually ubiquitous. According to Arjun Appadurai, the confluence between the impact of mass migration and the rapid circulation of images, scripts and sensations is creating ‘a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities’, and the contradictions raised by this ever more intensely mediatized and ‘interactive’ global culture are the driving force behind Kunzru’s text.19 Though in many respects the processes of global capital seem to be bringing a new complexity to our temporal and spatial relations as these are transformed by proliferating layers of mediation, this is accompanied by a contrary trend towards the reductive homogenization of human relationships and the atrophy of interior life. Transmission examines how the medial intertwining of the local and the global is redefining our psychic geographies as connectivity transcends the traditional spatial boundaries to human communication while fissuring

Hari Kunzru

83

emotional intimacy in new ways; and its particular point of focus is on how these changing conceptions of proximity and distance are manifested on the terrain of affect. The novel weaves together the narrative threads of four main characters  – Arjun  Mehta, a geeky computer science graduate from New Delhi lured to America by the promise of living out his dreams in California’s Silicon Valley; Guy Swift, a marketing executive whose London-based agency generates profits from the ‘emotional magma that wells from the core of planet brand’; Swift’s disillusioned girlfriend, Gabriella Caro, who is sent to handle PR for a Bollywood film shooting on location in the Scottish highlands; and the young star of this new movie, Leela Zahir, whose sanguine on-screen image masks a profound discontent with the demands of her increasing celebrity status.20 What binds these scattered stories together is the volatile cascade of effects and events set in train by a computer virus that spreads through the connective tissue of the global matrix, causing massive disruption for a world market that relies on the unobstructed flows of commodities, wealth and information. Facing redundancy from his dream job working for a computer security company in California, Arjun releases the virus in an attempt to make his own position indispensable, since only he has the necessary expertise to disable the malicious code. The virus, which Arjun names ‘Leela’ after his favourite film actress and which uses a clip from one of her movies to infect the host machine, is a sophisticated design – as well as replicating itself via infected emails, Leela has the capacity to mutate into new strains to stay one step ahead of anti-virus software, quickly splintering into a multitude of variants as it adapts to new digital environments. Like the so-called ‘butterfly effect’ used to refer to the sensitivity of dynamic systems, such as the Web, to initial conditions – where small variations produce larger deviations in the long-term behaviour of a system – the virus’s initial perturbations are swiftly amplified into more extensive turbulence. The circulation of data is interrupted or diverted, databases become corrupted and networked systems suffer inexplicable breakdowns. Arjun hopes that by providing the solution to the viral pandemic, he will be able to revive his own fortunes as well as those of his struggling employer, Virugenix, but he underestimates Leela’s virulence and is entirely unprepared for the scale of global disruption that is no less than ‘an informational disaster, a holocaust of bits’ (258). Whereas the ‘real’ Leela’s association with the virus catapults her to global superstardom, Arjun is transformed into a wanted terrorist on the run from the authorities. Indeed, Robert J. C. Young reads the novel as an heir to the novel of terrorism

84

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

exemplified in The Secret Agent, which reduces ‘terrorism to a farcical travesty of itself ’ compounded by a fear of immigration and the foreign.21 When juxtaposed with the pandemic plot of Kunzru’s novel, Hardt and Negri’s assertion that ‘the age of globalization is the age of universal contagion’ seems particularly evocative.22 As may be inferred from this fortuitous metaphorical correlation between ‘transmission’ and ‘contagion’, the common celebrations of the unbounded flows and exchanges in our new global village also carry with them anxieties about increased contact. Just as The Impressionist reproduces the fear of mixing and miscegenation that was a commonplace of colonial consciousness – whether framed as physical contamination, moral corruption or psychological collapse – so too does Transmission articulate contemporary concerns about what lies beneath the glossy surface of the information economy and the rhetoric of the borderless world. The dark underside to the awareness of globalization is the fear of contamination and corruption, for as the prophylactic borders of the nation state become increasingly porous, our capacity to resist the rapid spread of undesirable or hazardous elements is proportionally diminished. Seen as an evolving biopolitical body composed of both human and non-human systems, the globe at once appears more adaptable – since each part of the whole is connected to every other – and ever more vulnerable to sudden, catastrophic dysfunction. In part, this is to echo Ulrich Beck’s and Anthony Giddens’s diagnoses of contemporary relations as symptomatic of a global ‘risk society’, where the growing interdependency of social relations and the intensified reflexivity of networked space continually generates new hazards and insecurities.23 As well as the spectres of biological pandemics such as AIDS, SARS, and recently, avian flu or viral threats across the digital domain – for instance the Netsky and Sasser worms that caused widespread disruption in 2004 – we could also point towards the advent of ‘global terrorism’, which is habitually figured as a form of contagion that can erupt anywhere, along with the paranoiac emphasis on ‘security’, as potent indices of this process. The notion of ‘transmission’ that animates Kunzru’s novel carries a number of different valences. Most obviously, as demonstrated in the brief précis offered above, it refers to the ethereal flux of media images and codes through the virtual spaces of the networked world and their continual crossover with the material realm. But it also gestures towards the imbrication of the ‘wetware’ of the corporeal body with the technologies of transport and communication – the new ontological fluidity engendered by the deterritorialization of social relations. In contrast to The Impressionist, where identity was primarily established in terms

Hari Kunzru

85

of racial hierarchies, in Transmission, it is shaped by the newer technologies of power wielded by global capitalism, which regulate a global politics of difference and diversity through the production of purities and hybridities. In different ways, each of the text’s main players are interpellated by the planetary flows of the mass media, the matrix of signs, images and affects that both incorporate and pass through them. It is not merely the case that Guy, Gabriella, Arjun and Leela manipulate the various dimensions of the global mediascape – Guy traffics in the transient brand images and sensations of consumer capitalism; Arjun immerses himself in the algebraic order of computer code; Leela participates in the economy of fame and celebrity – but that they are simultaneously constituted by them. Arjun, for example, is depicted throughout the novel as a kind of information processor – he tries to ‘reboot himself in positive mode’ when feeling anxious, and after being unfairly fired from his job in  Silicon Valley, attempts to retreat into rational logic of numbers that hold out the promise of stability in a nightmarishly erratic social world – ‘numbers were the truth of the world, numbers cloaked in materials. Find certainty by counting the things. In decimal. In binary, hexadecimal’ (99). Set against the transparency and binary simplicity of cyberspace, however, the real world is perceived by Arjun as a degraded echo of this simulated ideal, its vicissitudes and unpredictabilities understood as glitches in its core logic rather than as evidence of the limitations of the reductive framework that he imposes on it. Unsurprisingly, there is a similarly mechanical quality to his social interactions which, despite his yearning for intimacy and the intensity of feeling offered by his favourite Hindi romances, are stripped of any kind of intuitive affective connection. As though unable to provide any more than a simulacrum of spontaneous emotion, he reacts to his crying mother by making ‘the gestures you make when you are trying to comfort someone’ (16). Similarly, Arjun’s interviewer for the post at ‘Databodies’ – an appropriate neologism for this cybernetic interlacing of human and machine – is perceived less as a tangible human being than ‘a communications medium, a channel for the transmission of consumer lifestyle messages’ (8). Kunzru’s novel suggests that under the aegis of technocapitalism, which attempts to excise every ‘unproductive’ element in its desire for ever more efficient modes of exchange, social interactions become increasingly reduced to the transmission of packets of information. For the globetrotting entrepreneur, Guy Swift, the notion of the world ‘contracting like a beach ball’ that Arjun finds so unsettling is perceived less as a

86

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

sign of the self ’s ominous shrinkage and potential erasure than of its rapturous expansion, marking the advent of an entirely new mode of being liberated from the strictures of embodiment and the material inertia of space (6). The market’s cyclical logic of novelty, obsolescence and innovation is a fetish around which Swift’s existence is moulded, his branding agency aspiring to surf the shifting currents of global capital by harnessing the future. Early in the text, Guy perceives his body not as a mass moving through time, but rather as a conduit for the ‘alien fibrillation’ of futurity that flows inexorably into the present, this apparent effacement of bodily duration shooting him ‘beyond the trivial temporality of the unpersonalised masses of the earth’ (20–1). Indeed, it is not merely that Guy deals in the images and effects of the global mediascape, but that his identity appears to have taken on the characteristics of the immaterial milieu that he seeks to inhabit. Like Arjun, he is figured as a holographic refraction of the economic system that structures his mode of being, yet whereas Arjun constitutes the world according to the output functions of machine code, Swift imagines his own diffusion into the vaporous transience of the media. In this sense, the feeling of ‘angelic contentment’ that he experiences on one of his transatlantic flights is particularly suggestive – the philosopher Michel Serres, whose work will be returned to later in this chapter, traces several metaphorical connections between the celestial intermediaries of the sacred world and the contemporary systems of mass communication that fill the heavens with a multiplicity of messengers and messages (13).24 Guy dreams of his dissolution into the weightless ether, visualizing his passage towards the light-speed of signals and transmissions as he breaks free from earthly friction to carry ‘the message of himself from one point on the earth’s surface to another’ (13). However, Swift’s desire to insulate himself from the turbulence of terrestrial relations and partake in the ‘sublime mobility’ of this exterritorial elite ‘who travel without ever touching the ground’ goes hand-in-hand with the atrophy of his interior life made manifest in his sterile relations with Gabriella (45). Despite his belief in the potential for brands to bring consumers together in fulfilling relationships, he is ‘untouchable’ in a double sense, at once emotionally disconnected and wishing to isolate himself from the ‘yearners and strivers’ swallowed into the consumerist mass below (12; 21). As a superstar of popular Hindi cinema, Leela Zahir’s exalted celebrity profile embodies the romantic ideals pedalled by the Bollywood industry, the allpervasive vision of pyaar, or Love, which the text describes as a ‘glittery madness’ (105). Worshipped by her adoring fans, for whom the cinematic spectacle of her ‘towering luminous face’ appears to radiate a virtuous grace that is touched with

Hari Kunzru

87

the divine, Leela is practically inseparable from the saintly persona that circulates through the channels of the global media (278). Yet, in contrast to the ubiquity of her image that is transmitted from billboards, movie screens and magazines, the young starlet herself is barely seen at all during the novel. The virtual invisibility of the ‘real’ Leela, whose subjectivity is all but subsumed beneath the endlessly mutable sign of celebrity, is suggestive of both the instability and the multiplicity of identity in a contemporary culture dominated by the biopolitical technologies of the mass media. The iconic image that has been carefully engineered to appeal to the public emerges from the complex intersections between the conventions of Hindi cinema, the discourses of the tabloid media, ideological expectations surrounding femininity and the female body and the collective desires of her audience, whose projections play a vital part in shaping the actress’s iconography and generating cultural meaning. But while Kunzru’s portrayal acknowledges the intertextuality of her persona, it does not entirely collapse the distinction between her corporeal identity and its media simulacrum. The resentful young actress who Gabriella meets by the moonlit loch is ‘not quite the double of the dancing girl in the film clips’ – unlike the joyfully dancing figure in the viral video that is transmitted around the world, the sulky, chain-smoking Leela reveals herself to be bitterly cynical about the movie business in which she is forced to work by her overbearing mother – herself a faded star – who seeks to fulfil her ambitions vicariously through her daughter (162). But perhaps the contagious video file says more than it seems to, since the endless loop of the clip does symbolically underscore the hemming-in of Leela’s life, a form of digital incarceration to match her own isolation and diminished autonomy. Certainly, the image of ‘the girl with the red shoes, cursed to dance on until her feet bled’ is evocative of her objectification and exploitation that is characterized towards the end of the novel as ‘a kind of prostitution’ (279). Whereas the virus that bears the actress’s name possesses a freedom of which she can only dream, able to drift without restriction through the networks and systems of global capitalism, the corporeal Leela is fixed in place by the discursive machinery of the film industry in which her identity is entrammelled. Just as Arjun, and even Guy to a lesser extent, are caught in the volatile flows of the world market that are outside the realm of personal action, Leela is subject to the play of global forces and desires over which she has little agency. Arjun is introduced to underworld captivity when he is lured to California by spurious guarantees of employment, which neglect to mention the downturn in the IT sector. Though on the outside, a client of an international recruitment agency, it becomes immediately obvious that they have little intention of

88

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

fulfilling their contractual obligations to provide work and a comfortable salary, and without being able to afford to return home to India, Arjun is left to survive on a paltry wage, offered only short-term and sporadic opportunities. The exploitation of labour here tends to replicate familiar ethnic divisions, with Arjun soon discovering that ‘middle-class’ is a code-word for ‘white’. Starkly juxtaposed against the jet-setting Guy Swift, whose very name is a reference to kineticism, Arjun finds himself trapped in his immediate locality. From this down-at-heel perspective, exposed to the shameful secret of poverty lurking beneath the gleaming surface of California, the economic divide articulates itself in one’s relative capacity to transcend the restrictions of spatial location. For Guy, the desire to overcome the limitations of time and space offers the promise of a liberty that is vertiginous and intoxicating, yet for Arjun, unable to drive or to afford transport, the concreted immensity of this urban landscape expands interminably. The image of Arjun ‘trudging along the margin of a wide California highway’ poignantly evokes his social exclusion, a disparity made all the more humiliating by the obtrusive sight of the others’ freedom to move: If the soccer moms zipping by in their SUVs registered him at all, it was as a blur of dark skin, a minor danger signal flashing past on their periphery. To the walking man, the soccer moms were more cosmological than human, gleaming projectiles that dopplered past him in a rush of noise and dioxins, as alien and indifferent as stars. (37)

From the celestial perspective of those who skim easily across the surface of the earth, both physically and virtually, the sedentary figures of the dispossessed are practically invisible. Two worlds rush past each other barely making contact at all, the gap between them like that of different orders of being. As Guy later remarks, ‘the border is not just a line on the earth any more’, no longer merely demarcating discrete territorial spaces, but traced through the ether, erecting new immaterial barriers along the fractal flows of bodies, capital and information (238). There are clear overlaps between the reduction of Arjun to a ‘blur of dark skin’ on the periphery of middle-class vision and the text’s satirical portrayal of the European Union’s immigration policy. According to one of the officials associated with the fictional Pan European Border Authority (PEBA), who have commissioned Guy’s agency to re-brand the image of European citizenship, ‘the question of the border is a question of information’ (237). In spite of its sugared rhetoric of ‘harmonisation’, PEBA’s project to establish a common border policy depends on the installation of invasive mechanisms of surveillance and data

Hari Kunzru

89

collection designed to reinforce these borders against outsiders. By combining a centralized electronic database with detailed biometric information, PEBA seeks to use the same technologies that offer unprecedented levels of human interaction and commonality to construct more efficient regimes of differentiation. Guy’s crucial pitch plays on these ambiguities between inclusion and exclusion, imagining a territory that is simultaneously open and closed, both hospitable and prohibitive: We have to promote Europe as somewhere you want to go, but somewhere that’s not for everyone. A continent that wants people, but only the best. An exclusive continent. An upscale continent . . . . Welcome to Club Europa, the world’s VIP room. (272)

The prospective uniforms of the black-shirted immigration officers-cum­bouncers  hint at the fascistic undertone barely concealed beneath the glossy sheen of Club Europa. Though taking a different form to the spurious racial hierarchies and classifications of the colonial world, the desire to segregate the lowstatus and ‘unproductive’ migrant others who do not fit in with Europe’s ‘upscale’ image retraces an all too familiar story. PEBA’s integrated information system makes it possible to automate the bureaucratic task of separating the ‘legitimate’ citizens from the sans papiers and swiftly deport those without the correct credentials, so bringing into being a gated community on a continental scale. There are hints here of the potential emergence of a totalitarian information state that Kunzru warns elsewhere is the potential other side to these technologies that permit the tracking of people and materials through physical and data space.25 Indeed, Mark Poster has critiqued the technocratic assumption that the storage and transmission of information will inevitably produce a more egalitarian society, arguing instead that the blanket electronic surveillance of the wired world marks the advent of the ‘Superpanopticon’, where the panoptic gaze that Michel Foucault offered as the principle disciplinary mechanism of industrial capitalism is freed of its technological limitations. 26According to Poster, the emergent technology of power in the Superpanopticon both compels the population to willingly partici­pate in their own surveillance and constitutes supplementary, digital selves built from electronic records of their movements and transactions. Like the clusters of matched data kept on the PEBA database, these virtual subjects – shorn of their human ambiguities and thus easily manipulated – are imparted a quasi-material authenticity set above that of their human counterparts. Kunzru’s text thus signals the potentially pernicious effects of the cybernetic idealism underpinning the construct of the ‘information society’, where

90

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

increased connectivity opens up new paths for dialogue while extending the reach of administrative and disciplinary regimes. The codification of bodies and social interactions has, of course, long functioned as a primary means of political control, but the development of more integrated networks of exchange promises increased levels of efficiency in the systematic production and regulation of boundary spaces. The informatic order depends on bracketing the complexities and ambiguities that characterize lived experience, flattening the heterogeneity of terrestrial space into a uniform, readable plane where social relations are rendered fully visible to the panoptic gaze of instrumental power and may be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment and exchange. In this context, there are obvious overlaps between the Leela virus and the sans papiers targeted by the border authorities in the novel. Both are perceived as dangerous forms of contagion contaminating the systemic order of material and virtual space, and in both cases, their menace stems in large part from their invisibility to a system whose ideal horizon is a world of absolute transparency and legibility, in which all may be codified and controlled. As we have already seen, Transmission repeatedly blurs the distinction between human beings and the bursts of data coursing through the networked channels of the global matrix, which models both organisms and machines in the terms of information transmission and communications engineering. From the perspective of the emerging technologies of power, those elements that obstruct the drive towards unlimited transfer and convertibility are conceived as forms of ‘noise’, which must be excised to preserve systematic efficiency. While the movements of Kunzru’s cyborg bodies are regulated by the multiplying and structuring interconnections of the global communications networks, the virus, though it is parasitically dependent upon this environment, continually disturbs the apparatus of command. As mentioned earlier, the infectious fragment of computer code generates a swarm of variants as it adapts itself to colonize new virtual domains and elude the hygienic barriers of firewalls and anti-virus software. Echoing the protagonist’s ontological mutations in The Impressionist, this flexibility allows it to pass unchecked through the security mechanisms of cyberspace; but whereas Pran’s transformations worked within the discourses of imperial authority, Arjun’s virus works against the master code of information upon which the new Empire’s control systems depend. As in The Impressionist, the ending of Transmission looks towards the development of modes of life unencumbered by the limits imposed by the traditional staging grounds of identity construction. Whereas Pran becomes a nomadic figure no longer defined by his connection with any particular place,

Hari Kunzru

91

Leela and Arjun undergo a form of networked dissemination, their diffraction across material and immaterial space suggestive of a gathering of migrant multiplicities that looks towards a shared future beyond the domination of abstract individuation and the quotidian experience of atomization. Certainly, beneath the novel’s comic vignettes, there is a plangent hollowness at its heart, signalling the atrophy of human intimacy and acute longing for touch that goes hand-in-hand with the contemporary proliferation of communication technologies. However, though the perfection of Zahir and Mehta’s elopement may be tinged with the wistful sentimentality of the Bollywood romances that Transmission both satirizes and cherishes – with the lonely protagonists united beyond the law in loving anonymity – the novel is ambivalent about the nature of their freedom. On the one hand, the final dilatory image of Arjun and Leela scattered across the globe echoes Donna Haraway’s fable of the cybernetic diaspora liberated by the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries. In this context, the young couple are reconfigured as viral bodies whose unfettered mobility and ‘power of metamorphosis’ make it impossible to filter their corporeal selves from the media chatter (108).27 On the other hand, it is questionable to what extent their conjoined lines of flight really allow them to regain control over their own lives or their capacity for self-fashioning. Far from puncturing her celebrity persona, the revelation of Leela’s history of personal problems serves only to intensify her deification by her fans, the star’s off-screen suffering invested with a saintly piety. Similarly, Arjun – ‘Gap loyalty-card holder and habitué of Seattle Niketown’ – is appropriated as the putative figurehead for a range of anti-capitalist movements, from disaffected computer hackers to neo-Marxist politicos (272). Transmuted into mythical figures bearing little resemblance to the real personages, both are continually remodelled by the shifting currents of the networked desires of millions around the world, and while the mediated forms of Leela and Arjun possess an influence far exceeding that of their corporeal bodies, they have no power over how these are wielded and directed by others.

Notes 1 Hari Kunzru, ‘Eclipse Chasing’ Noise (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005), p. 42. 2 A full transcript of Kunzru’s statement may be found on the author’s website, see ‘Society: Making Friends with the Mail’, (2003) http://www.harikunzru. com/ [accessed 25 January 2010].

92

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

3 Peter Morey, ‘He Do the Empire in Different Voices: Intertextuality in Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist’, New Hybridities: Societies and Cultures in Transition (unpublished conference paper, University of Munich, July 2004). 4 Hari Kunzru, The Impressionist (London: Penguin, 2003; first pub. 2002), p. 14. Further references to this edition will include the page number in parentheses after the quotation. 5 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1994; first pub. 1902), p. 51. 6 It is difficult to know precisely by what name to refer to the central character of the novel, since his transformations are not so much disguises as wholesale revolutions in identity. Rather than modifying the names to reflect his current incarnation, which would perhaps lead to confusion, or opting for an unwieldy compound – such as ‘Pran-Rukhsana-Bobby-Jonathan’ – we have elected to call the protagonist Pran throughout this chapter, though it is certainly not our intention to imply that this represents his true, essential identity. 7 See Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 85–92. 8 Peter Morey, ‘He Do the Empire in Different Voices: Intertextuality in Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist’, New Hybridities: Societies and Cultures in Transition (unpublished conference paper, University of Munich, July 2004). 9 ‘Postmodernism or Postcolonialism Today’, in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, ed. by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 125–9. 10 For a more detailed discussion of the rhizome, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), pp. 7–13. 11 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000). 12 A comparison between the tropes of the hierarchical grid and the decentralized network may be found in Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 3–23. 13 For example, see Harris’s The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination (London: Greenwood Press, 1983). 14 See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 236–56. 15 Nick Ryan, ‘Global Village Rebel’, The Scotsman, 29 May 2004, Critique section, p. 8. 16 Empire, p. 138. 17 Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-First Century (London: Penguin, 2006).

