Englands
In England, England (1999), the novelist Julian Barnes devotes around two hundred pages to an essay on what might happen if a replicated image of Britain were to become more recognisably authentic than the ‘original’. Based on the Baudrillardian concept of the simulacra, Barnes’s model attempts to subvert postmodernist theorising that accomplishes no more than the description of everyday life under capitalism. Instead — perhaps as a result of his critique of a putative postmodern lifestyle constructed antipathetically — he produces an urbane novel of class manners that concludes with a banal conservative foray into geopolitical futurology.
Despite its limited interest to anyone not of an English middle-class mindset, and its intellectual dullness, England, England is in fact magnificently postmodern. Most notable is the way that the self-conscious fictivity of Barnes’s subject is itself figured and realised as a self-consciously fictional project. Barnes attempts meta-fiction by conjoining sympathetic magic with his fictive inventions, apparently lighting upon the occultism implicit in Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum. Thus, this novel seeks to abolish postmodernity by invoking the reassuring, and totally imaginary, polity of ‘the English rural community’.
However, Barnes’s self-conscious literary postmodernity — and therefore the effectiveness of the narrative — pointedly both centre on the reader ‘getting’ the initial postmodernist reference. Through his engagement with postmodernity Barnes produces a postmodern narrative that reacts against its self-conscious awareness of the materiality of culture and the dialectical nature of cultural discourse. Which series of textual devices describes the nature of Barnes’s postmodernism.
The replica of England that is the theme park England, England is a pristine, adult-oriented theme park located on the former Isle of Wight, complete with compliant royal family, spitfire sorties and living literary heritage zones. The name of this new province (a designation that appropriates an American notion of geographical specificity in the face of a proliferation of colonial duplicates of ‘real’ places) inevitably proves more popular than the shoddy original. Against a background of imagined super-intense global political instabilities Barnes narrates the decline of England into a closed community shunted into an ahistorical neverland because of a total loss of historical consciousness. What might appear to be an impish salutary warning against globalism becomes a rather more sinister check on the development of British multiculturalism. In the aftermath of some unspecified but disastrous global crisis (Barnes performing as hack novelist and political analyst) people of colour return to wherever they ‘originated’, England having become poorer, and thus less economically desirable, than their homelands. Similarly, class relations become deproblematised in a ruralised landscape of interdependent communities. History is defused of political tensions, differentiated past cultural practices (the stuff of heritage) having become hazy and opaque to everyone, and thus available for all to reconstruct from scratch, in a way that emphasises the universality of a homogenised ‘middle-class-ness’, and the fictive (and thus culturally and politically realisable) possibility for a ‘real’ Englishness to emerge from global ‘chaos’.
By making plain such narrative outcomes, Barnes seeks aggressively to foreground the discussion of the nature of Englishness, a pastime that has become a popular ‘parlour game’ for the chattering classes. But it is more likely that Barnes plays the Orwell card; that is, by offering a vision of Englishness in negative, he thereby hopes to prompt a debate about what it is that ‘we’ have actually lost, rather than what we might become. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell reveals a vanished British culture of the imagination squeezed between Eastern European expansionism and American cultural/militarist imperialism. In England, England Barnes effects a similar manoeuvre, although being aware of ‘postmodernist’ thought, he has England squeezed by a multiplicity of global forces, including voraciously social mobile homegrown venture capitalists.
A more consciously problematic ‘vanishing’ of English culture and identity is produced by Robert Bateman in his 1963 pulp novel, When the Whites Went (paperback edn.,1964). In this vivid exploitation shocker, Bateman narrates a populist-racist reaction to Black immigration into Britain which is contextualised with the social conditions of postcolonialism. Significantly, Barnes chooses to ignore this aspect of postmodernity, preferring, tautologically, to concentrate on ‘deconstructing’ introspective Eurocentric intellectualism. In Bateman’s novel ‘race’ is initially figured as dichotomous. Most of ‘The Whites’ of Britain are killed off by a disease epidemic, ‘BUT NEGROES ARE IMMUNE!’, and ‘The Blacks’ are forced to learn to fend for themselves. The result is a conscious attempt to foreground racial differences by reducing Black and White identities to signifiers of cultural homogeneity, but this eventually proves impossible given the number of different Black cultures Bateman discovers. Consequently, Bateman attempts to reconcile the cultural differences he comes to recognise in his initial simplification of ‘Blackness’ by describing Black political organisations divided between collectivities ‘naturally’ drawn to either communism or orgiastic ‘destructive self-indulgence’. In opposition to both tendencies, he figures two individuals, a woman and a male doctor, who seek to establish a more representative institutional system in the absence of powerful White leaders. At the end of the novel, having produced a change in the political organisation of the Black British population the doctor, Charles Massam, decides to return to Accra in Guyana, to take part in representational politics in order to progress the bold revival of global politics in the absence of White politicians.
Despite his implied narrative of white superiority, Bateman’s reactionary satire produces some surprisingly liberating possibilities for Britain’s Black population, and, in narrating the end of white-dominated global administration, offers a fictive reversal of the legacy of otherness of postcolonialism, in which white identity will perforce become the imagined, internalised other. This in itself is not necessarily a liberating fictive strategy. Such an imagined situation may be viewed as a simplistic ideological inversion, for instance, in the manner of recent fascist literature in the UK that uses a version of postcolonialist discourse to figure multiculturalism as the enemy of a multiplicity of indigenous white cultures in Britain.
This is a racist text. The front cover illustration of the 1964 paperback edition of When the Whites Went shows a black man’s face accentuated by flames from a burning St Paul’s Cathedral. This image subverts the famous Second World War photographs in which St Paul’s is saved from