Hari Kunzru

93

18 See in particular Empire, pp. 22–41. Hardt and Negri’s use of the concept of biopower is indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, and also draws on elements of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. 19 Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 4. 20 Hari Kunzru, Transmission (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 20. Further references to this edition will include the page number in parentheses after the quotation. 21 Robert J. C. Young ‘Terror Effects’, in Terror and the Postcolonial, ed. Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, Oxford: Blackwell, 2010, pp. 307–28, p. 322. 22 Empire, p. 136. 23 See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. by Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992); and Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). Beck and Giddens argue that the expansion and heightening of the desire for control expressed through modern institutions ultimately ends up producing new and unforeseen risks. 24 See Michel Serres, Angels: A Modern Myth, trans. by Francis Cowper, ed. by Philippa Hurd (Paris: Flammarion, 1995). 25 ‘Rewiring Technoculture’, Mute (Jan 1997) http://www.metamute.org/?qen/ node/6101 [accessed 22 May 2010]. 26 The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), pp. 97–9. 27 Kunzru interviewed and profiled Haraway for Wired magazine. ‘You are Cyborg’, Wired, 5.02, Feb. 1997: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway. html?topic&topic_set [accessed 2 August 2012].

94

3

Nadeem Aslam

Alongside the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, other events in 1989 served to mark the advent of a new context to global relations. The controversy surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which led to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s declaration of a fatwa against the author in response to his alleged blasphemy against the sanctity of the Quran, exposed the deep-seated ideological contradictions surrounding discussion of a modernity that was no longer the exclusive property of Western societies, but traversed other histories and competing epistemologies. The day after the fatwa was declared on 14 February 1989, the Soviet Army completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, ending a 10-year occupation and precipitating years of civil warfare that would pitch the abandoned pro-Soviet government against mujahideen warlords and issue in the Taliban’s control of the republic. We will return to this second event in a discussion of Aslam’s third novel The Wasted Vigil, but first, we consider the ‘Rushdie Affair’ of 1989 and the sociopolitical backdrop to Aslam’s second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers (2004).1 The schism between pluralized Western liberalism and monologic Islamic orthodoxy, a conflict that Rushdie’s novel itself draws out, yet cannot unravel, was habitually portrayed in the late twentieth century as a clash of civilizations, its rhetoric prefiguring that of the ‘War on Terror’. Yet, the fact that hostility to The Satanic Verses was also expressed in 1989 by British Muslims – communities in Bolton and Bradford publicly burning copies of the book – complicated this picture, illustrating how the neat dichotomies underpinning Cold War political relations had become inadequate conceptual tools to map a world structured by the fluid mobility of communities and ideas through networks that had an increased potential to connect disparate peoples and perspectives. Brian Finney offers the opinion that the novel’s ‘paradoxical combination of the unitary and the plural, the local and the global . . . is one of its great strengths’, since it advocates the superiority of multiple, competing discourses through a defence

96

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

of pluralism that is no less totalized than the dogmatic singularity it critiques, and thus incorporates the contradictions of late twentieth-century modernity into its very form.2 Fundamentalism is itself the product of the modern world, but though these diametrically opposed responses to globalization appeared to be largely kept in check during the 1990s, leading to hubristic pronouncements of a ‘new world order’ ushered in by the spread of liberal democracy, the attack on the New York World Trade Centre in  2001 dramatically signalled that the passage had taken place into a different regime of political complexity split along the fault lines exposed by the publication of Rushdie’s novel. While more than a mere media spectacle, the so-called ‘Rushdie Affair’ could not have taken place without the worldwide distribution of media and communications networks that filtered the events and often served to exaggerate the intransigence of the offending parties. Indeed, there are a number of similarities here with the massmediated outrage following the publication in 2005 of a series of inflammatory cartoons caricaturing the prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Whereas Rushdie’s novel raised the debates between literature and religion on the one hand, and artistic freedom and censorship on the other, the cartoons’ portrayals seemed deliberately designed to provoke those who already felt economically and politically marginalized. In this case, the spread of censure and indignation was even more pervasive and rapid. In contrast to the involvement of only eight countries and approximately 25 deaths connected with the ‘Rushdie Affair’, the protests that followed in the wake of the Danish cartoons extended to about 30 different countries and led to the loss of 139 lives. This response indicates the changes over the intervening period, suggesting that the world’s greater interconnectedness brings with it increasingly unstable political and cultural relations as a range of different, even incompatible, viewpoints are brought into close proximity. As the best-known precursor to the increased prominence of British Muslim writers since the turn of the century, Rushdie has explored the postcolonial mutations and reinventions of subjectivities within a sphere of national identities rapidly changing shape. Since the appearance of Midnight’s Children in 1981, a host of diverse writers has emerged from the shadow cast by Rushdie. Those resident in the West, but with roots in South Asia include Amitav Ghosh (The Glass Palace), Aamer Hussein (Another Gulmohar Tree), Bapsi Sidhwa (The Ice-Candy Man), Sunetra Gupta (The Glassblower’s Breath), Vikram Seth (A  Suitable Boy), Amit Chaudhuri (Afternoon Raag), Vikram Chandra (Red Earth and Pouring Rain), Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance), Daniyal

Nadeem Aslam

97

Mueenuddin (In Other Rooms, Other Wonders), Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth) and Monica Ali (Brick Lane).3 Though many of these novelists draw on the legacies of decolonization, it has been suggested that there is a trend among the new generation of writers towards the acceptance of cultural syncretism as a quotidian ordinariness, rather than a spectacle of continued national reinvention in the West.4 Part of this is the recognition that cultural hybridity is no longer, and perhaps never was, an exception to a concept of identity based upon an illusory unity, or even a multiculturalist notion of unity in diversity. That a single homogenizing mode of, for example, Britishness, is splintering into a diversity of forms, and will continue to do so under the spread of multifarious physical and technological flows, seems unquestionable, and the emergence alongside migrant communities of various local regionalisms, indexed by the increased critical interest in specifically Scottish, Welsh and Irish writing, is itself partly a response to this process. But whether this marks the passage towards the normalization and eclipse of hybridity in a cosmopolitan, relativist and globalized world where the paradigms of modern sovereignty decline into insignificance is less certain, and in the post-9/11 climate of inter-cultural tension and religious hysteria, it is difficult to imagine such a peaceful and harmonious future as Smith’s Irie Jones alluded to in 2000 in White Teeth. It would not be an overstatement to suggest that the cultural milieu in which the diasporic novel now situates itself has expanded to encircle the globe, and whereas the world of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century British novel could conceivably be mapped in terms of metropolitan society’s preoccupations, contemporary writing seems more conscious of its location within a wider literary–cultural field. What might be termed after Spivak the ‘worlding’ of the contemporary novel consists of this amplified frame of reference that takes account of the heterogeneity of histories and geographies – a process that mirrors the widening of society more generally. Although care must be taken not to overstate the stability of social, cultural and sexual boundaries prior to this period, setting fluid multiplicity against a falsely homogeneous picture, it is possible to argue that there has been a watershed where a notable aesthetic shift has gestured towards a radical transformation in political, as well as creative and cultural contexts. In very different ways, contemporary novelists have attempted to give form to these sweeping social transformations, approaching the present through the medium of acerbic satire, stream of consciousness and a reinscription of metaphoric reference or mythic allegory, alongside more conventionally realist modes.

98

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

Indeed, it has almost become a platitude of critical engagements with the contemporary novel to draw attention to its syncretic mixing of genres and forms, stylistic fusions and liberal borrowings from a range of cultural reference points. While the dominant characteristic of much of the British writing of the previous generation was the expression of a familiar middle-class identity and ethnicity, nostalgic for a waning intellectual and imperial authority, the diversity and multiplicity of new literary voices render this kind of cultural centring and continuity acutely problematic. The shared space of the nation has always been a slippery discursive construct, its elastic boundaries ever inadequate to project the spatial consistency and horizontal comradeship that it desires, but the apparent resurgence of narrative fiction during the 1980s and 1990s was fuelled in no small part by the work of writers who did not fit neatly into established frameworks. The publication of Midnight’s Children marked the emergence of a perspective which, though critical of colonial domination and its continuing legacies, embraced the potentialities of political and cultural newness opened up by imperialism’s conjoining and entangling of histories. In the novel, the destiny of post-independence India is metaphorically entwined with that of its protagonist, Saleem, whose confused parentage, unstable identity and fragmenting body both symbolize and enact the nation’s slide towards the Emergency of 1975–77. But in seeking to preserve the past through a process that he terms ‘chutnification’, Saleem’s unreliable narrative sets a vision of metamorphosis against the backdrop of post-imperial disintegration, ushering in a future that finds hope in the transformative properties of contamination and impurity, the alchemical combining of previously distinct ‘pure’ elements. These images of splitting, liminality and hybridity are recurrent throughout Rushdie’s oeuvre, finding their most focused first expression in the 1980s in Shame and The Satanic Verses, which the author suggests ‘rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure’.5 Rushdie’s celebration of rootless levity and suspended syncretism as progres­ sive responses to the cultural dislocations of mass migration has been particularly influential in re-situating notions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ in the time/ space of diaspora, and elaborating a form of selfhood reliant less on continuity than dissemination. At the same time, however, Rushdie’s aestheticization of migrancy and marginality, an imaginary that attempts to dwell in the interstitial ideal of Homi Bhabha’s ‘Third Space’, has been criticized for espousing an eclectic cosmopolitanism that reflects the experiences of a privileged cadre of metropolitan migrants. The relative ease with which these ideas passed into the

Nadeem Aslam

99

Western academy – finding themselves reproduced on a cornucopia of newly emergent courses in postcolonial writing and readily assimilated by the theoretical rubric of postmodernism – certainly makes pause for thought about the apparent consonance between their political and critical agendas. Indeed, ­Graham ­Huggan’s  discussion of the means by which postcolonial literary ­products such as Midnight’s Children have been packaged for Western consumption argues that their success had much to do with their perceived exoticism, these commodities offering a glimpse of ‘authentic’ local colour or the glamour of (domesticated) otherness precisely as the texts themselves disavowed such orientalist discourse.6 Even when turning attention more explicitly to the contemporary im/migrant experience in Britain in parts of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie’s Ellowen Deeowen is situated in the liminal zone between fantasy and reality, less a real place than a febrile dream city whose shifting impermanence at once literalizes London’s tangled colonial legacies and metaphorically contests spurious notions of cultural, and theological, purity. That the sense of place and a situated, organically embedded selfhood seem, in some way, under threat accompanies a shift in the balance of global power away from the West to the extent that it can no longer assume precedence over other histories and ways of life that it was previously able to organize into symbolic hierarchies (the shift is illustrated in Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers as the relatively recent mosque sits opposite the 100-year-old Church of St. Eustace – ‘The crescent faces the cross squarely across the narrow sidestreet’ 9) Indeed, this perception of immersion and engulfment has much to do with the spatialization and retrospective re-phrasing of the unitary Western narrative of modernity within the framework of globalization.7 This is to bring into question the modern constitution’s assumption that cultures, societies and nations had an integral relation to bounded spaces that were internally coherent and differentiated from each other by separation, a geographical imagination integral to the imperial project to organize global space. From this perspective, the very idea of ‘place’ entails the problematical necessity of a boundary that situates difference on the outside and constructs its uniqueness by turning inwards to recover or invent an evolutionary historical narrative. As form gives way to flux and social relations become increasingly stretched out over space, mediation makes notions of separation difficult to sustain. Rather than zones of segregation, boundaries are reconceived as sites of trans­ mission and interface – places are less static ‘containers’ of particular spatial identities than processes of interaction, articulated moments in networks

100

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

of understandings that link with the wider world and are thus profoundly political and ideological.8 The benefit of understanding places in terms of the particularity of their connections to other places beyond, criss-crossed, even constituted, by paths of movement with varying speeds and trajectories, is that it becomes possible to think the local and the global together, without setting one against the other.9 Far from conjuring the image of completed simultaneity in which all interconnections have already been established, a vision of integrated totality that occasionally shadows the concept of a ‘world system’, here, global space is seen as a theatre for multiple durations and becomings where the interconnectivity of relations is fundamentally open-ended.10 The topographical cartography that was one of modernization’s, and, of course, imperialism’s, fundamental technologies has, at the beginning of the new millennium, been displaced by a topological logic of relation and contiguity, figuring space as a morphic ensemble of movements, stretchings, crumplings, fluctuations, involutions and distortions. In this milieu of continuities and connections, the confluence of physical and virtual planes where information is imbued with the material inertia of forms and forces, there can be no point of departure or termination, merely structured relations of enclosure and flow. Of course, there are dissonances, ruptures and attenuations here too, which are just as much a part of globalized spatial relations as liberal imaginings of a ‘happy multicultural land’ – a smooth world of unbounded connectivity and cosmopolitan miscegenation. Yet, the movement from static representation towards more open and shifting patterns of intermingling permits an imagi­ native revisioning of cultural history no longer framed by an autonomously unfolding modernity. If this has become necessary both because of widespread migration, often taking the form of an outside-in recursion from the former peripheries to the post-imperial metropolis, and the unparalleled fluidity of cultural artefacts that are voraciously incorporated and recycled by global capitalism, it places significant strains on definitions of citizenship and belong­ ing, and not solely in Western countries. Within this, the notion of ‘home’ is a crucial site of contestation in a world that seems to have changed state from solid to liquid, expanding and contracting according to unpredictable ripples of turbulence and consumerist manipulations of transience and impermanence (hence, in one of Aslam’s novels, a neighbour in England ‘wonders why her children refer to Bangladesh as “abroad” because Bangladesh isn’t abroad, England is abroad; Bangladesh is home’).11 As a staging ground for identity construction, the stability of place

Nadeem Aslam

101

is undermined by the spread of technology, rationalization and processes of economic transformation; even those who physically stay in place may become disembedded by the inroads of modern means of communication.12 Whether it is done explicitly or implicitly, it has become de rigueur when talking about identity to set a rooted, essentialist and reactionary version of subjectivity against a performative, itinerant and hybridized alternative, where ‘authentic’ grounding is an intransigent and potentially pernicious fantasy. In this context, the concept of ‘diaspora’ has emerged as a particularly suggestive semantic vehicle that brings together these conflictual imperatives, albeit without resolving their tension.13 Paul Gilroy’s well-known notion of the ‘black Atlantic’, for example, proposes an analysis of modernity that is fluid and dynamic, and an understanding of situatedness that travels beyond the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnic particularity.14 In centring his analysis of the long history of African diasporic culture on the triangular relationship between North America, Africa and Europe, Gilroy’s intention is to take the Atlantic as a single, complex element of analysis and thus to open up a mobile space for the articulation of black tradition, which is not fixed in a pre-modern past or imaginary homeland, but constituted by nomadic lines of passage at once within and outside of modernity. Helpful though Gilroy’s Atlantic triangle is, it also appears limited 20 years later because of its partial mapping of migratory lines of travel and re-homing. Peter Brooker observes that the concept of diasporic dwelling ‘involves a stereoscopic notion of place and non-synchronous view of time’ and therefore has a number of affinities with a modernity that has become increasingly reflexive and contested.15 Indeed, such metaphors of marginality, travel and transgressive border crossing are key to the anti-foundational rhetoric of the various ‘post-’ discourses which, their distinct concerns and political intentions notwithstanding, advocate a politics of difference that contests the essentialist binaries and hierarchies of the modern field of normative Eurocentric power. The general critique of fixed subjectivities and categories promotes a notion of habitation that wanders and migrates instead of having a fixed base or home; indeed, it raises fundamental questions about what it means to possess a homeland in a world of complex discontinuities and fragmented experiences. As Caren Kaplan indicates in her discussion of the political implications of such ‘travelling theory’, the figure of the nomad in contemporary postmodern and postcolonial discourse has come to represent ‘a subject position that offers an idealised model of movement based on perpetual displacement’.16 Although

102

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

Gilroy is conscious that his depiction of this confluence of narratives does not slide into the fetishization of displacement and itinerant cosmopolitanism that is a habitual gesture in metropolitan theory, he does try to delineate a new form of ‘unhomely’ community through the affirmation of hybrid multiplicity. The ‘black Atlantic’ may be seen as a conceptual apparatus that permits the histories of those marginalized by Western modernity to be reframed as a diasporic gathering. In this new context, the sundering and splitting performed by colonialist exploitation sows the seeds of an alternative form of collective identity that, with its emphasis on the play of difference across boundaries, operates as a powerful mode of resistance to such oppressive structures. This is the liberation of differences under the sign of collective homelessness, the projection of a world in which the given principles of differentiation have become outmoded, envisaging a new kind of shared future beyond parochial nationalisms and entrenched identity politics, one that, as mentioned at the end of the earlier chapter on Zadie Smith, in Gilroy’s more recent work traces the outlines of an incipient ‘planetary humanism’.17 But this new form of humanism is only imaginable as a consequence of the renegotiations of subjectivity in the wake of the postcolonial, and rather than seeking to rekindle a dubious liberal universalism that imposes a hegemonic ideal of the human, Gilroy argues for a cosmopolitan solidarity among people around the world, a form of creative cohabitation that embraces the everyday negotiation of difference as constitutive of humanity. Like Hardt and Negri’s notion of the multitude, this involves strategies of cooperation appropriate for an increasingly divided and differentiated, but also increasingly convergent planet, in lieu of narrowly identity-based social movements.

Solitude: Maps for Lost Lovers Nadeem Aslam moved to Britain as a young teenager. His three novels published up to 2012 have been located respectively in Pakistan, England and Afghanistan, and were originally conceived as a triptych. The first, Season of the Rainbirds, is a study of loss and communication across time and place. At its narrative centre is the delivery, two decades later, of letters lost in a train crash. The revelations and declarations made apparent by this sudden eruption of the past reveal the damage caused by the years of General Zia’s oppressive rule in the 1970s and 1980s. Establishing the major theme of Aslam’s fiction, it is a

Nadeem Aslam

103

novel whose seminal idea of the past haunting the present centres on religious fundamentalism, as his next novels are developments from a concern with honour killings and war orphans, respectively.18 Aslam is a writer whose novels are concerned with loss, exile and suffering, but whose narratives are suffused with beauty, in terms of their imagery and their use of language. This is an aesthetic approach that has led to some criticism, as when Adam Mars-Jones writes in a review of The Wasted Vigil, ‘There isn’t enough beauty in the world, but isn’t it true that a work of art can be too beautiful’?19 Aslam’s blend of ethical scrutiny with an aesthetics of exquisite prose would seem to suggest not, and indeed his philosophical approach, which has something in common with Zadie Smith’s, is based on a democratic desire for greater aesthetic awareness, as when he says, ‘Nature, beauty, and art belong to everyone and are without nationality’.20 Aslam’s second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers, takes place a few years before the millennium over the course of a little more than 12 months in a northern English town known as Dasht-e-Tanhaii, taken from Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem on ‘memory’ called ‘Yad’. While the place itself resembles Yorkshire towns such as Huddersfield, where Aslam lived as a youth, the name given to it by the migrant community suggests their sense of isolation – ‘The Wilderness of Solitude. The Desert of Loneliness’.21 With streets and landmarks (re)named after expatriate landmarks, it is a complex novel of home, creating Dasht-e-Tanhaii through refracted references to Kashmir, the Punjab or Bangladesh. The novel is suffused with backward glances, literal and metaphorical, and is replete with imagery from Urdu poetry. Aslam’s book is also an imagining of the city solely as it appears to migrated communities, such that Catherine Pesso-Miquel argues that in Maps for Lost Lovers, ‘every strategy is used to disorientate the Western reader’.22 Dashte-Tanhaii appears as a palimpsestic town placed over an English one, occupying the same space, but culturally refigured in a new metaphoric register – ‘The town lies at the base of a valley like a few spoonfuls of sugar in a bowl’ (10). Where the novel is unusual is in the way in which it portrays a city with a different cartography for ‘lost lovers’, making strange the landscape of the town’s setting in the same way that its traditional northern English culture might appear alien to a migrant.23 Though sharing some of the magic realist linguistic stylizations of Rushdie, this approach is a radical and complexly regional development of the depiction of London in The Satanic Verses, dissimilar in approach from that used in the portrayal of the capital in other migrant visions of the metropolis, such as Timothy Mo’s SourSweet or Gautum Malkani’s Londonstani, having more in common with fictional approaches to the alienated terrains of the colonialist

104

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

mapped onto the reality of an indigenous topography – the India of Kipling or the Alexandria of Durrell’s quartet. Reminiscent of aspects of the presentation of London as Ellowen Deeowen does in The Satanic Verses, Maps for Lost Lovers thus explicitly depicts English landscapes and seasons through a poetic sensi­ bility brought from South Asia. After the thematic temporal preoccupations noted by the title and chapter names (the days of the week) of Aslam’s first novel, Maps for Lost Lovers is a narrative of exile and spatial disorientation, the text repeatedly signalling a concern with perceptions of place and route – ‘from now on he’ll see everywhere a possible map that’ll lead him to her’ (280). Also, drawing a temporal arc to accompany the cartographic promise of its own title, Maps for Lost Lovers is arranged in four parts, corresponding to the seasons in England, from winter to autumn. However, the novel’s principal character, Shamas, notes early in the book, as he greets the snow that will melt to wafers of ice and then water in his palm, that in Pakistan, ‘there are five seasons in a year, not four, the schoolchildren learning their names and sequence through classroom chants: Mausam-e-sarma, Bahar, Mausam-e-Garma, Barsat, Khizan. Winter, Spring, Summer, Monsoon, Autumn. The snow falls and, yes, the hand stretched into the flakes’ path is a hand asking back a season now lost’ (5). On the novel’s first page, Shamas also observes how the snowstorm has ‘rinsed the air’ of incense, underlining a meeting of sensations and impressions from different climates and cultures.24 His devout wife, Kaukab, is alienated by almost everything in this foreign culture, including its onomatoepia ‘what was a person to do when even things in England spoke a different language than the one they did in Pakistan? In England the heart said boom boom instead of dhak dhak; a gun said bang! instead of thah!; things fell with a ‘thud’ not a dharam; small bells said ‘jingle’ instead of chaan-chaan; the trains said ‘choo choo’ instead of chuk chuk’ (35–6).25 As the novel opens, it is five months since Shamas’s 15-year-old younger brother Jugnu and girlfriend Chanda have gone missing from the next-door house. Mystery surrounding the circumstances of their disappearance forms both the emblematic enigma at the heart of the novel and its narrative suspense. The sadness of this loss, and what it represents within the community, haunts Shamas and pervades the mood of the narrative, with its repeated examples of grief and loss, isolation and ostracization. Retiring from work at 65, Shamas is a non-believer who arrived in Britain from Pakistan in the 1950s. He has charted the change in attitudes to migrants over the decades as the indigenous whites have gradually and grudgingly accepted

Nadeem Aslam

105

their presence in the workplace, then the streets and then the neighbourhood houses. A Communist Party member, Shamas is director of the Community Relations Council and ‘the person the neighbourhood turns to when unable to negotiate the white world on its own’ (15). He visits the Muslim mosque and the Sikh and Hindu temples to fulfil his role, helping those who have not been able to afford to move to the suburbs like the richer migrants from the subcontinent, ‘leaving behind the Pakistanis, the Bangladeshis, and a few Indians, all of whom work in restaurants, drive taxis and buses or are unemployed’ (46). Rather than any sustained focus on the tensions between native and migrant populations, a major concern of the narrative is the disharmony between the different diasporic communities and faiths, though there are incidents that make plain the confrontations and intolerances that largely take place off-stage. Thus, at the start of the novel a pig’s head has been left outside the mosque, and Shamas suspects it is because an ‘English girl had converted to Islam in December and had been given shelter in the mosque because her family was hostile towards her decision to change faith’ (57). He is later told that a human heart has been found near the local temple (87). Shamas’s position as a peacemaker between different faiths and as a community go-between is contextualized by the story that unfolds of his father’s life. Born in  1909 into the India ruled by the Raj, Shamas’s father, Deepak, was raised a Hindu, but became a Muslim at 10, having ‘lost his memory’ (47–8). This was during the RAF bombing of Gujranwala two days after the Amritsar massacre at the Jallianwallah Bagh that constituted a watershed in Indo–British relations. Suffering amnesia from the explosion, Deepak wanders the province and eventually arrives in a Muslim community, where he takes a new identity, faith and name, Chakor. By the time Deepak’s original identity is made known, it is after Independence; Gujranwala is part of Pakistan and his birth family are presumed to have moved from the Punjab to the new India. Echoing Deepak’s transformation in the present, not only Shamas, but Deepak’s other son, the free-thinking scientist, Jugnu, similarly declares his migrated position from his birth identity – ‘I was born into a Muslim household, but I object to the idea that that automatically makes me a Muslim’ (38). On the January day of the novel’s opening, the police have arrested Chanda’s brothers Barra and Chotta for the killing of Jugnu and Chanda. The Muslim daughter of the local food and convenience grocery-shop owners, Chanda had moved into Jugnu’s house a few months earlier. The couple then made a visit to Pakistan, but on their unseen return a week early, which is assumed because their passports were found in the house by the police, they suddenly went missing.

106

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

Chanda’s wider story illustrates one of the repeated interests of Aslam’s writing, which is the restricted personal freedom of daughters and sisters and the unhappiness caused by arranged marriages. At 16, Chanda had been sent to Pakistan to marry a man to whom she had been promised since childhood, but neither that nor a second marriage to a cousin lasted any length of time. Chanda returned to England, and for the sake of propriety, was married to a man without British nationality, who fled as soon as he gained legal status. There was no divorce and Chanda continued to work in her parents’ grocery shop until she moved in with Jugnu, at which point, her brothers consider that she had ‘died’ (64). Her elder by 23 years, Jugnu is the most cosmopolitan character in the novel, having studied in both Russia and the United States in addition to his knowledge of Pakistan and England. In his six years in the United States, he married to gain legal status, like Chanda’s husband, then divorced and began studying for a doctorate in Boston, only coming to England after news of his mother’s death. Having fallen in love with Chanda, Jugnu wishes to marry her, but it is chiefly to placate Chanda’s family and Kaukab, who have little care for British law, but want ‘a Muslim divorce’ and Chanda to ‘marry Jugnu Islamically’ (55). While Chanda and Jugnu exemplify the novel’s title, the narrative’s principal character portraits are of husband and wife, Shamas and Kaukab, who each have their own lost loves. With family as the bedrock of her life, Kaukab mourns the estrangement of her three children who have all grown up with Western culture and distanced themselves from her physically as well as culturally. Her eldest child, Charag, is a painter, divorced from, but still close to, a white woman called Stella. Kaukab had earlier sent Charag to university in London and seen him return with Stella, his pregnant girlfriend; now in his early 30s, he has a son with Stella, but wishes for no more children and has had a vasectomy, to Kaukab’s horror. Her other son, Ujala, has refused to speak to Kaukab for years; he blames Chanda’s family for the death of his beloved uncle, Jugnu and has attacked their home. Imprisoned by her lack of opportunity and her cultural inflexibility, Kaukab remains isolated, never having learnt English properly, such that ‘she barely knew what lay beyond the neighbourhood and didn’t know how to deal with strangers: full of apprehension concerning the white race and uncomfortable with people of another Subcontinental religion or grouping’ (32). The child with whom Kaukab is closest is her daughter Mah-Jabin, but this relationship appears to have been rooted in fear and abuse. When Mah-Jabin later visits Kaukab, their confrontation issues in threats and domestic violence

Nadeem Aslam

107

(112) that, unknown to Kaukab, mirror incidents in Mah-Jabin’s marriage, a main source of the tension between daughter and mother. Like Chanda, Mah-Jabin was sent to Pakistan at the age of 16 to marry a first cousin and Aslam repeatedly uses this enforced return imposed on the ­second-generation to parallel the sense of disorientation and unhappiness of their ­parents. The arranged relationship failed, but when she returned to ­England, Mah-Jabin found she was pregnant and decided to induce a miscarriage by taking quinine tablets (109). Now 27, she resents the loss of her own love – a boy she developed a relationship with before she was sent away – and the heartbreak she felt when told he had been married off to someone else. Mah-Jabin is angry at how her mother still advocates arranged marriages despite their repeated failure, while the community persecutes lovers such as Jugnu and Chanda, on whose house has been scrawled ‘They lived the life of sin and died the death of sinners’ (102). The comparisons and contrasts in the novel between enforced marriage and frustrated love epitomize the effects of cultural barriers, whether drawn from religious tradition or racial discrimination, which stand between genders and generations. Fear and suspicion of alterity form the backdrop to almost all the pain and unhappiness in the novel, accentuated by the themes of adjustment to exile and diaspora. Underlining the significant benefit of Shamas’s official role, difference in terms of sexual, religious, racial or cultural norms is used by many of those with financial and political control in the community to reinforce exclusion on the basis of maintaining ‘purity’ and to guard against exogamy or hybridity of any kind. Religious orthodoxy, extended families and the traditions of home, all fail to anchor a satisfying subjectivity in divided lives. Shamas’s divergent experience of lost love also links to his children in its origin and culminates in violence brought about by Kaukab’s separation from them. When Mah-Jabin visits, Charag has also returned to Dasht-e-Tanhaii, but is unsure whether to see his parents. Echoing the scene of Mah-Jabin’s return to the family home, he recalls how, when his sister was 13, Kaukab hit Mah-Jabin because she was using tampons, ruining her marriage chances in Kaukab’s eyes. Rehearsing this memory, Charag meets Suraya, a woman whose husband in Pakistan divorced her when he was drunk, such that she now needs to marry and be divorced again before her husband is allowed to remarry her under Muslim law (131). Alongside all the other female characters in the foreground of the novel, Suraya is another woman whose life has been scarred by the circumstances of her marriage. Separated from her son, she approaches men who might help her to regain her family. This is the reason she walks by the lake in Dasht-e-Tanhaii,

108

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

which all the novels’ lost lovers are said to haunt, trying herself to arrange a marriage she wishes to end in divorce as soon as possible. The meeting persuades Charag to return to London, while Suraya encounters Shamas a few weeks later at the same place and succeeds in entering into a relationship with the father where she failed with his son. Shamas is strongly attracted to Suraya’s beauty and intelligence; she is partly drawn to him as a sympathetic man, but chiefly as a potential husband who might be her path back to her own lost child and husband. Shamas and Suraya meet again on several occasions, including at the house of a girl who has been beaten to death by a cleric attempting to rid her of a djinn by exorcism, with her parents’ blessing (185–6). The dead girl was known to Shamas, who had earlier come across her with her Hindu lover, also by the lake, thus entering the narrative cycle of characters killed for choosing love over obedience to orthodoxy. At the end of the third section, ‘Summer’, it is almost a year since Jugnu and Chanda disappeared. As Shamas walks to meet Suraya by the lake once more, he is approached by three men who offer to bring his children home to Dashte-Tanhaii. In the ensuing discussion, he wonders if the men have been sent by Suraya’s husband to hurt him, but they insist it is Kaukab’s concern for her scattered family that motivates them. As Shamas tries to send them away, they increase their insistence that as a Muslim, he is also reprehensible for attempting, through his office, to deny other families their services, which his own wife had enquired after the previous year. When he tries to escape, the men assault Shamas and he is left beaten and bruised on the ground. By this time, he believes that Suraya is pregnant and worries that the men are now about to attack her. However, Shamas is hospitalized for a month and does not see Suraya again until the end of the novel, when his glimpse of her through a window, seemingly remarried, is one of the last images he sees before his death. Such a skeleton outline intimates how the novel presents multiple narrative strands, striating the narrative like map lines, of individuals separated from those they love. The divisions are deepened by accusations across families and generations. For her children’s alienation from her, Kaukab blames Jugnu’s influence, but also that of Shamas with his ‘godless ideas’. She additionally censures her own father for choosing an ‘irreligious husband for her’ (34). Over the course of their marriage, this has reinforced itself for Kaukab such that she and Shamas lived apart for a period of several years after he physically forced her to feed Ujala as a baby, when she was withholding milk during daylight hours throughout Ramadan (142–3). The near constant dissatisfaction with those who

Nadeem Aslam

109

are closest to each of the main characters underlines how, as much as exile, the book’s depiction of discord among families as well as communities leads to the acceptance of the title of the ‘Desert of Loneliness’ by all the town. Admission of self-doubt is rare, but at night, Kaukab dreams of two selves, one hanging dead and the other, her executioner – ‘ “I can’t help wondering if it’s all my fault,” said the corpse. “Stop wondering,” said the executioner-self. But during the waking hours, as usual, she could find no one other than the old culprits for this new disaster that had befallen her. Shamas. Jugnu. England. The white race’ (58–9).26 By contrast with that of her children, Kaukab’s life is indelibly marked by her exile from Pakistan. Since her move to England, she has hardly engaged with Western culture at all, such that she asks of a postcard of the Statue of Liberty, ‘ “Who is this green woman in a sari” ’? (27) When flowers sent by Mah-Jabin are delivered on her birthday, Kaukab notes that it is only the third time that year she has spoken to a white person, and that there were fewer than 10 such occasions in the previous three years (69). With no education since she was 11, this is partly because of linguistic and cultural seclusion, but also because Kaukab is wary of the many possible forms of contamination with which the West may confront her (she thinks ‘England is a dirty country, an unsacred country full of people filthy with disgusting habits and practices’ (267)). The culmination of Kaukab’s story occurs after the close of Chotta and Barra’s trial at a lavish meal she arranges for the family, quite inappropriately in the circumstances, her children feel. Her life has become so centred on her family, despite the fact that she is peripheral to theirs, that she prepares a large banquet of food (305), starkly revealing her own longing for her children’s homecoming. They, in turn, reveal their experiences of what they perceive as her ill-judged decisions over their welfare – Ujala believes the consecrated additive she put in his food as a child on a cleric’s advice was, in fact, bromide (304), a letter tells how Mah-Jabin was abused by the husband arranged for her in Pakistan (306–7). For her part, Kaukab is unrepentant, adhering to her respect for traditional practices and religious observance, which she continues to maintain are the foundation of propriety, honour and respect, valuing social conformity over individual freedoms. For example, at the meal she becomes worried about her reputation in the neighbourhood after learning that Mah-Jabin has entered a local shop, because she realizes ‘the women of the neighbourhood know the girl is divorced, and is sure they would have made comments about her’ (311). She is then concerned when Charag’s ex-wife, Stella, leaves the house to fetch a present

110

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

from the car because ‘Kaukab doesn’t want anyone in the neighbourhood to see the exposed skin and comment on it’ (317). After a fierce exchange of words, Kaukab retreats to her room and by the time she returns, the children have left the house. Echoing a wider concern in orthodox Islamic society over a Western liberalism that has shaped the thinking of many second-generation children in Britain, Kaukab despairs of a reconciliation within her own family of such stark ideological differences. In the night, Shamas awakes to find Kaukab attempting suicide by drinking water boiled with one thousand penny coins (328). Her reasons for this are placed at Shamas’s door – she wishes to die because of the country to which Shamas has brought her with his dreams of a communist future and because of her belief that he has made her lose her children (327–8). Written in the present continuous tense to convey immediacy, the thirdperson narration abounds with descriptions of the natural world that most urban culture overlooks – berries, trees, moths and birds. This lexicon, more familiar in Persian poetry, in part intimates the world of the story’s central, but absent lost lovers (Jugnu was a professional lepidopterist), but more generally reflects a cultural aesthetic alien to contemporary mainstream metropolitan sensibilities, made all the more incongruous by its paradisiacal associations in ‘The Desert of Loneliness’. Similarly, Shamas observes how ‘the condensation on the windowpanes has frozen into sparkling patterns of bird feathers, insect wings and leaf skeletons, as though each home contains within it a magical forest, tangled with fables and myths, the glittering foliage growing pressed against the glass’ (24). The book also, through plain description, draws attention to the incorporation of nature into the architecture of Dasht-e-Tanhaii – ‘In the town centre there are horses of stone. Lions guard the entrance to the library. A granite deer looks down from the top of the train station’s facade’ (137). The originality of the writing extends beyond this, however, applying a defamiliarizing poetic perspective to any everyday object, such that, for example, paper ‘turns yellow over the years because it’s burning very slowly’ (26). Like myriad stories of exiles and émigrés, from Stein to Isherwood, Aslam’s book is littered with the lost, many of whom are indeed looking for love. However, the novel’s title is illuminated by a thought of Suraya’s as she listens to the Sufi music of Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – ‘a lover looking for the beloved represents the human soul looking for salvation’ (188). This illustrates one metaphoric dimension to the novel’s title, which suggests that all those in the narrative are lost – isolated from some kind of familial, spiritual, national, cultural or beloved home, trapped in exile. In particular, a motif of

Nadeem Aslam

111

winged creatures runs through the book, underpinned by Jugnu’s interests in moths (e.g., ‘Garden Tiger. Cinnabar. Early Thorn. Nail Mark’ 6–7), and there is a repeated suggestion that the characters’ spirits are themselves caught in nets while struggling to fly free.27 After Shamas’s death, the last page cements the idea of the delicacy of human lives through this motif as a boy ‘keeps thinking some calamity is imminent, dreaming again and again of rocks and stones hurled at butterflies’ (369). The allusion derives from Islamic art, but also Western mythology, as is common in Aslam’s writing. Thus, the reference draws in the name of Iris, the middle name of Charag’s former wife, which ‘comes from a beautiful girl of Greek and Roman myths who had iridescent wings’ (270). A goddess of the rainbow with golden wings, Iris keys into the novel’s imagery of delicate beings at risk of harm and violence. For instance, it strongly resounds with the ‘Ghost Moth’, the most memorable of the moth names that Jugnu has taught Shamas (7), who is later reminded that ‘all animals retreat from fire . . . except moths’ (281). To emphasize the sense of isolation and danger in exile, Kaukab is likened by her daughter to an animal trapped in a cage of permitted thinking (111). Kaukab herself thinks, ‘There are no butterflies in the Koran but nine other birds or winged creatures are mentioned: the gnat, the bee, the fly, the hoopoe, the crow, the grasshopper, the bird of Jesus, namely the bat, the ant and the bulbul’ (291). The metaphor is intensified by the contrast between the book’s opening chapter and its closing revelations of the circumstances surrounding Jugnu and Chanda’s death, which seals one circle of the book’s imagery rather as the snow, for Shamas, seals another. The book’s first chapter is entitled ‘The Night of the Peacock Moths’, and in this respect, concerns an invasion of Jugnu’s 19 male moths from their storage in the attic. It is an assertion of the powers of attraction, of another search for lovers, as Jugnu lies asleep with hands of light, like Iris’s iridescent wings: The Giant Peacocks ignored the sleeping Jugnu even though his hands weren’t covered by the blanket, the hands that had the ability to glow in the dark. No moth could resist being drawn to his hands, but that night the interior was noisy with another call that only they could hear – that of a female moth. (22)28

This is Jugnu’s first night in the house (295). The closing chapters that explain the circumstances of the murders are then initiated by a narrative of how Jugnu was awoken by the sound of peacocks on the day of his death in the house (334). In terms of the suggestiveness of this choice of bird, it is explained that ‘the faithful have always been ambivalent towards peacocks because it was this kind-hearted

112

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

creature that had inadvertently let Satan into the garden of Eden’ (334). The birds have appeared in recent weeks and have mostly, like the story’s human lovers, hidden by the lake, but on this day, they come into Jugnu’s backyard, and to emphasize the ominous connotations for a lovers’ paradise, they seek ‘safety amid the branches of the apples trees’ (334).29 When Jugnu’s corpse is first discovered, the peacocks have invaded the house – the males have fought viciously over a female peahen and next to Jugnu lies the bright corpse of a peacock (358–9). Resonating once more with stories from religion and myth, it is also speculated by the town gossips that the human lovers have themselves transformed into peacocks. At the heart of Aslam’s novel is the lake where so many encounters take place and where the ghosts of lovers are thought to roam. To emphasize its topographical significance, it is in the shape of an X, but it was also ‘created in the early days of the earth when a towering giant fell out of the sky; and he is still there, still alive, the regular ebb and flow of the tides being the gentle rhythm of his heart still beating, the crashing waves of October his convulsive attempts to free himself ’ (4). The sense of an exiled and fallen presence prostrate on the earth and water seems to anticipate the close of the narrative too. Thus, as it starts, so the novel ends with Shamas, just before he dies beside the lake, stretching out his hand in the snowflakes to receive the ‘wafers of ice’ (5, 367) that provide the missing fifth season – ‘crystals of snow transformed into a monsoon raindrop’ (367). This occurs after Chanda’s brothers have been found guilty of the lovers’ murder and a further ‘lost lover’ (281) has been brought into the narrative foreground from her initial appearance at the novel’s start, fetching Shamas from his house to help her. This is Kiran, a Sikh woman previously in love with Kaukab’s brother, who, when he declared his intention to marry Kiran, was hurried into an arranged marriage in Pakistan. Kiran is now in a clandestine relationship with Chanda’s younger brother, Chotta, on trial for the murder of his sister and Jugnu (284). Indeed, it transpires that the sight – on the day of the murders –of Kiran in bed with Kaukab’s brother, who had secretly appeared again in her life a year earlier though Kaukab had tried to keep them apart, prompted Chotta’s rage at Chanda and Jugnu (283–4). It is one of the many examples of different behaviours sanctioned for men and women by their communities that Chotta is so outraged by Chanda’s relationship with Jugnu, and Kiran’s affair with her first love, that he contemplates a murder he thinks required by honour (347). This is even though he himself began his relationship with Kiran after mistaking

Nadeem Aslam

113

her house for that of a prostitute (287). The narrator specifies that neither the community nor Chotta see a similarity between the behaviour of brother and sister, between Chotta’s ‘secret nights with a woman he was not married to and Chanda setting up home with Jugnu’ (344). Like Aslam’s recognition of the distinction between a Muslim cultural heritage and a repressive adherence to religious dogma in the name of Islam, Maps for Lost Lovers is a book based on the juxtaposition of perceived and contrasted differences. There seems little middle ground occupied in the novel between fanaticism and liberalism, bigotry and toleration, vilification and love. The policing of women’s lives by clerics and family members in the name of religion and tradition sounds repeatedly in major and minor characters’ stories, but the largely self-imposed imprisoning of Kaukab in a claustrophobic ideology is the saddest. The degree to which the book’s title encompasses her situation is perhaps debatable, though her children and her homeland are lost to her, but Kaukab’s dangerous certainties create the harshest wilderness of solitude in the novel, paralleling her austere and sometimes cruel, if loving, oppression of her children with Chanda’s murderous brothers’ honour killing of their sister. Above all, Aslam’s criticism is aimed at the culture of gossip and judgement that leads a community to cut away at the lives of its own inhabitants, making Dasht-eTanhaii a town of ‘emotional espionage, where when two people stop to talk on the street their tongues are like two halves of a scissor coming together’ (176). In this poisonous atmosphere, the desert of loneliness ultimately embraces all the characters in an exiled and isolated community that becomes a crucible of fear and suspicion, despite the beauty available in the world around them. The book places antithetical codes of behaviour and prohibited relationships at the centre of its unhappiness, pitching honour, propriety and duty against love, self-determination and desire. Kaukab is isolated and suicidal, Shamas dies detached from Suraya, the children are alienated, Jugnu and Chanda murdered by her family, several more lovers and families separated from each other. The inability of people to communicate happily with each other, whether because of incompatible values or restricted liberty, underpins the book’s extensive dramatis personae of disappointed lives, though there are residual hints of hope for the future at the end – Shamas for the promise of an unborn child, Suraya for eventual reconciliation with her husband, Kaukab’s children for better lives than their mother. For the most part, however, there are distraught lovers hovering like spectres drawn to haunting others as moths dangerously drawn to sources of light.

114

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

Alongside the myriad accounts of brutality or threatened violence towards sisters, daughters, wives and mothers in the name of piety, modesty and virtue, Suraya’s story underlines the consequences for many women trying to reconcile love and devout obedience. The novel dramatizes tensions between the beliefs and values of the West and Islam without introducing white characters, but by using a gendered and cross-generational set of divisions that attempts not to fall into stereotypical associations. Yet, standing out from the plethora of fictions treating similar subjects since 2001, the most interesting aspect of Aslam’s writing is its linguistic innovation – an aesthetic approach to cultural difference that is also nuanced, with the mystic devotionalism of Sufism contrasted with the prescriptions of authoritarian Islamicists, and the many facets of the Asian communities’ response to flora and fauna with the alienation of the non-migrant population from the beauty of their natural surroundings. With its exquisite use of language, drawing on Urdu poetry, but also the Western modernists, Aslam’s novel is composed as an equivalent to a Persian miniature. As we noted earlier, Aslam writes in a recent tradition of migrant fiction that runs through to a broad range of novels that treat migrants’ experiences in Britain, stretching perhaps from Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999) to Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003). This is fiction that either frames Islam sympathetically to the Anglophone reader or, more commonly, presents the oppressive aspects of Islam for a Western perspective and as such appears onesided if its character portrayals are generalized into a worldview. Yet, in the work of a writer such as Aslam, the fiction’s committed secularism lays the foundations for a more direct post-9/11 novel of contrasting philosophical approaches brought together at one of the centres of contestation in a climate of globalized violence.

Terror: The Wasted Vigil Alluding to the opening of the Communist Manifesto, Hardt and Negri conclude that in the twenty-first century, ‘a spectre haunts the world and it is the spectre of migration’.30 In an accelerated world that is built on the fluidity of signs, images and bodies and the porousness of territorial and ideological boundaries, it seems to be movement, or rather the capacity to exert control over movement, that has become the central axis of political struggle. For Zygmunt Bauman, whose work has focused on the various tendencies and geometries of power

Nadeem Aslam

115

structuring global capitalism, the very same processes that have contributed to the new mobility of people, commodities and information are also responsible for ever-deepening divisions.31 In the present historical moment, for which Bauman coins the term ‘liquid modernity’ – in contradistinction to the previous ‘solid’ modernity of heavy industry, Fordist production, imperial expansion and monopoly capitalism – the relative freedom to access this new mobility and the increasingly disembedded channels of power is the main stratifying factor of twenty-first-century life.32 Beneath the rhetoric of multiplicity and universal inclusion advocated by global capitalism, then, the contemporary realization of the world market is defined by the continuous imposition of new hierarchies that exclude entire segments of the world’s population. Congruent with Hardt and Negri’s delineation of acutely divided and unequal conditions under Empire, this is to recognize the contradictions that underpin the imaginative and material project of globalization – alongside processes that dissolve the traditional spatial and temporal constraints obstructing the flows of material and immaterial commodities, localizing or space-fixing processes are also at work, which regulate the movement of ‘unproductive’ elements through the augmented surveillance and control of border zones. Thus, according to Bauman, the logic of globalization tends towards not homogenization, but an increasing polarization of society that is manifested at both global and local levels. On the one hand, an elite cadre of cosmopolitan ‘tourists’ float free from the constraints of territorial and corporeal embedded­ ness, able to move across the earth, both physically and virtually, almost without restriction. This exterritorial elite, at once weightless and inaccessible, wield a power whose motility annuls the possibility of situated resistance. On the other hand, those who are unable to mimic the free movement of capital find themselves deprived of the ability to control their own space and denied the freedom to choose a new locality. These ‘vagabonds’ are the dark vagrant ‘Other’ to the supercorporate and touristic consumption of commodities and desires, on the margins of a world contrived to ease the passage of those with the benefit of credentials and wealth.33 It is this friction-free smoothness, traversed easily on real and virtual journeys leaving no trace of material inertia, which is the ultimate expression of a technocapitalist desire that aspires to an ever greater manipulation of transience. This informs the scenario that conditions the lives of the characters in The Wasted Vigil (2008), of vast transterritorial forces operating overt and covert stratagems over displaced and conflicted populations. Aslam’s third novel

116

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

explores the human dimension to the acknowledgement that ‘the main theatre of the War on Terror is Asia’ against the historical significance of Afghanistan as a repeated contact zone for the fraught struggles between the East and the West.34 It is a narrative where, again, hate and love are pitched against each other, with the violent political machinations of ideological forces destroying the lives of individuals ‘on the ground’. Aslam’s viewpoint is evident in this description, for example, of a room painted with scenes of lovers, but mutilated by gunfire – ‘This country was one of the greatest tragedies of the age. Torn to pieces by the many hands of war, by the various hatreds and failings of the world. Two million deaths over the past quarter-century. Several of the lovers on the walls were on their own because of the obliterating impact of bullets – nothing but a gash or a terrible ripping away where the corresponding man or woman used to be.’35 This description provides a parallel to Aslam’s own novel, an art work in which lovers and their families are torn apart by perpetual war. As in Maps for Lost Lovers, this is a novel of irreconcilable political viewpoints and conflicting cultural understandings, and Aslam portrays a country and a situation differently perceived by British, American, Afghan and Russian eyes. Appropriate to these characters’ nationalities, the narrative spans three decades of Afghanistan’s complex history, from the present back to the eruption of violence when General Zia’s regime filtered CIA money and armaments into Afghanistan to augment the mujahideen opposition to the Soviets. It is also firmly set against the destructive aggression of the Taliban and its battle against free thought, culture or education. Principally encompassing the history of Afghanistan since the Russian withdrawal in 1989, the novel focuses on a band of nomadic characters brought together in circumstances linked by fear and loss. As a synecdoche for the history of the country, at the epicentre of the narrative is a house owned by English doctor Marcus Caldwell, whose Afghan wife of 40 years, Qatrina and daughter, Zameen, are dead. A portion of Marcus’s house, built by a master painter and calligrapher in the late nineteenth century, is occupied by a disused perfumefactory, containing an enormous unearthed Buddha’s head that was buried side-on in the middle of the floor. The house also shelters a Russian woman named Lara, searching for her brother Benedikt, a soldier in the Afghan invasion, and an American called David Town, a dealer in jewels who was Zameen’s lover in the months before she died. David is also an ex-CIA agent. Later in the story, two others come to stay in the house. One is Dunia, a teacher fleeing the Taliban and fundamentalist threats, and the other is Casa, a labourer with terrorist connections. Marcus will

Nadeem Aslam

117

not leave the house until he has news of Zameen’s son, Bihzad, but David will not divulge her story and its relation to both Lara’s brother and himself. Born the same year as Zameen, in  1963, Lara knows little of her brother’s fate after he came to Afghanistan as a Soviet soldier 25  years ago and never returned. This is her third visit to the country to try to find him, and she has come to Marcus’s house because she has learnt that Benedikt knew Zameen. Only towards the end of the novel does the horror of Benedikt’s death become apparent – that, after being captured by Afghan soldiers, he was torn to death when substituted for an animal in the bloodsport of buzkashi, in which two opposing teams on horseback fight over the body of a calf or goat (309–11). The manner of his death seems itself to stand as a metaphor for the dismemberment of the country as Afghanistan is repeatedly torn apart by civil war, foreign invasion and feuding warlords. Echoing the theme of haunting in Maps for Lost Lovers, Benedikt refers to his killers as dukhi, which means ‘ghosts’ and is the name that the Soviet soldiers give to their Afghan counterparts because these warriors seem to suddenly materialize and then disappear back into the countryside (this is one reason why ghosts repeat in the thoughts of Lara and others in the novel). Hardt and Negri consider conflicts of the kind present in The Wasted Vigil as imperial civil wars because ‘they exist within, are conditioned by, and in turn affect the global imperial system’.36 Such confrontations exceed the sovereignty of nation states and would require a new framework beyond international law to address successfully. As such, they create the greatest threat to democracy, which is a political system for the multitude in Hardt and Negri’s view, allied to the desire for equality and freedom which, for example, fuelled the Arab Spring movements that began at the end of 2010 and used twenty-first-century digital technologies to organize civil resistance in a way that would have been unimaginable even during the anti-communist revolutions of 1989. What was also unimaginable in 1989 was the unending need for democracy to co-exist with war, when previously, it had been a political system for peace, suspended in times of national crisis. In the twenty-first century, by contrast, the new global form of sovereignty that Hardt and Negri call Empire inevitably ‘rules over a global order that is not only fractured by internal divisions and hierarchies but also plagued by perpetual war’.37 Aslam’s writing engages with this contemporary frame to human affairs in The Wasted Vigil by positioning war at the heart of daily politics, showcasing how the political aim is no longer an end to warfare, but the use of it in social control. Under imperial civil wars, the restitution of peace is no longer a realizable goal, but instead, there is the orchestration of constant violence that

118

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

‘becomes the necessary condition for the functioning of discipline and control’, with war performing a controlling purpose – ‘both a procedural activity and an ordering, regulative activity that creates and maintains social hierarchies’.38 For this reason, Hardt and Negri cite the political programme of ‘nation building’ in Afghanistan as one example of the contemporary relation between war and the regulation of social life, writing in 2004 that ‘the U.S. military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq are proving incapable of meeting the minimum objectives of security and stability’.39 As its title suggests, Aslam’s novel is, in part, an observation of a household of characters concerned with futile waiting, and much of the narrative unfolds through recollection, moving between the past and present. The opening line of the novel describes Lara’s mind as ‘a haunted house’ (5) and this mirrors the atmosphere throughout Marcus’s ghost-filled residence. The narrative past is gradually pieced together as aspects to the characters’ past lives are slowly brought to light, in imitation of the archaeological process of unearthing the Buddha’s head. Thus, it transpires that many years ago, Marcus and Qatrina, also a doctor, were kidnapped to secure their medical skills by the feuding warlords based in Peshawar, Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan (95), whose rivalry over control of the region sits behind the main events in the story’s present (32). Years later, in the spring of 2001, the Taliban claim that Marcus and his wife are not married by Muslim law because a female cleric presided at their wedding – a viewpoint that surfaces at this point because Marcus and Qatrina have started to educate the children whose American-funded school has been destroyed. The denial of the wedding’s authenticity changes Marcus’s status to that of a thief of Qatrina’s property, for which she is forced to cut off his hand (207), while she herself is deemed an adulteress and stoned to death (225–6). Providing another link to Maps for Lost Lovers, the setting of the novel is beside a small lake called Usha (meaning teardrop), as is the town, which lies a mile away. Like the earlier novel, The Wasted Vigil draws on Persian literature and many of Aslam’s choices of imagery, from the lake to peacocks and moths drawn to candles suggest allusions to such texts of Islamic mysticism as Farid Attar’s twelfth-century allegorical rendering of Sufism in The Conference of the Birds, which Rushdie used as inspiration for his first novel, Grimus. Just as Maps for Lost Lovers alludes through its bird imagery to the soul’s search for the mystical path to God, both novels present a lake as the place where the individuals of the narrative find haunted mirrors of themselves rather than the objects of their quests, just as in The Conference of the Birds, the birds searching for God ultimately find only their own reflections in a lake.

Nadeem Aslam

119

Suggesting the devastation wrought on the country as well as the brutal treatment of women, in The Wasted Vigil soon after the Soviets arrive in Usha in  1980, Zameen witnesses a cleric burying his murdered second wife by the lake (he has also beaten his first wife to death and interred her (243)). To protect himself, the cleric claims Zameen and her lover are among the resistance fighters who have attacked a school, leading to her kidnap by Soviet soldiers, including Lara’s brother, Benedikt. She is tortured and her boyfriend supposedly murdered. Affording her a temporary reprieve from death, Zameen proves useful to her Soviet imprisoners because her rare blood group is the same as that of their colonel, Rostov. When he stabs Rostov during his desertion, Benedikt decides to take Zameen with him to prevent her being drained of blood in a crude transfusion attempt to save Rostov. Benedikt had previously taken advantage of Zameen’s captivity to sexually assault her repeatedly and by the time they escape, she is pregnant with Bihzad. Soon, they are separated, however, never to meet again, and Zameen starts a relationship with David Town in Peshawar a few years later. In the present of the story, over two decades later, another young man is pretending to Marcus to be his lost grandson (55). This Bihzad has previously been imprisoned by the Americans under suspicion of being a member of al-Qaeda. Mentored by the labourer-terrorist Casa, he is now being sent by one of the warlords, Nabi Khan, to blow up an American-funded school in Jalalabad, the nearest city, 30 miles away. Unknown to Bihzad, the timer attached to the bomb-detonator does not work, and so his is a suicide mission. This serves as a parallel to the story that is finally revealed about Zameen, the woman that the bomber Bihzad claims as his mother in order to exploit Marcus. Both Marcus and David come to believe Zameen was killed in a raid on Gul Rasool’s house, where she was held captive. However, David learns a different truth years later (110). This is that Zameen survived the raid and was bribed with the promise of seeing her son again into trying to blow up Christopher Palantine, a CIA colleague of David’s. When Palantine discovers Zameen planting the bomb, Gul Rasool has her immediately shot to try to show he was not the perpetrator of the assassination plot (167). Illustrating how Aslam weaves historical facts into his novel, David is told this news by Christopher in 1993 in New York on the February day that a bomb explodes underneath the World Trade Centre, planted by a graduate of the Afghan training camps established in the 1980s to train men to fight the Soviets (169). Returning to the narrative’s present, David is now Lara’s lover, underlining Aslam’s desire to mimic in his human story the entanglements of the various

120

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

national forces in Afghanistan. Acting on her request, David agrees to talk to CIA agent James Palantine, the son of his ex-colleague, to discover for her the truth about Benedikt. This acts as an echo of the time he agreed to find her Afghan childhood sweetheart for Zameen, but failed to tell her he had located the man in a refugee camp, which was subsequently bombed by the Soviets (136, 144). At this point in the present, post-9/11, James is working as head of security for Gul Rasool, now a U.S. ally, despite his knowledge that the warlord tried to kill his father. With this explicit complexity around the intersection of the personal and the political, the novel ends Book One, setting up its second half as a playing out in the present of these various antecedent circumstances. The novel also reveals a Russian doll structure with regard to the truth as revelations repeatedly expose new information that forces the characters to revise their understanding of the past, and to reappraise their relationship to it. For example, in Book Two, David is told by James that his friend Christopher Palantine knew Zameen was in a relationship with David, but allowed her killing by Rasool because he thought she was a spy working for the Soviets (325). He is also told that Zameen’s Afghan communist lover did not die in the Soviet bombing of the refugee camp, but continued to meet with her (326). Central to the novel’s concern with families torn apart by war, the complex problem of authenticity and genuine knowledge additionally hangs over the future in the question of the real Bihzad’s whereabouts and existence. In such ways, the events of the novel build up repeated hopes for the characters and frustrate them. Each individual is driven by hope of reconciliation, but perpetrates and/or encounters deception and manipulation. Information is used to extort and coerce while misinformation serves to deflect and delay. The different protagonists gathered at Marcus’s house wait patiently, their long vigil, in part, symbolized by the vast Buddha’s head, while their movement is subjected to exploitation, border controls, bandit raids and the vested interests of foreign powers. Into this crucible of suffering comes Casa as another figure who is both puppet and would-be liberator. After he is injured in Usha, posting threatening ‘night letters’ (shabnama) for Nabi Khan, Casa arrives at Marcus’s house, knowing him to be a doctor. David and Marcus take him to the hospital for treatment, but he is then seen with David by others of Nabi Khan’s men, and so decides to hide out with his new acquaintances (161–2). There is a suggestion in the novel that Casa could be the real Bihzad, and he is the right age having been six in 1988 (177),

Nadeem Aslam

121

but the novel leaves the question of Bihzad’s identity unresolved. Nonetheless, Book One has revealed that Casa’s only memory of his mother is of knocking over a basket of silk embroidery threads, which tumble down a staircase (56–7), and David Town later recounts how, in Peshawar, he first saw Zameen 20 years ago at an open doorway and gathered for her ‘silk filaments’ after ‘fifty or so orbs of thread leapt down the steep staircase leading to that upstairs apartment’ where Zameen was living with Bihzad (130–1). Divided into two Books, each of five chapters, the novel’s second half begins with an explanation that the name of the Islamic extremist Casa comes from a well-known nineteenth-century English Romantic poem. This is ‘Casabianca’ by Felicia Dorothea Hemans, a poem based on the true story of a 12-year-old boy who died at the Battle of the Nile in Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 (177). Importantly, it is a poem about a son’s obedience to his admiral father and his refusal to save himself from danger until he is given permission from his parent, who is unable to grant it. It would thus seem that allusion to the poem underscores questions of parentage, obedience and power raised by the novel, while sounding its primary interest in imperial wars fought out in the East. Casa is now resident in Marcus’s house when the teacher Dunia comes to stay. Echoing Zameen’s story, this is after her school has been closed down because she has been declared dissolute.40 The latest instance of past–present parallels, the declaration has been made by a cleric who is the son of the man who long ago denounced Zameen, and he himself is motivated by the fact that he has asked Dunia to be his third wife and been refused. Dunia’s presence disturbs the virginal and ascetic Casa, who develops feelings for her, but is unable to express them or even admit them fully to himself. When Dunia is kidnapped, possibly by Gul Rasool because of a suspicion that she was involved in the ‘night letter’ postings, Casa sets out to find her, becoming one of those seeking someone lost to the larger forces engulfing all those living at Marcus’s house. Casa is himself captured by James Palantine and his U.S. security guards at Gul Rasool’s house, leaving David to attempt a rescue. At the house, David discovers Casa has been brutally tortured into revealing the details of the raid threatened in the night letter. Accusing James Palantine of illegal actions, David retreats from the house with the wounded Casa, though Dunia is never found. This plot line culminates in the penultimate chapter with the preparations of Nabi Khan’s death squad for a raid on Gul Rasool’s house. Casa is one of the young men readying themselves for martyrdom when David tries to rescue him from the line and persuade him to leave. Instead,

122

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

while held in David’s embrace, Casa detonates the bomb he is carrying, killing them both. In the book’s final chapter, it is several months later. We learn that Nabi Khan’s raid on Gul Rasool’s stronghold in Usha failed, but there were many killed or wounded, including James Palantine. Another raid is promised in more night letters, emphasizing the novel’s pervasive sense of ceaseless conflict and futile repetition. Lara has returned to Russia and Marcus is supervising the removal of the Buddha’s head from the perfume factory by an American helicopter crew. When rockets are fired at the aircraft, Marcus and the Buddha’s head are abandoned on a hillside, where Marcus meets a man who has come to reopen the local school after Dunia’s disappearance, starting another cycle of attempted education of the upcoming generation. In a closing image of optimism, Marcus and the head are picked up once more and transported to Kabul, where the giant Gandhara Buddha is to be housed in the capital’s museum. Like its predecessor, the novel is indeed striking for its imagery. For example, in a gesture that suggests Aslam may, in part, be recalling the battle over free speech at the heart of the ‘Rushdie Affair’, Qatrina has nailed prized books to the room and corridor ceilings in her and Marcus’s house to stop the Taliban from burning them.41 Occasionally, a book falls to the floor or is brought down by someone to read. It is as though both knowledge and the past has been held in check, stopped in time and kept out of reach for a better future. Similarly, the giant Buddha’s head, eyes two-thirds closed in serene meditation, hints at a buried history and forgotten serenity. Only at the end of the novel is it freed as the last glimmer of hope in the narrative occurs – Marcus is to meet a young man who may be his lost grandson. The story tentatively concludes by presenting the possibility of consolation as well as portraying overwhelming barbarities within the overriding political machinations of warlords and neo-imperialists. The novel’s lyrical style repeatedly emphasizes the long view and the beauty of the region’s past, as when Lara is described thus – ‘A native of faraway St Petersburg, what a long journey she has made to be here, this land that Alexander the Great had passed through on his unicorn, an area of fabled orchards and thick Mulberry forests, of pomegranates that appear in the border decorations of Persian manuscripts written one thousand years ago’ (6). But the abiding atmosphere of the novel is one contaminated by a history of social collapse into civil war, the rise of the Taliban, American and Pakistani interference, and the brutal rule of local warlords overseeing corrupt clergy and vicious soldiers. Creating a contrast and equivalence to the buried Buddha’s head, the novel notes that in  2001, American soldiers ceremonially buried debris from the

Nadeem Aslam

123

World Trade Centre in the mountain ranges that loom over the house (30). This reference to 9/11 marks it as, in the historical long view, simply the latest moment of East–West conflict. As suggested by the reference to the poem ‘Casabianca’ mentioned earlier, the novel is striated with references to wars and their rendition in art, from The Aeneid (95), The Iliad (168) and Aeschylus’s The Persians (86) to Tolstoy’s War and Peace (78) and Kurosawa’s film about sixteenth-century Japanese warlords Kagemusha (76). While the imagery of the novel includes the meshwork of netting and the aesthetics of symmetry, it is apparent that Aslam sees parallels everywhere for the enmeshment of East and West in bloody histories, such as that of Afghanistan, where both sides have played an enormous part in their estrangement and in the devastation of lives. Contrasting with this tortured history is the symbolic tradition of Buddhism, which posits alternative possibilities to the monotheistic dogmatism of Islam, communist fundamentalism or the modern-day neo-Christian crusaders of freedom within Hardt and Negri’s Empire. Aslam’s novels are not national allegories, but situated, cross-national portrayals of complex, imbricated lives that describe the movements of individuals alongside the larger military, diasporic and economic waves that wash across continents. The reference points are not narrowly colonial or national history, but diversely cultural and ethnic in ways that trace the multiple lines leading to contact zones of East and West in any part of the globe. Once more, we find in this approach contrasting preoccupations from those of a previous generation of writers, Salman Rushdie being one of the few novelists who came to prominence in the 1980s whose portrayals of the modern world assumed a transnational context for narratives that, while often teasing away at national allegories, placed them against the long view of world history. In the final chapter, we will examine the first three novels of a writer from the current generation who situates this long view more clearly in the context of the contemporary rise of globalization – David Mitchell.

Notes 1 Developing aspects of his enquiry into the subject of the East and West at war in The Wasted Vigil, in 2013, Aslam published a fourth novel The Blind Man’s Garden, set in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the months following September 2001. 2 English Fiction Since 1984: Narrating a Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 6.

124

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

3 In parallel with the emergence of these authors, many of whom have lived or continue to live in Britain, there is a similar fecundity of writers in English with generational ties to northern Africa, such as the Cairo-born writers Ahdaf Soueif (The Map of Love) and Leila Aboulela (The Translator), or to the Caribbean or Sub-Saharan Africa, including Caryl Phillips (The Nature of Blood), Fred D’Aguiar (Feeding the Ghosts), Ben Okri (The Famished Road), Bernardine Evaristo (Soul Tourists), David Dabydeen (Harlot’s Progress) Andrea Levy (Small Island), Diran Adebayo (My Once Upon a Time) and Abdulrazak Gurnah (Paradise). 4 Laura Moss, ‘The Politics of Everyday Hybridity: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth’. Wasafiri, 39 (2003), pp. 11–17. 5 Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991), p. 324. 6 The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). 7 See Stuart Hall, ‘When Was the “Post-Colonial”? Thinking at the Limit’, in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons. Ed. by Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 242–60. 8 Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989). 9 See Doreen Massey, ‘Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place’, in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. Ed. by Jon Bird and others (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 59–69. 10 The philosophical reassertion of space as both a material product of social relations and as a site of changing cultural meanings can be traced back in particular to the spatial phenomenology of Henri Lefebvre’s, The Production of Space. Trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). More recently, the work of Michel Serres, Bruno Latour and Manuel DeLanda has continued the critique of a static and stabilized space, advocating instead the notion of place as a meshwork of movements and foldings. 11 In Liquid Modernity, Zygmunt Bauman suggests that the West has shifted from a ‘solid’ hardware-based modernity, characterized by heavy industry, Fordist ­mass-production, imperial expansion and monopoly capitalism, towards a ‘light’ or ‘liquid’ software-based modernity that poses fresh challenges for the cognitive frameworks used to narrate individual experience and joint identities. The quotation is from Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers (London: Faber, 2005), p. 46. 12 David Harvey, ‘From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity’, in Mapping the Futures, pp. 3–29 (p. 11). 13 Indeed, Susheila Nasta observes that the etymology of ‘diaspora’ connotes both dispersal and settlement; see Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (London: Palgrave, 2002), p. 7.

Nadeem Aslam

125

14 See The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 15 Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film and Urban Formations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 20–1. 16 Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 66. 17 Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line (London: Allen Lane, 2000), p. 2. 18 See Aslam’s interview with Claire Chambers, British Muslim Fictions (Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 134–57 (pp. 154–5). 19 Adam Mars-Jones, ‘Anything to See Those Paper Eyes’, The Observer, Sunday 12 October 2008,  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/12/ fiction2  [accessed 1 March 2012]. 20 Nadeem Aslam, quoted in Claire Chambers, British Muslim Fictions (Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2011), p. 157. 21 Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers (London: Faber, 2005), p. 29. Further references to this edition will include the page number in parentheses after the quotation. 22 Pesso-Miquel, Catherine, ‘Addressing Oppression in Literature’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 43:2 (August 2007), pp. 149–60 (p. 153). 23 Aslam says, ‘I wanted the reader to be as confused about his surroundings as my characters – immigrants to this alien place – were’. Quoted at  http://www. faber.co.uk/site-media/reading-guides/maps-for-lost-lovers_reading-guide. pdf  [accessed 26 April 2012]. 24 See Lindsey Moore’s discussion of the opening to the novel, the use of references to Islamic art and the ‘bearing across of motifs and references from the Pakistani to the northern English context in order to render the depressing urban landscape pastoral’. Lorrie Moore, British Muslim Identities and Spectres of Terror in Nadeem Aslam’s ‘Maps for Lost Lovers’. Postcolonial Text, 5:2 (2009), pp. 1–19 (p. 7). 25 To reinforce the point, Kaukab continues to think in the Pakistani language of things, hence a few pages later, when a door slams, it is ‘with a loud bang – dharam!’ (p. 40). 26 Kaukab also has a secret – she telephoned people in the house where Chanda and Jugnu were staying in Pakistan and denounced them as sinners – lovers pretending to be friends. (p. 59). 27 See the discussion of the metaphor of moths and butterflies in terms of sexual and cultural motifs in Chris Weedon’s essay, which builds on that by Moore concerning the cultural significance of winged creatures (Moore, p. 8) – Chris Weedon, ‘Tropes of Diasporic Life in the Work of Nadeem Aslam’, in Metaphor

126

28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40

41

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels and Diaspora in Contemporary Writing. Ed. by Jonathan P. A. Sell (London: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 20–38 (p. 36). Continuing the motif, Chapter Two is entitled ‘A Breakfast of Butterfly Eggs’ and records how condensation ‘on the windowpanes has frozen into sparkling patterns of bird feathers, insect wings and leaf skeletons, as though each home contains within it a magical forest, tangled with fables and myths’ (p. 24). The chapter also recounts how Jugnu encounters a barber’s son with a box containing ‘dying blood-soaked birds’ from an all-night quail fight (p. 337). Empire, p. 213. Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), p. 2. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). For a more extended discussion of ‘tourists’ and ‘vagabonds’, see Bauman’s Globalization, pp. 80–93. Ninan Koshy, The War on Terror: Reordering the World (New Delhi: Leftword, 2003), p. x. Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil (London: Faber, 2008), pp. 12–13. Further references to this edition will include the page number in parentheses after the quotation. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004), p. 4. Multitude, p. xiii. Within this, is the democratic organization of modern resistances and network of organizations in collaborative relationships to displace authority that Hardt and Negri see as characteristic of the ‘multitude’. Multitude, p. 21. Ibid., p. 320. Saira Shah explains the hostility shown by the Taliban to education in Afghanstan, and the existence of secret schools in houses. She visits one in Kabul – ‘Not only girls are denied education, boys are deprived of it too. It the Taliban find this calls everyone in the room – children included – will be beaten and sent to jail’. Saira Shah, The Storyteller’s Daughter (London: Michael Joseph, 2003), p. 21. See the discussion by Amit Chaudhuri, ‘Qatrina and the Books’. London Review of Books, 31:16 (27 August 2009), pp. 3, 5–6.

4

David Mitchell

With a succession of novels whose defining feature has been their difference from each other, Mitchell has specialized in innovative, if not always speculative, fiction since his ambitious and consistently inventive debut, Ghostwritten: A Novel in Nine Parts (1999).1 Shifting between a multitude of geographical settings, Ghostwritten weaves a series of discrete first-person narratives into a tapestry of stories that make subtle connections between apparently unrelated lives. This might be an appropriate way to view his fiction overall and we will illustrate this interconnectedness within the variety of his writing while limiting ourselves to a consideration of his first three books. Mitchell’s third novel, Cloud Atlas (2004), is reminiscent of his first, inter­ weaving six successive narratives that move from the colonial era of the nineteenth century to a dystopian future where warring tribes battle for resources after an unknown apocalypse. Similarly to Ghostwritten, the novel sets up textual and thematic echoes that resonate through its interlocking parts and bind together its dispersed voices, the layering of stories gradually building towards a sense of global space as at once encompassing diverse, heterogeneous elements and forming a densely interconnected matrix of human agents plotted as moving particles in a relentless, omni-directional diaspora. Before our discussion of these two books, we would like to shift the focus towards Mitchell’s second novel, number9dream (2001). In contrast to the globespanning architectures of Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, number9dream zeroes in on a single location, Tokyo, filtering Japanese society through the Western consumption of popular cultural productions such as manga, anime and video games.2 But the ultra-contemporary urban landscape of Japan’s sprawling capital is also a microcosm of the excesses of global technocapitalism and thus provides a powerful imaginative locus for the exploration of modes of identity in the twenty-first century. Like Hari Kunzru’s, Mitchell’s work seems fascinated by articulations of subjectivity opened up by the contemporary proliferation of

128

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

mass communications and new media technologies where concrete and virtual spaces, bodies and machines, have become inextricably intertwined. Just as both The Impressionist and Transmission suggest different, but related, perspectives on the fluidity and impermanence of identity in a networked global culture whose social relations are increasingly disembedded and deterritorialized, number9dream repeatedly blurs the apparent polarities between the realms of the material and the immaterial. The plot of number9dream centres on the experiences of the 20-year-old Eiji Miyake and his search for a father he has never known, a man who abandoned Eiji and his twin sister, Anju, shortly after they were born. Having spent most of his young life in the sleepy rural backwater of Yakushima, a tiny southern island in the Kyushu region, Eiji arrives in the sprawling metropolis of Tokyo on a quest to track down the parent whose regular maintenance payments, paid through a lawyer, is the only contact that he retains with his children. It emerges that Eiji and Anju were products of an extramarital affair, which traditional Japanese codes of family honour demand be kept secret. The very fact of their existence is seen as shameful evidence of this past infidelity and their absent father has attempted to sever all ties with his illegitimate offspring and their mother. Though he is determined to evade the consequences of his past actions, this callous rejection of his former mistress and children has had serious repercussions on Miyake and his family, contributing to the mental instability and alcoholism of their mother – necessitating her self-enforced absence for much of their upbringing – and the death of Anju nine years before, who disappeared while attempting to swim towards a partially-submerged rock off the coast that the children, believing it to have magical properties, named the ‘whalestone’.3 Cut loose from his immediate relations and finding little warmth from his surrogate family of a grandmother and various aunts and uncles who feel burdened by the weight of responsibility, Eiji dreams of a future reunion with his father that he hopes will anchor the aimless drift of his life and restore a sense of significance to his world. This father-shaped lack is thus invested with a transcendental authority over Miyake’s existence, conceived as a repository of truth that holds out the promise of meaning and existential plenitude for which he yearns. However, Eiji’s search for his father’s identity, and by extension, his own is hindered at every turn, the man’s anonymity preserved by the legal wrangling of his attorney as well as the intervention of his repellent ‘real’ wife and daughters who have no wish to publicize the secret stain that tarnishes the family name.

David Mitchell

129

The motif of the absent parent is a familiar route by which metaphysical questions of selfhood may be approached – one that can be traced back to the earliest examples of the novel form. Yet, it is significant that this device recurs in the writings of the authors on whom this study has been concentrating, the vacancy that sets in motion Pran’s multiple transformations in The Impressionist and the ontological lack fissuring Smith’s protagonist in The Autograph Man, while Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil rests on the multiple observation of absences. It may be that these struggles to reclaim personal histories and restore biographical continuity key into a wider sense of dislocation and rootlessness intensified by the pressures of globalization. The quest for selfhood and kinship goes hand-inhand with the erosion of the traditional cognitive frameworks used to narrate individual experience and joint history. As Eiji swirls around the labyrinthine streets, a self-styled private detective on the hunt for clues about his father, his quest is repeatedly subject to unexpected detours, deferrals and disruptions – he tries to hold down a job at a railway lostproperty office, becomes the unwilling participant in a Yakuza turf war, uncovers an illicit network that harvests human organs for profit, embarks on a love affair with a beautiful music student called Ai and re-establishes contact with his estranged mother. For much of the novel, the hazy figure of Miyake’s father is little more than a symbolic projection in which naïve fantasies of love and forgiveness commingle with feelings of bitter resentment. Unsurprisingly, considering the all-encompassing nature of his paternal search, Eiji’s voyage through the mazelike city spawns a succession of father-figures, from his landlord, Buntaro, to the Yakuza ‘father’ who ‘educates’ him in the ways of the violent criminal underworld that thrives in Tokyo’s shadowy spaces. Miyake’s febrile imagination conjures up a range of romantic scenarios in which shadowy conspirators keep him apart from his parent, whom he believes to be a high-profile public figure, preferring these fantasies to a more plausible, and emotionally crippling, reality. When Eiji finally comes face to face with the man in whom he has invested so much significance, however, his dreams of fulfilment dissolve into a crushing sense of pathos. Though it is never clear whether their meeting is the product of a hidden destiny or merely a fortuitous ‘card trick that Tokyo has performed’ (370) – Miyake finds himself delivering a pizza to the very person for whom he has been searching – what Miyake experiences when he confronts the affluent, yet conceited pater familias whose almost mythical persona has underpinned his quest is less the triumphant consummation of his selfhood than profound shame and disappointment. Not recognized by his father, Eiji chooses to slip

130

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

away anonymously rather than reveal his identity. As he puts it, ‘I feel sad that I found what I searched for, but no longer want what I found’; yet, if the culmination of his voyage brings little sense of personal resolution, it does at least permit him to cast off the father fetish that has obsessed much of his young life, allowing him to establish a more sympathetic relationship with his mother, who is convalescing in a mental institution (375). In the same way as Kunzru’s Transmission works on the volatile interface between abstract ideals and material forces, Mitchell’s novel explores the fluid border zone between dreams and reality. But if the opposition between signal and noise in Kunzru’s text maintains the dividing line between the subjective frameworks that constitute the world as an object of sense, knowledge and affect and those terrestrial elements that always exceed the limits of this process of enframing, in number9dream, the question of precisely where Eiji’s consciousness ends and the external world begins is raised from the very first pages. The novel’s opening section, entitled ‘PanOpticon’, is a model of this ontological instability where, reflecting contemporary re-articulations of space as a confluence of ongoing processes and oblique trajectories of becoming, the real and imaginary dimensions interpenetrate each other. As Eiji sits in the Jupiter Café, staking out the imposing PanOpticon building where he has learnt that his father’s lawyer, Akiko Kato, is employed, his narrative segues through a series of extravagant scenarios that jolt between different levels of reality. Perhaps influenced by the handheld ‘vidboy’ being played by one of the other customers, one of these sees Eiji conducting a daring raid on the building, evading high-tech surveillance systems, shooting Kato as well as her cyborg double, and escaping with the secret documents that will reveal the true identity of his father (6–15). Amid cloud-draped skyscrapers, sci-fi ‘bioborgs’ and exotic firerarms, Miyake’s incarnation bears more relation to the bulletproof avatar of a video game than the callow youth that comes into focus as the narrative shifts back to the café, revealing the preceding events to have taken place only in his caffeine-soaked thoughts. Until this moment, the fabricated status of this mind’s-eye account has been by no means clear, though a retrospective reading of the scene provides a number of hints, most explicitly Eiji’s observation that the interior of Akiko Kato’s office ‘matches closely the version in my imagination’ (9). ‘PanOpticon’ is actually a succession of aborted openings that serve continually to disorient the reader, a fictional equivalent of a video game in which the player fails, only to begin the level again. Eiji’s overstimulated imagination spawns other episodes that see him, first, drown in a flood of biblical proportions, and then pursue

David Mitchell

131

Kato to a run-down cinema where he watches a bizarre film – also named PanOpticon – in which a prisoner in a psychiatric hospital claims to be the creator of the universe. When he eventually plucks up the courage to leave the sanctuary of the café, however, Miyake’s humiliating and inept attempt to gain access to Kato’s office contrasts starkly with his projected alter-ego’s successful raid on the building, throwing into relief the awkward lack of fit between his fantasies and his real experiences. While in the ‘PanOpticon’ section, the fabulated displacements of imagina­ tion are explicitly juxtaposed with the more prosaic actuality of a Tokyo whose frantic pace threatens to sweep the protagonist away completely, the novel progressively dissolves any absolute distinction between the two. Indeed, by opening the novel with a chapter that textually interfuses fantasy and reality, Mitchell instils a kernel of doubt in the reader’s mind about the veracity of the narrative’s subsequent episodes, many of which appear equally fantastical. But if it invites us to separate the strands of the real and the intangible, the hybridity of the text may be intended to make the point that in a world disseminated through an array of different mediums, this polarity itself seems increasingly anachronistic. The duality of material and immaterial is no longer an adequate way of framing the complex intertwinings of virtual and ­physical flows – organic  and technological networks – whose dynamic interplay structures a contemporary consciousness that inhabits both of these dimensions simultaneously. Just as the bifurcations of Arjun and Leela at the end of Kunzru’s Transmission make it impossible to disentangle their corporeal bodies from the circulations of data, Mitchell’s protagonist shifts fluidly between the scapes of subjectivity, cycling through different versions of himself, which are also diverse inflections of our composite being. Mitchell gestures towards the governing architecture beneath the novel’s loosely thematic chapters when, in the chapter ‘The Language of Mountains is Rain’, Eiji dreams of ‘a mind in eight parts’, these eight parts mirroring the structure of the novel (417).4 It is certainly possible to produce a schematic taxonomy of what each section signifies in a piecemeal fashion – for instance, the sci-fi and cyberpunk drenched fantasizing of ‘PanOpticon’; the recursion to Eiji’s fragmented childhood memories in the aptly-named ‘Lost Property’ where much of the back-story is fleshed out or the nightmarishly exaggerated imagery of the tenebrous underworld, both psychological and metropolitan, in ‘Reclaimed Land’ – but this would suggest a rather static and discontinuous formal diagram. On the contrary, the fluidity of the narrative works against the synchronic,

132

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

spatialized notion of the text as a kind of rigid cognitive map, for as well as Miyake’s central narrative that cuts across the various parts, the thickening web of threaded connections and continuities is suggestive of a far more dispersed structure that lies somewhere between neat synthesis and chaotic disjunction. In this respect, the world of Mitchell’s novel has more in common with the dynamic properties of non-linear systems which, like the volatile networks of Transmission, adapt and co-evolve through the interplay of order and chaos that is unpredictable, but not arbitrary. For example, the ubiquity of the number nine in the text implies an underlying pattern, code, or, to draw on the terminology of chaos theory, ‘attractor’ whose hidden logic leaves its traces on the surface flux; yet, the text is constantly mutating into new forms as narrative doors open up unexpectedly onto other stories, each of them separate, but resonating together as part of a larger whole. As much as it is a portrait of a city where ‘not a single person is standing still’ – crisscrossed by the turbulent flows of ‘rivers, snowstorms, traffic, bytes, generations’ – number9dream is also a journey through the networked constitution of the twenty-first-century subject (3). This is to suggest that identity is articulated in the text neither through the opposition nor synthesis of the Cartesian dualism of inside/outside, but instead emerges within a web of mutating and mutually defining associations that braid together the dimensions of ‘self ’ and ‘world’, each of which is always already embedded in the other. On two occasions, the unusual kanjis that form Eiji’s name are alluded to, but the subtle differences between the translations hint at this interpenetration of subject and object. In the first instance, we are informed that Eiji’s name breaks down into ‘incant’ (ei) and ‘world’ (ji), suggesting that the world depicted through Miyake’s first-person narrative exists only in the magic circle of his consciousness (258). Later on, however, ‘incant’ becomes ‘incantation’, this transition from active verb to acted-upon noun implying that Eiji may equally be seen as an expression of the world’s diverse worlding (339). Certainly, many of the episodes that occur later in the novel, particularly the grotesque violence that Eiji witnesses between rival Yakuza families, may have no more concrete reality than his earlier daydreams. Similarly, the disparate characters who emerge from the volatile tumult of the city that moves at ‘a thousand faces per minute’ are no less unstable, oddly refracted through Miyake’s memories and desires or appearing to represent alternative versions of himself (3). His various ‘fathers’ have already been mentioned, but he is also haunted by the memory of his dead sister, whose body was never recovered – the stray cat which visits Eiji’s apartment in the ‘Lost Property’

David Mitchell

133

section, and which reappears at a later point after being thought to have died, has the same ‘bronze-spark Cleopatra eyes’ as Anju (92, cf 51), and Miyake’s burgeoning love for Ai is textually interfused with his love for his lost sister in the dream narratives of the final chapter. In addition, the persistence of certain textual echoes, images and motifs – for example, the symbol of the whale; the trope of falling, which appears to reconnect with Eiji’s infant experience of being pushed down the stairs by his mother; and recurrent fragments of text, such as ‘the lockless knob twizzles uselessly’ (387; cf 209, 266) and the viral number nine that infects the novel – combine to suggest that Eiji is distributed through the world that he simultaneously constitutes and is constituted by, immanent in the text for which he is the medium. Throughout the narrative, illusion contrasts both with reality and disillusion, memory turns the past into present realities; reality shapes and is, in turn, shaped by dreams. The tenuousness of the borders between dreams and waking life becomes particularly evocative when we find ourselves jettisoned alongside Eiji in the ‘Reclaimed Land’ section of the text. As intimated above, here, the protagonist unwittingly stumbles into a gang war between rival Yakuza factions who are battling for control of Tokyo, sucked into a lawless hinterland built on fear and the ubiquitous threat of violence. Filtered through a cultural mythos established by decades of movies and manga, the Morino organization with which Miyake is caught up is described as ‘gargantuan, nameless and many-headed’, a loose syndicate of gangsters, shady businessmen, corrupt politicians and crooked law enforcers (337). Morino’s network operates in collusion with state authority and extends its influence into all areas of Japanese life. As Eiji is informed by Yuzu Daimon, son of a wealthy Tokyoite whom he meets by chance during one of his nocturnal meanderings, you straight citizens of Japan are living in a movie set, Miyake. You are unpaid extras. The politcos are the actors. But the true directors, the Nagasakis and the Tsurus [rival Yakuza families], you never see. A show is run from the wings, not centre-stage. (165)

Indeed, it gradually emerges that Eiji has himself been kept under surveillance by Morino, who wrongly suspects him of being involved with his beloved. As well as receiving a series of cryptic messages while using his bank’s ATM machines, which he later learns to have been sent by Morino’s organization, when Miyake finally meets his pursuers, they possess such detailed information about him that it is as though they hold ‘the skeleton key to the basements of minds’ (196). In

134

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

one especially gruesome scene, Miyake is forced to take part in the nauseatingly inventive punishment of three thugs from a rival clan – a game of bowling that uses their heads as pins. How much of this is real, or whether these experiences are merely the paranoid delusions of a disconnected young dreamer atomized by the urban environment, is a slippery question, and in naming the Morinoowned leisure complex ‘Xanadu’, Mitchell’s literary allusion to Coleridge’s opium dream compounds the indeterminacy. In part, the shadow world of ‘Reclaimed Land’ could be seen to represent the repressed underside of the social imaginary of capitalist modernity. The rampant consumerism in contemporary Japanese life is, of course, evident throughout the novel, but the fact that the profits of the Morino organization come chiefly from selling for exorbitant sums the bodily organs of unfortunate victims takes this commodification to its logical extreme. This is a buried terrain, unauthorized and uncolonized by modern rationality, a social order stripped down to the savage doctrine of ‘the weak are meat, the strong eat’ (341). The topography of the chapter traces a lawless border territory of skeletal construction sites just beyond the bounds of the encroaching metropolis; and in doing so, the vast, uncompleted leisure complex, the bare frameworks of half-formed malls and the unfinished terminal bridge sited on a reclaimed wasteland sketch the contours of Japan’s collective unconscious. The novel hints at the atavistic drives that subsist under the veneer of civilization, the undercurrent of violence that runs beneath what one of Morino’s men terms the ‘land tamed and grazed by our softer, fatter, modern, waking selves’ (190). Like the release valve of fantasy fulfilment made concrete, the casual destructiveness and extravagant cruelty meted out by the Yakuza are eruptions of desires prohibited by the social order. Indeed, the grotesquely exaggerated brutality that takes place on the reclaimed land, as the leading figures of both the Morino and Nagasaki factions are obliterated in an orgy of hallucinated bloodletting, is, explicitly, the stuff of Eiji’s nightmares: The men who are out of the glare of the headlights are shadowy piles, but the ones who fell in the light – red as a slaughterhouse floor. Most of the torsos still have their legs attached, but the gun hands are blown away. And their heads – imploded by their combat helmets – are nowhere. I never learned the vocabulary I need to take this in. Only in war movies, horror movies: nightmares. (200)

If the violence of ‘Reclaimed Land’ is almost cartoonish in its voyeuristic extravagance – Eiji remarks that ‘not for the first time today, I feel I have strayed into an action movie’ – its juxtaposition with the ‘Video Games’ chapter further

David Mitchell

135

blurs the distinction between the simulated and the factual (197). Led by Yuzu Daimon, Eiji’s journey through Tokyo’s pleasure quarter paints the portrait of a garish sin city pulsing to the electronic bleep of innumerable games arcades and soaked in the neon glow of ‘love hotels’ promising cheap, disposable sex. The narrative continually jump-cuts between the digitized universe of the video screen – offering an experience of reality that Daimon describes as being ‘realer than the real thing’ (108) – and the pair’s drunken wandering through the city’s bars and nightclubs, which are no less hyper real. In the ‘Merry Christmas Bar’, for instance, patrons can enjoy a commercialized parody of the Yuletide season every day of the year, while the ‘Queen of Spades’ appears to have slipped out of time altogether, its mahogany and leather décor the perfect replica of a 1930s smoking room, complete with a mechanical parrot and player piano. The hostess’s assertion that ‘the days don’t find their way up this far’ is particularly apposite, for the ‘Queen of Spades’ floats free from its historical context, decked out in the textures and commodified styles of a past that is endlessly recycled as nostalgia (113). Saturated by the flickering phantasmagoria of sights, sounds and information, ‘Video Games’ mimes the permeation of contemporary consciousness by the electronic landscapes of the media. Indeed, in the flow of signs and images beamed into Eiji’s consciousness, there is more than a hint of Baudrillard’s vision of a reality that has terminally dissolved into a depthless spectacle: I savour my pineapple muffin and watch the media screen on the NHK building. Missile launchers recoil, cities on fire. A new Nokia cellphone. Foreign affairs minister announces putative WW2 Nanking excesses are left-wing plots to destroy patriotism. Zizzi Hikaru washes her hair in Pearl River shampoo. Fly-draped skeletons stalk an African city. (125)

The lack of differentiation between the various images – news stories of war and famine possess no greater authenticity or ethical significance than the parallel domain of advertisement – evokes a uniform topography where any sense of perceptual proximity or distance is diffused into the all-enveloping penumbra of information. Considering this radically flattened mode of consciousness, it is hardly surprising that one of the most popular video games among the novel’s Tokyoites – entitled Virtua Sapiens – enables the user to cultivate relationships with a range of pixellated interlocutors generated by the software in lieu of face-to-face interactions. As Eiji observes, ‘these are days when computers humanise and humans computerise’, and Tokyo is depicted as a node of the world system where the confluences between capital and technology generate

136

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

new forms of subjectivity and subjectification (6). Drifting through the text are the teeming multitudes of faceless workers – described by Miyake as ‘drones’, ‘clones’ or ‘bioborgs’ – whose ceaseless migrations between work and home are figured as the lubricant for a city that is imagined as ‘one massive machine made of smaller components’ (56), where a ruthless economic logic diminishes the salaried inhabitants to ‘a bank balance with a carcass in tow’ (16). If the enlightenment dream of the modern polis straddled the secular and the sacred in its vision of a construction that would affirm the creative power of human civilization, then Ai’s declaration that ‘people used to build Tokyo. But that changed somewhere down the line, and now Tokyo builds people’, suggests a paradoxical reversal (330). The light-speed of communications, though, represents only one strand of Mitchell’s kaleidoscopic narrative. In the ‘Study of Tales’, the focus turns towards another kind of virtual space routing through the lattice of networks within which the mobile figure of Eiji coalesces. In this section, Miyake recovers from his encounter with the Yakuza in a quiet suburban house owned by his landlord’s mother who, it transpires, is also a well-respected writer, or as she prefers, ‘fabulist’ (228). As much as it is a suburban haven from the frantic pace of urban life, and from an outside world that, following Eiji’s terrifying ordeal, has taken on a more menacing aspect, this place is also an overtly aestheticized realm. The dusty garret hidden away at the top of the house, a room that is ‘sentient with books’, is figured as a purified space of literary art where Miyake is able to recover from his trauma through the consumption of stories (210). Here, he immerses himself in the manuscript of a surrealistic fable featuring three parthuman and part-animal characters – the author, Goatwriter, who wakes to find that his precious fountain pen has been stolen along with his tales, his hen-like housekeeper, Mrs Comb and the prehistoric ape-man, Pithecanthropus. Their adventures in a bizarre dreamscape, which includes an encounter in cyberspace with the evil Queen Erichnid who intends to ‘digitalise’ the literary cosmos (246), are characterized by a playful linguistic excess whose Joycean inspiration is intimated by the ‘stream of consciousness’ in which Goatwriter swims near the end of the story (256). Like Joyce’s writing, the linguistic experimentation and the punning allusiveness of the prose foregrounds the materiality of language, teasing away at the tension between its referential and rhetorical functions.5 While ‘Video Games’ works on the axis of the image, ‘Study of Tales’ articulates the narrative dimension in the construction of consciousness; it is significant that following his rehabilitation, Eiji’s perception of the world has transformed

David Mitchell

137

from chaotic flux into ‘an ordered flowchart of subplots’ (259). Miyake asks himself at one point whether ‘I am a book too’ (210); there is a suggestion that his sojourn among the whispering volumes that line the study is bringing about the dispersal of his corporeality – ‘I gather up any sign of me and stuff it into the plastic bag under the sink. I must clean up traces of myself as I make them’ (213). This sense of self-dissolution into textuality and the putative serenity of the aesthetic, is ambiguously mirrored in Goatwriter’s quixotic quest for ‘the truly untold tale’ that can only be accomplished by sloughing off his material body in the sacred pool (207). Goatwriter’s symbolic pursuit of the inarticulate and the unarticulatable is thus revealed to be a desire whose fulfilment is a form of death, and similarly, Eiji’s retreat into literary seclusion, where time itself appears to be suspended, must give way to a reconnection with the clamour of the world. Although the final sentence of the story, and of the chapter, suggests that ‘reality is the page. Life is the word’, this need not be read as the idealistic collapse of reality into textuality; rather, it could be interpreted as an understanding of being as an artistic endeavour, this inscription of the self-framed as a unique performance from which uniquely singular meaning emerges (267).

Amanuenses Unlike number9dream, whose fragmented episodes are held together by a single consciousness that establishes a level of narrative continuity, both Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas are an amalgam of competing voices and styles that cycle through a mélange of temporal and spatial settings. The subtitle of Ghostwritten presents it as ‘a Novel in Nine Parts’, its formal arrangement comprising nine discrete first-person narratives that trace an imaginative passage from East to West that encircles the globe. Beginning with the chilling interior monologue of a terrorist hiding out on the island of Okinawa, the novel takes in such diverse speakers and locales as the account of a corrupt expatriate lawyer struggling for self-reconciliation in Hong Kong, the memoir of an elderly teashack proprietor on Mount Emei in Sichuan, the fable of a disembodied soul searching for its birth story in the vast expanses of Mongolia and the tale of a gangster’s moll working in a St Petersburg art gallery. As opposed to offering any kind of overarching plot, Ghostwritten works through a process of contiguity and correlation. The novel evokes a subtle tension between the singularity of its individual narratives – each of which articulates a mode of being that is

138

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

distinctive, insistent and powerfully itself – and the crossroads and confluences between these heterogeneous and superficially incompatible perspectives on the world. The formal segmentation of the text may suggest a world held still in cross-section, but as it segues between parallel lives and locales by turns exotic and familiar, there emerges the sense both of humanity’s multiplicity and its congruity, an interconnectedness and interdependency that undercuts tribal boundaries without congealing into liberal humanist orthodoxy. The slices of the world that the novel depicts are less a series of internally coherent and bounded spaces than nodal points of a globally extended network constituted through dynamic interactions that stretch from the infinitesimal to the immeasurable. Like the fictions of Hari Kunzru, Mitchell imagines a global system striated by the simultaneous coexistence of a multitude of diverse, but not unconnected, (hi)stories and trajectories of becoming. Indeed, the Deleuzian figure of the rhizome again seems apposite, for Mitchell’s text progresses through a kind of textual spread and dissemination whereby individual narratives continuously exceed their boundaries and flow into other stories. The skein woven by these slender lines of association is less a globe-spanning architectural embrace than a thin and fine spider’s web – characters from one narrative appear in another, glimpsed en passant in the background or playing a more pivotal role, and similar to expanding ripples on the surface of a pond, actions and events in one chapter generate unforeseeable consequences as they intersect with other parts of the book. The dislocated chronology – jump-cutting between various historical points from the early 1960s to an unspecified moment in the near future – militates against constructing an evolutionary model of cause and effect, but it is possible to sketch some schematic lines of connection. Apparently inspired by attacks carried out by followers of the Japanese religious group Aum Shinrikyo in 1995, the novel opens with the account of a terrorist responsible for detonating canisters of Sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway, who is known within his millennial cult by the pseudonym ‘Quasar’. Increasingly desperate as he hears of the capture of his fellow ‘cleansers’ and the arrest of other high-ranking members of the Fellowship, Quasar dials the classified number of the cult’s Secret Service and gives the coded call for assistance – ‘the dog needs to be fed’.6 In the next chapter, Satoru, the teenage manager of a specialist jazz shop in Tokyo is about to close up for the night when he is interrupted by a telephone call. The voice from the ether is Quasar’s, but Satoru fails to understand his oblique plea for help and hangs up, mystified. However, this seemingly random

David Mitchell

139

misconnection – an uncanny coincidence that is also a quotidian banality in the era of mass communications – is the catalyst for Satoru’s incipient relationship with Tomoyo, a young jazz-lover who had previously visited the shop, but left before Satoru could pluck up the courage to talk to her. Though his opportunity seems to have been lost to the vastness of the metropolis, Satoru’s assertion that ‘anonymity doesn’t muffle coincidence: it makes the coincidences more outlandish’ is borne out when his delay in closing leads to a reunion with Tomoyo, which he otherwise would have missed (44). A third narrator, the Nick Leeson-esque figure of the corrupt banker Neal Brose who is involved in a complex money-laundering scam for Russian gangsters, recalls his visit to a Hong Kong café where he was deeply affected by the young couple sharing his table whose budding love for each other contrasted bitterly with the atrophy of his own marriage. This is obviously Tomoyo and Satoru, though refracted through Brose’s rather narrow-minded, not to say racist, consciousness and his train of thought turns back repeatedly to the image of these young strangers who represent the possibilities opened by love, a romantic ideal that has come to seem unattainable in his own life. Brose’s death at the end of ‘Hong Kong’, a corollary, the reader later learns, of undiagnosed diabetes, spawns consequences and connections across a number of other chapters. In particular, it is directly responsible for the murder of an ambitious art-thief in the ‘Petersburg’ section whose own criminality was bound up with Brose’s money-laundering activities, and it transpires in ‘Holy Mountain’ that the Chinese maid with whom Brose was having an affair – coincidentally, also the illegitimate daughter of that part’s tea-shack owning narrator – has prospered from her employer’s untimely death, having been bequeathed, or more likely having stolen, Brose’s fraudulent wealth. Like number9dream, the novel’s macrocosmic journey through disparate worlds brought together in the ‘global village’ created by mass migration and communications finds interesting parallels in the peripatetic narrative of the ‘Mongolia’ chapter. This section portrays the wanderings of a mysterious disembodied entity that survives by transmigrating between the minds of various human hosts, scouring their consciousnesses and assimilating their secrets, pleasures and memories into its own. Though perhaps existing on a subcellular or bio-electric plane, since the transmission between minds is dependent on the hosts having made physical contact with each other, this being is the consummate nomad, drifting between different mental terrains as travellers move across national boundaries. Indeed, the ghostly narrator compares this

140

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

itinerant life with that of the backpacker whose mind it is inhabiting at the beginning of the chapter: We live nowhere, and we are strangers everywhere. We drift, often on a whim, searching for something to search for. We are both parasites: I live in my hosts’ minds, and sift through his or her memories to understand the world. . . . To the world at large we are both immaterial and invisible. We chew on the secretions of solitude. My incredulous Chinese hosts who saw the first backpackers regarded them as quite alien entities. Which is exactly how humans would regard me. (160)

In an intertextual allusion to a ‘writer in Buenos Aires’ with whom the narrator claims it debated metaphysics and co-authored stories – presumably Jorge Luis Borges whose eclectic fictions may well provide the imaginative stimulus for Mitchell’s own creation – we learn a possible name for this floating conscious­ ness – a ‘noncorpum’ (172). The noncorpum’s sense of freedom is vertiginous, comparing the experience of transmigration to ‘a trapeze artist, spinning in emptiness’ or ‘a snooker ball lurching round the table’; but this is accompanied by a profound sense of loneliness and a longing to exchange diasporic displacement for existential dwelling (165). This search for the authenticity of place beneath fragmentation and flux echoes the experiences and desires embodied in the contemporary figure of the postcolonial migrant, as well as that of the postmodern tourist who, as Caren Kaplan observes, quests for the ultimate ‘Real’ in ideal ‘vanishing’ or ‘endangered’ locations supposedly untouched by Western modernity.7 The narrator’s own quest is also haunted by a melancholic nostalgia for plenitude, its journeying motivated by the desire to recover its lost memories – of which the Mongolian folktale that haunts its consciousness is a tantalizing fragment – and thereby reveal the origins of its existence. Following various leads as it transmigrates between several hosts – a move­ ment that is allusive of both touristic consumption and colonial appropriation – the noncorpum hears of a folklorist, Bodoo, who is collecting together local myths and tales, and much of the chapter recounts the search for the man across the country’s vast desert landscape. The narrator eventually learns that Bodoo has been killed by a fascistic KGB agent named Suhbataar who has likewise been tracking him, but not before this same figure, who appears in ‘Petersburg’ and even crosses between novels to resurface in the ‘Reclaimed Land’ section of numbr9dream, murders the host that the narrator is currently occupying. The noncorpum’s greatest fear is to be inhabiting a human at the moment of

David Mitchell

141

death, and in the surreal scene that follows the narrator awakens inside a ger, a collapsible tent of skins used by nomads of central Asia, that appears to be a spiritual gateway for the souls who pass through its curtain from one world to the next. After one of these passing spirits intervenes, a monk wearing a distinctive yellow hat who, the reader may infer from later revelations about the narrator’s origins, is its former master executed in communist purges, the noncorpum is transmigrated into the body of an unborn child, and experiences the terror of birth as the ger’s numinous curtain resolves into the pulsing viscera of the womb and is torn aside. This figure of passing between worlds is one of the novel’s most consistent motifs, a sudden rupturing of the narrators’ frameworks of understanding as they are confronted by forms of alterity that exceed the limits of their conceptual registers. By uncanny coincidence or sublime design, the grandmother of this newborn child is the keeper of the narrator’s displaced history, having waited patiently since her childhood for the owner of these memories to return to reclaim them. Passing from the baby’s body into the elderly woman’s consciousness, the lost soul bears witness to an epiphany of recognition as it skims across ‘a canyon of another’s memories, running across her mind’, and plunges into it to enter its own past, reliving the final moments of embodied life in front of a firing squad (199). Here, a new truth of the noncorpum’s identity is elucidated – this floating consciousness was once a young boy, condemned to death alongside the rest of his Lamaist sect for the crime of ‘Feudal Indoctrination’; and it was his master’s aborted attempt to transmigrate him into the body of a young girl nearby, and thus save him from death, that caused the child’s mind to become untethered from the memories that had already been transmitted into his prospective host. The narrator is offered a choice by the grandmother who has guarded its memories: to return to the body of the newborn girl which, it transpires, is a merely a ‘shell’ whose true soul and mind is the narrator’s (202). The noncorpum weighs up this dilemma, whether to exchange the freedom of disembodied levity, endlessly traversing the globe to sample limitless experiences in the minds of ‘presidents, astronauts, messiahs’, for the vicissitudes of mortality (202). Its yearning for the kinship of human community, for the social and emotional ties that at once constrain and liberate, compels the narrator to accept a more circumscribed existence bounded by the contingencies of embodiment. Like the migrant figures of Pran Nath in Kunzru’s The Impressionist and the Leela virus in Transmission, Mitchell’s noncorpum is a potent symbol for contemporary forms of identity which, according to Hardt and Negri’s concept

142

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

of the ‘multitude’, mark the advent of a historically unprecedented mode of global citizenship constituted by mobile, hybrid circulations of people and ideas.8 This also reflects on Mitchell’s own aesthetic approach, which similarly attempts to inhabit a range of styles and idioms and to travel across the ontological boundaries of history, language and identity. For the noncorpum, which has no existence outside of the parasitic space of mediation, identity is a potentially endless process of transit, transformation and translation, and in a similar way, the kaleidoscopic form of the narrative opens out the linear temporalities of ‘modernity’ and ‘globalization’ encoded in the abstract body of the humanist subject to reveal alternative paths of becoming. The novel’s modulating perspective thus refuses to route difference through the shared contours of a common map, and Mitchell’s Mongolia is rendered both from the outside – viewed through the minds of the western backpackers as a ‘carnival of aliens’ and fetishized as ‘the last place’ uncolonized by modern explorertourists – and articulated from indigenous perspectives that find little romance in the country’s dilapidation or the daily struggle for survival on the margins of the global economy (156, 159). The title of Ghostwritten alludes, in part, to the spectral qualities of its narrative form, which repeatedly transmigrates between bodies and spaces without properly belonging anywhere – a rootlessness that mimics the dislocation of identity as it is buffeted by the turbulent currents of globalization. Also, the novel’s epigraph is taken from Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) – a book in which the disastrous collapse of a Peruvian bridge is the stimulus for a metaphysical exploration of the tension between celestial design and individual will – and like Wilder’s fictional work, Mitchell’s novel meditates on the mysteries of causality and subjective experience. Rather than offering any kind of answer, Ghostwritten functions as a neural network of thoughts and ideas. For the millennial cultist, Quasar, the apocalyptic coming of the ‘New Earth’ is an inevitability prophesied by his Guru; the life of the unnamed tea-shack owner in the ‘Holy Mountain’ section is caught in the machine of patriarchal history, her rape by the son of a warlord symbolic of her subjugation and exploitation; the pioneering scientist, Mo Muntervary, finds paradoxical structure in the ‘syntax of uncertainty’ articulated by the subatomic universe of quantum physics (373); while Marco, the professional musician and ghostwriter who narrates ‘London’, stakes his existence on the beneficence of serendipity. From the always partial and contextual perspective afforded to each of the narrators, it would appear that human agency has little purchase on larger material and

David Mitchell

143

metaphysical forces. Yet, the prismatic structure of the novel also permits us to step outside of the limitations of embodiment and spatio-historical location, revealing the subtle and profound effects that individual lives have on others in distant parts of the world. The chains of cause and effect that ripple through the text may remain largely invisible to the local actors – the consequences of their actions impossible to predict or control – but Mitchell suggests that agency is everywhere, immanent in the networked lives and narratives that trace the common horizon of globality. As we have seen in earlier discussions of the work of Kunzru, the absence of subjective mastery and the precariousness and perniciousness of single, allencompassing perspectives are familiar themes in literary texts responding to the material conditions of globalization. Both Kunzru’s novels examined earlier play in different ways with notions of authorial omniscience, textual representation and narratorial coherence, but the mosaic structure of Mitchell’s text arguably constitutes a more radical attempt to give aesthetic form to a contemporary life-world characterized by entrenched and enduring patterns of interdependence. The novel’s suspicion of the abstract universalising gaze finds particular focus in the ‘Night Train’ section, which recounts a series of broadcasts from the eponymous radio show, hosted by late-night New York DJ Bat Segundo, during which a mysterious caller known only as ‘Zookeeper’ makes a number of eerie appearances. Though the precise temporal setting is ambiguous here, this part is clearly narrated from a point in the near future where the apocalypticism that shadows much of the rest of the novel resolves into a more tangible vision of catastrophe – the splintering of humanity into tribal factions and a runaway escalation in military technology. These horrifyingly real threats of total annihilation merely compound a Zeitgeist of widespread paranoia, and Segundo’s show is regularly beset with calls from deluded fantasists who testify to ‘viruses in cashew nuts, visual organs in trees, subversive bus drivers waving secret messages to each other as they pass, impending collisions with celestial bodies’ (pp. 386–7). As the narrative unfolds, the nature of the Zookeeper’s identity is gradually elucidated – it emerges that this entity – a kind of cybernetic reimagining of the noncorpum consciousness that appears earlier in the novel – is the product of Mo Muntervary’s groundbreaking work on ‘Quantum Cognition’, a technology originally intended to have civilian applications, but since appropriated by the military. Prior to this, the ‘Clear Island’ chapter portrayed the scientist’s flight to a remote corner of Ireland in an attempt to take refuge from the shadowy agencies competing to

144

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

secure control of her research, yet its closing pages saw Mo reluctantly agreeing to continue her work in the employ of the American Defence Department at a secret institute in Saragosa, Texas.9 In the intervening period, it would appear that her utopian vision of creating an autonomous information system based on the principles of ‘Quantum Cognition’ has been realized. The Zookeeper is a fully sentient hybrid of artificial intelligence and networked communications designed to protect the world from its potentially catastrophic entanglement with technology that has exceeded humanity’s ability to control it. This digital organism is able to monitor events in its ‘zoo’ through the extensive network of ‘EyeSats’ that orbit the earth, their powerful lenses offering a celestial vista over the planet. Like the Leela virus in Kunzru’s Transmission, though committed to maintaining rather than disrupting social order, the Zookeeper is a kind of ghost in the machine, an ethereal quintessence with no more substance than the fibreoptic pulses and stream of data surging through the global networks. Similarly, it is worth remarking on the apparently boundless mobility of this entity, which is able to ‘scroll’ across the globe as if the world’s surface has been translated into the display on a monitor. With the capacity to access any form of digitally stored information and to skim its roving eye across a single globally extended plane, the Zookeeper is the ultimate (dis)embodiment of panoptical surveillance whose all-seeing eye does not merely unfold global space, but also offers a depth of vision inaccessible, and even inexplicable, to the humans below: This world of trees is still dark, to human eyes. Nocturnal eyes and EyeSats can see deeper down the spectrum. There are no names for the colours here. On the roof of the forest canopy, a spider monkey looks up for a moment. I can see the Milky Way and Andromeda in its retina. By image enhancement I can identify EyeSat 80BˆK, lit by a morning that hasn’t arrived yet. The monkey blinks, shrieks and flings itself into the lower darkness. (414)

Described by Segundo as an ‘archangel’ and a ‘floating minister of justice’, the Zookeeper is a form of technological deity or deus ex machina – albeit created by the humanity over whom it watches – whose role is to preserve order in the zoo by adhering to a system of laws that governs its decisions (410, 427). On ‘Brink Day’, when the escalation of international tension brings the world to the verge of nuclear holocaust – indeed, both sides in the conflict actually order the launch of their missiles – it is the intervention of this cybernetic consciousness that causes the weapons systems to malfunction and averts disaster. Despite the fact that its intentions are benevolent, the Zookeeper’s ethical imperatives are given a sinister edge by its ability to take control of

David Mitchell

145

an orbital network of satellite weapon systems, named ‘PinSats’, which make possible the immediate and utterly ruthless punishment of any transgressions. The destruction of the military installation at Saragosa and the vaporization of a hack writer whose latest conspiracy thriller, The Invisible Cyberhand, stumbles rather closer to the truth than its author imagines, are just two instances of the consequences befalling those who, whether wittingly or unwittingly, violate the core logic in which the Zookeeper believes ‘the origins of order’ inheres (426). Though later conversations with Segundo reveal uncertainties about the legitimacy of its laws, the absolute authority of this cybernetic technology over the flow of information  – ‘every image on every screen, every word on every phone, every digit on every VDU’ is routed through a global matrix that is entirely under its command – is the foundation for a regime of blanket electronic surveillance which, as we saw in the last chapter, seeks to pacify the ambiguities and unpredictabilities of material interactions. However, the fact that the zoo remains in a state of ‘chaos’ exposes the perverse narrowness of the Zookeeper’s panoptical worldview, which reduces the complexity human relations to instrumental problems of optimization and rational organization. Ultimately, the mounting evidence of the inadequacy of its strategies of topdown control – civil wars claim hundreds of lives every day, rivers are polluted and ecosystems destroyed, famine and disease blight the poorest countries  – forces the Zookeeper to confront the gap between its programmatic ethical system and a far messier reality: I believed I could do so much. I stabilised stock markets; but economic surplus was used to fuel arms races. I provided alternative energy solutions; but the researchers sold them to oil cartels who sit on them. I froze nuclear weapons systems; but war multiplied, waged with machine guns, scythes and pickaxes. (425)

The Zookeeper’s faulty conception of the world as a form of organic machine or logical system means that its scrupulously planned ‘solutions’ have simply precipitated ‘the next generation of crises’ (426). From one perspective, this could be seen as a resigned recognition of the human race’s endless capacity for self-destruction and the inevitable failure of every utopian project. But from another, more optimistic, point of view, the ‘chaos’ of the zoo bespeaks the dynamic openness of global space and repudiates the technocapitalist vision of a fully integrated and predictable world. By subordinating the unity of any single subject position to the splintered multiplicity of voices and identities, one could accuse Mitchell’s text of

146

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

submitting to perspectival relativism at the expense of a broader examination of humanity’s collective conditions of existence and the ethical obligations of globality. Certainly, the stability of the narrators’ disparate belief systems and representational schemas is eroded as they are brushed up against each other, with the consequence that the moral centre of Ghostwritten remains, perhaps appropriately, indeterminate. The novel seems to be less an argument for a particular position than an echo chamber of conflicting ideas, a shifting mosaic of the human condition at the end of the second millennium. Like the metropolis of Tokyo, which is described by one of the narrators as ‘so big that nobody really knows where it stops’, the global extension of Mitchell’s novel poses urban sprawl as an epistemological condition (34). But in this world of incoherence, fracture and dislocation, where the impossibly complex machinery of everyday life seems to be sweeping way established cartographies, the text implies that we must learn to detect the meaningful connections that pass between us, thus writing the ghostly outlines of a new global community that is emerging at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While it is differently articulated in particular contexts and its processes are neither unified nor univocal, the collective experiences of economic and cultural globalization open up a common milieu for contemporary human interaction unimpeded by the barriers erected by the nation state. From the transformation of the sacred temple atop the ‘Holy Mountain’ into a destination for foreign tourists surrounded by shops selling ‘glittery things that nobody could ever use, want or need’, to the colonization of Hong Kong by corporate capital, to Neil Brose’s description of himself as ‘a man of departments, compartments apartments’ in the same chapter, each part of Ghostwritten is concerned with questions of identity and belonging which, taken together, offer diverse responses to a shared historical situation and emerging system of values (146, 103). From this perspective, the decision to use Quasar’s narrative as a pair of bookends, notwithstanding its violent and intolerant religious fanaticism, similarly demands to be understood as a reaction to the contemporary social order and the growth in discourses surrounding terrorism. Quasar’s millennial cult offers spiritual kinship and sanctuary from a modern world that is perceived as decadent and morally vacuous, saturated by the ‘mindtrash’ of consumer culture and overrun by ‘the demons of materialism that possess the unclean’ (11, 13). Combining notions of racial purity, national honour and a belief in traditional practices, the Fellowship’s fundamentalist discourse is engaged in an effort to re-create a putatively lost world unblemished by the

David Mitchell

147

global flows of modernity. The group’s leader, known as ‘His Serendipity’, espouses apocalyptic purification as the only means of redemption. The Guru prophesies a future ‘nation without borders’ where a fallen humanity is reunited in immaculate wholeness, but this harmony depends on eradicating the taint of the unfaithful. Though this is conceptualized as a return to what is imagined to be a past social formation, it is really a new invention constructed retrospectively through the lens of contemporary anxieties and fears. The rejection of the values of the world market may be linked with the resurgence of primordial identities conceived as a kind of historical backflow, but it is actually a refusal of the historical passage in course, a political project directed against the contemporary social order. This is to suggest that while the current global tendencies towards increased mobility, indeterminacy and hybridity are seen by some as a kind of liberation, for others, they represent the exacerbation of their suffering. Indeed, competing passions for escape and belonging are experienced to varying degrees by all of Mitchell’s narrators. Quasar’s is perhaps the most extreme response to contemporary feelings of atomization, one that the novel’s formal and thematic emphasis on humanity’s interconnectedness and interdependency implicitly condemns. But by giving voice to opinions that, in the current climate of global terrorism and resurgent fundamentalisms, are ever more insistent, the text demands that we attempt to understand these discourses on their own terms. Although Quasar’s monologue expresses rigid opposition to the hybridizations emerging from the fluid networks of globalization, the final part of Ghostwritten articulates the irreducible imbrication of lives and narratives. In ‘Underground’, we return to the mind of Quasar at the moment he releases canisters of Sarin gas into a packed metro carriage, an event that has been alluded to at a number of points in the novel but never confronted directly. As the 10th chapter in Mitchell’s ‘novel in nine parts’, this section operates as a kind of coda that loosely draws together the strands of the text, presenting itself as a node through which the rest of the stories pass, or perhaps as an underworld that threads together different levels of reality. The terrorist’s struggle to escape from the carriage after setting the timer that will release the poison is rendered in dreamlike prose, where people and objects take on a mythic resonance. In his panic, the integrity of Quasar’s narrative begins to collapse and images alluding to each of the other chapters bleed into consciousness. As the real and the imaginary are increasingly confused, people and objects echo the stories that we have just read. This interpenetration of voices, texts and sensations appears

148

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

to reveal the multiplicity of Quasar’s identity and the fragility of the boundary between clean and unclean that structures his existence and divides him from the world. If Quasar’s brutal act is dependent on a similarly violent suppression of compassion and empathy – the imaginative sympathy that is necessary in order to see oneself as another, and which flickers briefly when sees himself reflected in the eyes of a young baby – his fleeting apperception of the submerged lines of connection that will come to proliferate from his actions offers a sliver of hope. But rather than providing any form of conclusion, the ‘ending’ of Ghostwritten directs the reader back to the beginning, with Quasar’s final thoughts as the train disappears into the darkness mirroring those with which ‘Okinawa’ opens – the unanswered, even unanswerable, question ‘who is blowing on the nape of my neck’? (436).

Multitude: Cloud Atlas In terms of form and structure, Mitchell’s third novel, Cloud Atlas, is strongly reminiscent of his first, once again making use of intricately interlinked firstperson narratives that shuttle between locations scattered across the surface of the globe. But while the pan-global daisy chain of Ghostwritten evokes the interconnectedness of people across vast geographical distances, the dizzying vista across which Cloud Atlas ranges displays an even more expansive transhistorical sweep. The six narratives are arranged chronologically – the first is the diary of an American notary named Adam Ewing travelling across the South Sea during the mid-nineteenth century who, at no little risk to himself, befriends a Moriori who has stowed away on board; the last is the yarn spun around a campfire by a Pacific Islander named Zachry Bailey who bears witness to a distant, annihilated future where ‘the candle o’civ’lise is burnt away’, the surviving vestiges of humanity having fallen into the superstition and violence of a new Dark Age.10 In between, there are a series of letters written by an aspiring English maestro called Robert Frobisher, who is scratching a precar­ ious living serving as an amanuensis to an older, more established, composer living in Belgium between the First and Second World Wars; a pulp thriller set in 1970s California in which a courageous young journalist named Luisa Rey – a character first met in the ‘Night Train’ section of Ghostwritten, where she is one of the callers on Bat Segundo’s radio show – attempts to expose an industrial conspiracy involving the construction of a nuclear reactor; the contemporary memoir of a London-based vanity publisher, Timothy Cavendish – also reprised

David Mitchell

149

following a cameo in Mitchell’s debut novel – who finds himself wrongly incarcerated in a home for the elderly; and the pre-execution testament of a genetically engineered ‘fabricant’ named Somni-451 who inhabits the dystopian cityscape of a near-future Korea. In keeping with the polyphonic exuberance of the author’s previous fictional works, Cloud Atlas contains multitudes. The distinct voices and vocabularies of each of its narrators once again demonstrate the fluidity of Mitchell’s own authorial voice and his capacity for aesthetic ventriloquism. These disorientating changes of tone and register are more than mere stylistic pyrotechnics, for the novel’s shifting textures and modes of narrative transmission are linguistic correlatives for diverse temporal settings, cultural milieus and existential horizons, building blocks for a series of intensely imagined worlds. This dizzying transit through time and space is simultaneously, then, a journey across the generic and stylistic boundaries of narrative. Certainly, Ghostwritten also experiments with a number of recognizable genres, including science fiction, romance, fairy-tale, crime thriller and picaresque farce, but in Cloud Atlas, the shifts in language and form are more pronounced. Indeed, whereas Ghostwritten intermingles its separate parts by means of delicate causal, thematic and figurative counterpoints and connections, the narratives of Cloud Atlas cut violently across each other. With the exception of Zachry’s story – which forms the structural and thematic centrepiece of the novel – none of the five preceding narratives is allowed to proceed uninterrupted, but is instead abruptly broken off in the middle. The technique builds on the vertiginous textual regression of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, in which the reader is confronted with the curtailed openings of 10 different narratives in turn, each indirectly connected with the next, but differing in setting and style. However, Mitchell’s novel also subverts its own influence by completing each of the stories that it has begun. Thus, the first half of the text sees the five successive tales progressively falling away, their reverberations sounding across the post-apocalyptic epicentre of Zachry’s story, which is the still point around which the novel turns. The second half of the book re-gathers the abandoned narrative threads, but it does so in reverse order, pulling the reader backwards through history to return to the original point of departure in the nineteenth century. The effect of this back and forth movement as the novel tunnels through the strata of history is to offer a vision of time and narrative that is at once linear and cyclical, both a succession of discrete moments causally connected and an infinitely extended network in which interlaced people, events and stories resonate together.

150

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

Mitchell’s text is punctuated with a number of allusions to its novelistic architecture, which are also meditations upon the nature of temporality and identity. In the ‘Letters From Zedelghem’ section, Robert Frobisher toils away on the composition which, at the tender age of 23, he knows to be his masterwork, an artistic gesture that encompasses his life and will stand as the enduring monument to it. In one of his epistolary outpourings to his college lover, Rufus Sixsmith, he describes his magnum opus as a ‘sextet for overlapping soloists’ in which each part is interrupted by another played on a different instrument that speaks ‘in its own language of key, scale and colour’ (463). Frobisher’s piece, whose arrangement sketches the novel’s overarching framework in miniature, is pointedly named the Cloud Atlas Sextet. Like Ghostwritten and, to a lesser extent number9dream, Cloud Atlas could be read as a compendium of short stories or loosely connected episodes, but the image of Mitchell’s novel as a musical composition suggests that each of its narratives should be understood as symphonic movements of a larger whole. Another paradigm is put forward in the ‘Half-Lives’ chapter by the nuclear scientist, Isaac Sachs, shortly before the aircraft in which he is travelling is blown apart by a bomb concealed in the hold. Meditating upon the unfathomable vectors of past, present and future, Sachs proposes a model of time as ‘an infinite matrioshka doll of painted moments’ where, at every instant, we exist within the ever-accreting ‘shells’ virtual pasts – one of which is also the real past – and encase within our present a multitude of possible futures, of which only one will ultimately come to pass (409). As suggested above, the text possesses a similar kind of nested structure, whereby each of the six narratives is contained in the tale immediately preceding it, but also carries within itself the story that is to follow. What connects the sequence of narratives is the metafictional device of each of the subsequent narrators stumbling across the very same texts that we have just read; thus, the tales of their predecessors become incorporated into their own. For example, the reason for the sudden abridgement of Adam Ewing’s story only emerges during the succeeding part, where Frobisher, who has been supporting himself by selling rare books pilfered from the estate’s library, comes across a torn volume entitled The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, of which the second half is missing. Similarly, after the untimely death of Rufus Sixsmith – who, it transpires during the ‘Half-Lives’ segment, is now a renegade atomic physicist refusing to buckle under corporate pressure to approve plans for an unsafe nuclear reactor – Luisa Rey discovers the letters from Frobisher among his personal effects. The first half of the manuscript of Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery arrives on the desk

David Mitchell

151

of Timothy Cavendish in the fourth section, while in the fifth, Cavendish’s own memoirs have been made into a filmic picaresque, the first frames of this now ancient and proscribed movie offering Somni-451 a brief glimpse of a world long since lost. At the zenith of the novel’s narrative arc, Sonmi has become a deity worshipped by the Valleysmen of ‘Ha-Why’ who are under threat of enslavement by a warlike neighbouring tribe. Her last testament is recorded holographically in a device known as an ‘orison’, carried by one of the mysterious visitors who cross the ocean to barter with Zachry’s tribe. After befriending one of these ‘Prescients’, whose name Meronym alludes to the theme of connectedness, Zachry tells of how he came to be gifted the strange object, and his narrative comes to a close with him showing his son the concluding part of Somni’s legacy, and so setting in train the reader’s recursive journey back through the novel’s palimpsestic layers of text and history. While they remain marooned in their time and place, the novel’s characters forge links with each other through the act of reading and writing. Similar to the figure of the ghostwriter in Mitchell’s first novel – or another iteration of this idea that commingles the spectrality of identity and text, each bleeding into the other – the concept of narrative transmission both knits together the disparate parts and opens up channels of exchange between worlds that, from the inside, appear entirely self-contained. In spite of the sometimes vast expanses of time separating the sextet of narrators, the translation of these necessarily provisional, context-bound stories into other settings – both textual and material – evokes a vision of overlapping lives where the boundaries of the past and future soften into permeable interface. At the same time, the structure of the novel implies the mutual interdependency of these disseminated consciousnesses, since each narrator is able to complete his or her predecessor’s tale – Sonmi is granted her dying wish to see the final scenes of Cavendish’s filmed memoir in which the protagonist gains his freedom; Cavendish obtains the second half of Half-Lives to prepare for publication; Luisa Rey acquires the remaining correspondence between Frobisher and Sixsmith; and Frobisher encloses the concluding pages of Adam Ewing’s journal with his final letter, which is also his suicide note. One of the characters in Ghostwritten remarks that ‘the human world is made of stories, not people’, and Cloud Atlas articulates a similar blending of narrative and subjectivity as stories and memories, life and fiction, merge into each other (386). While reading the last eight letters Robert Frobisher wrote to Sixsmith, Luisa Rey wonders whether ‘molecules of Zedelghem Chateau, of Robert Frobisher’s hand, dormant in this paper for forty-four years’ may now be

152

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

‘swirling in my lungs, . . . in my blood’, an image that combines the transmission of narrative with the transmission of identity (453). In a similar way to Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas makes use of repeated phrases, images and ideas to indicate our collective imbrication in networks that extend both spatially and temporally, but this is supplemented by the strong implication that its characters may represent different incarnations of the same transmigrating soul. As well as each of the narrators sharing a distinctive comet-shaped birthmark, their stories are ghosted by acute remembrances and foreshadowings of experiences that appear to emanate from other lifetimes. For example, Luisa Rey becomes entranced by a piece of music in the Lost Chord Music Store whose vivid familiarity makes her feel like she is ‘living in a stream of time’, subsequently learning that this piece is a rare recording of Frobisher’s Cloud Atlas Sextet (425). In another time and continent, Sonmi-451 flees from the authorities in a car driven by members of the resistance movement; as it swerves off the road, the sudden drop shakes free ‘an earlier memory of blackness, inertia, gravity, of being trapped in another ford [Sonmi’s word for a car]’ which has no source in her experience, but echoes Rey’s plunge off a bridge at the end of the first part of her narrative (330). Given additional philosophical bolstering by Nietzche’s concept of time’s eternal recurrence – whose ‘elegant certainties’ are at the heart of Robert Frobisher’s music – Mitchell’s text offers the notion of identity as at once singular and multiple, the strands of each single life utterly unique, yet woven into a collective tapestry wherein the contingent and the local is connected directly with the universal (490). Each narrator is necessarily circumscribed by the specificity of their place in culture and history that simultaneously reveals and obscures their particular horizons of possibility, but they are also attuned to each other’s voices as they echo down the corridors of history. Certainly, the most profound moments of perception are achieved when the novel’s characters catch the momentary glimpse of the larger epic in which their own story is encompassed. Zachry Bailey’s narrative is at the apex of Cloud Atlas, and it is he who is granted the clearest view of humanity’s shared journey through time, his eloquent expression of existence providing a key to the novel’s title: I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o’that kayak. Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be’morrow? (324)

Just as clouds are amorphous, ever-changing coalescences of water molecules, so too, Mitchell suggests, is the human species at once infinitely diverse and bound

David Mitchell

153

together in a global community that cuts across the boundaries of ethnicity, ‘race’ and nation. The conceit of literary metempsychosis provides the novel’s connective tissue, but its lifeblood is drawn from a different source that supplies the thematic and philosophical coherence of Mitchell’s text. Whereas in Ghostwritten, the multiplication of perspectives and subjectivities rendered its ethical underpinnings decidedly ambiguous – its competing voices each offering a specific and necessarily narrow view of the world – Cloud Atlas’s nested narratives are linked by the twin refrains of the Nietzschean will to power and the eternal recurrence of human subordination which lie at the heart of the ‘many-headed hydra of human nature’ (529). From the brutality of colonialism witnessed firsthand by Adam Ewing during his sojourn on the Chatham Islands, to the statesanctioned biotechnological apartheid of Nea So Copros, where genetic clones such as Sonmi are bred to serve the ruling class of ‘purebloods’ (191), to more intimate portraits such as the petty tyrannies suffered by the elderly Timothy Cavendish in a nursing home or the parasitic relationship between composer and amanuensis in ‘Letters from Zedelghem’, the novel traces a rapacious cycle of cruelty and exploitation that spirals through human history. The necessity of struggling against what Adam Ewing names as ‘the entropy written into our nature’ is the humanist imperative that animates the novel, pitching individual acts of heroism and resistance against the Darwinist vision of tooth and claw predation that emerges at every point of the narrative web (528). If, during the first half of the book, humanity appears to be shackled to its apocalyptic destiny  – the will to power that compels the strong to subjugate the weak ultimately begetting the Hobbesian nightmare of civilisation’s destruction – the reversal of this forward momentum in the second half allows Mitchell to open up an alternative perspective. Rather than the future being impossible to resist – an outcome hard-coded into our biological or social nature and thus already etched into the trajectory of history – as the interrupted narratives are resumed the novel emphasizes that it is fashioned by ethical choices made by individuals and societies, thereby reasserting the potential for political agency. Ewing’s journal bookends the chronology of civilization’s fall, and offers itself as a template for later episodes as the shells of Mitchell’s Russian doll progressively fall away. Berthed on a vessel bearing the suggestive name of the Prophetess, Ewing’s narrative records his struggle to square his faith in the civilizing, beneficent aspects of colonialism with what he sees before him on the Chatham Islands, ‘that casual brutality lighter races show the darker’ (31). He learns of the archipelago’s history, specifically the fate of the indigenous Moriori

154

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

people who, having lived in isolation for hundreds of years, were decimated first by the arrival of foreign settlers who brought disease and competed with the native population for resources, and later by the invasion of Maori tribes – supplied with weapons and transport by the British – who claimed the land for their own, massacring the peaceable Moriori and enslaving those that remained. Ewing is also disturbed by the treatment of a vulnerable young sailor, who eventually takes his own life after suffering weeks of verbal, physical and sexual abuse at the hands of the rest of the crew. These patterns of exploitation are replicated in the American’s relationship with a fellow passenger named Henry Goose, who claims to be a doctor and diagnoses Ewing’s bouts of illness as the symptoms of a rare parasitic worm that incubates in, and ultimately destroys, the brain of its host. Unbeknown to Ewing, Goose is a confidence-trickster seeking to procure the (imagined) riches contained in his trunk; the cocktail of drugs that he administers are not a treatment, but rather a poison that is gradually killing his ‘patient’. For this quack-doctor, the notions of progress, civilization and the divine sovereignty of the white races underpinning the imperial project are merely fatuous mystifications of the single, immutable law that the strong prey on the weak, these concepts no more than intellectual fig-leaves deployed to legitimize a predatory rapacity amplified by the development of superior weaponry. A similar point is made by a disillusioned missionary with whom Ewing becomes acquainted on his journey, whose parable about a breed of ants known as ‘slave-makers’ resonates with the natives’ forced labour on church plantations: ‘These insects raid the colonies of common ants, steal eggs back to their own nests,  & after they hatch, why, the stolen slaves become workers of the greater empire, & never even dream they were once stolen. Now if you ask me, Lord Jehova crafted these ants as a model, Mr Ewing.’ Mr Wagstaff ’s gaze was gravid with the ancient future. ‘For them with the eyes to see it.’ (510)

The abundant evidence of the desecration of lives and habitats under the banner of the Christian mission, not to mention his own experience as the prey of Henry Goose, shakes Ewing’s belief in the ladder of civilization and the moral superiority of the white European. Yet, if he comes to abandon these seductive fictions, Ewing understands that Goose’s savagely nihilistic doctrine need not take their place; after all, this ‘truth’ is itself just another narrative, a story whose validity is a function of belief. The bond he develops with a stowaway Moriori tribesman, whom he defends against the Dutch Captain who would have him thrown overboard, opens his eyes to the possibility of a different future.

David Mitchell

155

Ewing’s charity in saving Autua from an almost certain death is repaid to him in kind when the Moriori courageously rescues him from his sickbed on the Prophetess, managing to carry his body to a Catholic mission where he is nursed back to health. At the end of the book which, as the narrative arc comes full circle, is also close to its beginning, Ewing reaches the conclusion that ‘one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. . . . For the human species, selfishness is extinction’, a prophecy that has already been revealed, though not to our ‘naïve, dreaming Adam’, in the dystopian futures mapped by Sonmi and Zachry (528–9). But against this cataclysmic vision, he affirms both the necessity of the ethical struggle towards a more equitable world and the capacity of individuals to actively shape their collective history, finally pledging himself to the abolitionist cause. For, as Ewing suggests, ‘belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world’, and the dominant order, no matter how grounded in ‘reality’ or seemingly bound to ‘material’ necessity, can only maintain its sovereignty so long as its narratives are subscribed to (528). Cloud Atlas demonstrates throughout the myriad misuses of fiction, from the lies told by grifters, CEOs and politicians to maintain their power, to the larger cultural narratives that legitimize the expansion of empires and rewrite the past to justify present political aims. But it also puts forward a continued faith in the potential for narrative to shape a different world, and even after the collapse of civilization, it is significant that the impulse to tell stories survives. What binds the narrators of Cloud Atlas together most strongly is their common experience of political oppression and exploitation, whether colonial or corporate, economic or tribal. The narrative strategy of Mitchell’s text seems intended to capture both the particularity and the commonality of human existence, its shifts of perspective between different social settings and modes of life depicting humanity as a kind of diasporic multiplicity scattered across time and space. If subjugation of the weak by the strong throughout the novel is a constant refrain, however, then so are the repeated acts of resistance that oppose these divisive hierarchies. Without wishing to force the comparison unduly, one interesting way of approaching these dispersed vignettes may once again be as the literary expression of Hardt and Negri’s concept of the global multitude. To reiterate, Hardt and Negri suggest that the extension of the global market and global circuits of production and exchange has propagated a new logic of structure and rule, which they term ‘Empire’. This regime incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers, regulating the flows of commodities and labour across the world and seeking to exert its control over all human interactions, even human nature itself. The multitude is the other side

156

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

to these global networks of power – the productive, creative subjectivities of globalization whose movements, modulations of form and processes of mixture and hybridization express the desire for liberation from the false hierarchies imposed by global capitalism. In a similar way, Mitchell’s narrators are connected through common needs and desires that have no regard for the borders and boundaries that parcel up their world. Though separated from each other by enormous geographical and temporal distances, their struggle to assert their humanity against inequality, discrimination and various forms of subordination is a universal impulse that unites them in their difference. Hardt and Negri describe the multitude as ‘constellations of singularities’, and this also seems an accurate approximation of Mitchell’s vision of subjectivity in the changed constitution of the present, where new forms of community and citizenship are emerging to overturn established structures.11 While his characters remain embedded in the material conditions of their existence, their narratives couched in the ideological and moral atmospheres of their time, Mitchell’s work is motivated by the connections that cut across the divisions of time and space, and across the divisions of his own texts, to reveal a more profound ontological drama. Against the idea that individuals are powerless to intervene in the large-scale historical processes in which they are swept up, the final lines of Adam Ewing’s journal, and also of Cloud Atlas, articulate a quiet belief in our capacity to open up new paths of becoming away from localized misery and exploitation, and towards a new terrain of humanity. Anticipating the response inevitably marshalled against such idealistic sentiments, that these gestures are futile because a single life amounts no more than ‘one drop in a limitless ocean’, Ewing, and Mitchell, leave us with the rhetorical question, ‘what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?’ (529) This vision of human existence as an infinite sea neatly counterpoints Zachry Bailey’s figuration of souls as clouds, exemplifying how Mitchell’s text embodies simple beliefs and makes them vital and enduring. Each of the novel’s vignettes and their narrators are likewise just a few exemplary drops taken from the infinite ocean of humanity. To conclude, it is interesting to meditate on the way that Mitchell himself ‘ends’ these texts. The author’s reluctance to provide what many would regard as conventional endings has been touched upon during the preceding discussions of his work. Ghostwritten comes to a close with a section that merges together the various parts of novel but at the same time, consciously resists narratorial resolution. Rather than attempting to tie up the loose ends, the text loops back to the start, inviting the reader to begin again and to continue the process

David Mitchell

157

of tracing the intricate web of causal linkages, intertextual associations and thematic correspondences that invests the pan-global mosaic with a coherence that becomes ever more deeply embedded. In a different way, the final chapter of number9dream also leaves the narrative open to connections yet to be made, the blankness of the ninth section opening a space for its protagonist’s continued becoming. Although the nested structure of Cloud Atlas does satisfy the readerly desire for the closure of each of its interrupted stories, the concepts of narrative transmission and the transmigration of identity underpinning the novel’s architecture suggest that endings are always provisional and arbitrary, germinating new beginnings. What more distant future lies beyond Zachry’s narrative? What incarnation precedes Adam Ewing? Of course, this has much to do with the way that he structures his texts, favouring the juxtaposition of vivid fragments over the teleological drive of linear narrative. If the guiding principle of his writing is that of the interconnectedness of people and stories, then this suspicion of endings is understandable, for the proposition of the world as a multiplicity of durations and becomings is fundamentally opposed to ideas of totality and completeness. The networked quality of Mitchell’s fictions creates a form appropriate for the interconnected, globalized times in which we live, buffeted among billions by the flows of the world market. Whether Mitchell’s approach to fiction traces the emergence of new kind of consciousness and a new mode of experiencing the world is too early to say, but the emphasis on fragmentation and flux, as well as on the barely visible but increasingly powerful matrix of connections that is reshaping the fabric of social being, represents a striking vision of the nature of human or posthuman community in the twenty-first century.

Notes 1 As well as appearing in Granta magazine’s list of best young British novelists in 2003, a recent special issue of Time named Mitchell amongst the 100 most influential people in the world. See Granta, 81 (2003) and Time 100 (2007), available online at http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/time100/article/0,2 8804,1595326_1595332_1616691,00.html [accessed 20 May 2012]. 2 A long shadow is also cast over Mitchell’s writing by the work of Japanese writers and Mitchell’s novel offers clear affiliations with, for example, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a literary debt consciously alluded to by the implication that Mitchell’s protagonist is reading this same text.

158

Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels

3 David Mitchell, number9dream (London: Sceptre, 2001), p. 52. Further references to this edition will include the page number in parentheses after the quotation. 4 See also Jerome Urquhart’s interview with Mitchell, ‘You May Say He’s a Dreamer’. Independent, Features section (24 March 2001), 11. 5 Though there is not the space here to engage with the point in more depth, the engagement with Joyce in ‘Study of Tales’ provokes wider comparisons with Ulysses in particular. Indeed, there are thematic and stylistic correspondences in the overall architecture of Mitchell’s novel, which is similarly a presentation of a young man’s quest for a father figure and a portrait of a city. 6 David Mitchell, Ghostwritten: A Novel in Nine Parts (London: Sceptre, 1999), p. 27. Italics in original. 7 Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 60–3. 8 See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, especially pp. 353–69; for a more involved discussion of this new global body, see Hardt and Negri’s Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004). 9 Incidentally, to draw out another one of the intertextual strands that connects Ghostwritten with number9dream, this is the same institute to which Eiji’s computer-hacker friend, Suga, finds himself transferred after cracking the Pentagon’s security system. See number9dream, pp. 344–7. 10 David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (London: Sceptre, 2004), p. 255. Further references to this edition will include the page number in parentheses after the quotation. 11 Empire, p. 60.

Bibliography Ahmed, Rehana, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin (eds). Culture, Diaspora and Modernity in Muslim Writing. London: Routledge, 2012. Allen, Nicola. Marginality in the Contemporary British Novel. London: Continuum, 2008. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. — (ed.). Globalization. Duke: Durham and London, 2001. Aslam, Nadeem. Maps for Lost Lovers. London: Faber, 2004. —. The Wasted Vigil. London: Faber, 2008. Beck, Ulrich. What is Globalization? Trans. P. Camiller. Cambridge: Polity, 1999. Black, Shameen. Fictions Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Chambers, Claire. British Muslim Fictions. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011. Chaudhuri, Amit. ‘Qatrina and the books.’ London Review of Books, 31:16, 27 August 2009, 3, 5–6. Connell, Liam and Nicky Marsh (eds). Literature and Globalization. London: Routledge, 2011. Damrosch, David. How to Read World Literature. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Politics and Friendship: a discussion with Jacques Derrida,’ Interview with Martin Shaw. Centre for Modern French Thought, University of Sussex, 1997. Accessed 10 June 2011. http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/hafa3/derrida.htm. Gee, Maggie. The Ice People. London: Telegram, 2008. Giddens, Anthony. Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. Gilroy, Paul. ‘It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at: The dialectics of diasporic identification.’ Third Text, 13, 1991, 3–17. —. Between Camps: nations, cultures and the allure of race. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 2000. Gunn, Giles. ‘Introduction: globalizing literary studies.’ PMLA, 116:1, January 2001, 16–31. Gupta, Suman. Globalization and Literature. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

160

Bibliography

—. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004. Head, Dominic. ‘Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: Multiculturalism for the Millennium’, in Contemporary British Fiction. edited by Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew. Cambridge: Polity, 2003, pp. 106–19. Iyer, Pico. ‘Books: Thirteen Ways to Be 13.’ Time (16 April 2006). Accessed 11 September 2009. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ printout/0,8816,1184057,00.html. James, David. ‘The New Purism.’ Textual Practice, 21:4, December 2007, 687–714. Kunzru, Hari. Transmission. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005. Lanchester, John. Mr Phillips. London: Faber, 2000. Lodge, David. The Novelist at the Crossroads. London: Routledge, 1971. Malkani, Gautam. Londonstani. London: Fourth Estate, 2006. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. McEwan, Ian. Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. Mitchell, David. Ghostwritten. London: Sceptre, 1999. Miyoshi, Masao. ‘ “Globalization,” Culture and the University’, in The Cultures of Globalization. edited by F. Jameson and M. Miyoshi. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998, pp. 247–71. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. ‘Postcolonialism and the “the Figure of the Jew”: Caryl Phillips and Zadie Smith’, in The Contemporary British Novel. edited by James Acheson and Sarah C. E. Ross. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005, pp. 106–17. Moore, Lorrie. ‘British Muslim identities and spectres of terror in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers.’ Postcolonial Text, 5:2, 2009, 1–19. Moss, Laura. ‘The politics of everyday hybridity: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.’ Wasafiri, 39: Summer 2003, pp. 11–17. Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. Routledge, ARK: London, 1985. —. ‘The sublime and the good.’ Chicago Review, 13:3, Autumn pp. 42–55 1959. Nak-Chung, Paik. ‘Nations and literatures in the age of globalization’, in The Cultures of Globalization. edited by F. Jameson and M. Miyoshi. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998, pp. 218–29. Nash, Geoffrey. WritingMuslim Identity. London: Continuum, 2012. Newman, Robert. The Fountain at the Centre of the World. London: Verso, 2003. Phillips, Caryl. A New World Order: Selected Essays. London: Vintage, 2002. Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992. Ruvani, Ranashina. ‘Racialized masculinities and postcolonial critique in contemporary British Asian male-authored texts.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 45:3, September 2009, 297–307. Ryman, Geoff. 253. London: Flamingo, 2010. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. London: Duckworth, 2000.

Bibliography

161

Schoene, Berthold. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Singh, Nirpal Dhaliwal. Tourism. London: Vintage, 2006. Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000. —. Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009. —. NW. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012. —. On Beauty. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005. — (ed.). Piece of Flesh. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2001. —. The Autograph Man. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002. Spivak, Gayatri. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Su, John J. Imagination and the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Tew, Philip. Zadie Smith. London: Palgrave, 2009. Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literature. New York: Continuum, 2008. Tolan, Fiona. ‘Identifying the precious in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty’, in British Fiction Today. edited by Philip Tew and Rod Mengham. London: Continuum, 2006, pp. 128–38. Urquhart, Jerome. ‘You May Say He’s a Dreamer.’ Independent, Features section (24 March 2001), 11. Weedon, Chris. ‘Tropes of Diasporic Life in the Work of Nadeem Aslam’, in Metaphor and Diaspora in Contemporary Writing. edited by Jonathan P. A. Sell. London: Palgrave, 2012, pp. 20–38.

162

Index

Aboulela, Leila  114 Adebayo, Diran  51 Aeschylus  123 Albrow, Martin  6, 11 Ali, Monica  97, 114 Appadurai, Arjun  2, 14, 38, 82 Appiah, Kwame  2 Aslam, Nadeem  1, 2, 7–8, 23, 95–123 Maps for Lost Lovers  95, 99–100, 102–14, 117–18 Season of the Rainbirds  102 The Wasted Vigil  114–23, 129 Attar, Farid  118 Austen, Jane  42, 55 Ballard, J. G.  42 Barker, Pat  1 Bauman, Zygmut  114 Beck, Ulrich  2–3, 38, 84 Bellow, Saul  42 Bhabha, Homi  68, 73–4, 78, 98 Blanchot, Maurice  42 Borges, Jorge Luis  51, 140 Botting, Fred  45 Brennan, Timothy  31 Brooker, Peter  101 Burroughs, William  42 Calvino, Italo  149 Castells, Manuel  19 Chambers, Iain  16 Chandra, Vikram  96 Chaudhuri, Amit  96 Connor, Steven  16 Conrad, Joseph  1, 42, 75, 84 Cortázar, Julio  51 Cusk, Rachel  56 DeLillo, Don  50, 56 Derrida, Jacques  31 During, Simon  73

Eggers, Dave  51 Eliot, George  24, 42, 56 Eliot, T. S.  37, 48 Faiz, Faiz Ahmed  103 Farrell, J. G.  63 Fischer, Tibor  7, 51 Fitzgerald, F. Scott  42 Flaubert, Gustave  42 Ford, Ford Madox  1 Forster, E. M.  24, 42–3, 50–2, 54–6, 64 Foster Wallace, David  43, 50–1 Fowler, Bo  18 Franzen Jonathan  51 Friedman, Thomas  81 Fukuyama, Francis  16 Gee, Maggie  38–9 Ghosh, Amitav  96 Giddens, Anthony  1, 2, 12, 84 Gilroy, Paul  2, 57, 101–2 Gunn, Giles  1 Gupta, Sunetra  96 Haraway, Donna  22, 91 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri  9–17, 22, 36–8, 61, 76, 79, 81–2, 84, 102, 114, 117, 123, 141–2, 155–6 Hardy, Thomas  53 Harris, Wilson  77 Harvey, David  2, 12 Head, Dominic  40, 57 Homer  123 Huggan, Graham  99 Hussein, Aamer  96 Ings, Simon  18 Isherwood, Christopher  110 Ishiguro, Kazuo  17 Iyer, Pico  35

164

Index

James, David  24, 55 James, Henry  1, 55–6 Jameson, Fredric  20, 46 Joyce, James  42

Morey, Peter  63 Mueenuddin, Daniyal  96–7 Murdoch, Iris  57 Murphet, Julian  11

Kafka, Franz  42, 48, 51 Kagemusha  123 Kaplen, Caren  140 Khan, Nusrat Fateh Ali  110 Kunzru, Hari  1, 2, 7–8, 23, 38, 43, 46, 54, 61–94, 127, 138 The Impressionist  61–79, 82, 128–9, 141 Transmission  38, 61, 76, 79–91, 128, 130–2, 141, 144 Kureishi, Hanif  46

Naipaul, V. S.  63 Newman, Robert  33 Nietzsche, Friedrich  153 Norfolk, Lawrence  7, 51

Lahiri, Jhumpa  97 Lanchester, John  33–4, 40 Laven, Mary  62 Lawrence, D. H.  53, 56 Le Corbusier  23 Lispector, Clarice  42 Litt, Toby  51 Lodge, David  24 Lorenz, Edward  21 Lyon, David  8

Robertson, Roland  1–2, 18 Robins, Kevin  23 Rushdie, Salman  31, 45–6, 63, 95–6, 98–9, 103–4, 118, 123 Ryman, Geoff  33

McCarthy, Tom  41–3 McEwan, Ian  32–3 Malkani, Gautam  35, 103 McLuhan, Marshall  13 Mansfield, Katherine  1 Marx, Karl  71 Massey, Doreen  15 Melville, Hermann  42 Mignolo, Walter  15 Mistry, Rohinton  96 Mitchell, David  1–2, 7–8, 23, 35–7, 57, 123, 127–57 Cloud Atlas  127, 137, 148–57 Ghostwritten  35–6, 127, 137–50, 152–3 number9dream  127–37, 139, 150, 157 Miyoshi, Masao  2 Mo, Timothy  103 Moody, Susan  51 Moore, Lorrie  51

O’Neill, Joseph  41 Perec, George  42 Pesso-Miquel, Catherine  103 Poster, Mark  89 Pynchon, Thomas  56

Said, Edward  2, 34, 46 Scarry, Elaine  53–5 Scott, Paul  63 Seth, Vikram  96 Sidhwa, Bipsi  96 Singh, Nirpal  32 Smith, Zadie  1–2, 7–8, 23–4, 31–58, 97, 102–3 The Autograph Man  31, 41, 47–50 NW  31, 37 On Beauty  31, 37, 41, 51–7 White Teeth  31, 37, 41, 43–6, 50 Spinoza, Baruch  36 Spivak, Gayatri  97 Stein, Gertrude  110 Su, John J.  57 Swift, Graham  1 Szeman, Imre  4 Tew, Philip  39 Tharooor, Shashi  63 Tolstoy, Leo  123 Urry, John  21

Index Van der Rohe, Mies  23 Verne, Jules  36 Virgil  123 Waters, Malcolm  2 Waugh, Evelyn  77 Webster, Frank  23 Weil, Simone  34

Wilder, Thornton  142 Winterson, Jeanette  17 Wood, James  50–1 Woolf, Virginia  37, 42, 48 Yates, Richard  42 Young, Robert J. C.  83

165

166

167

168

169

170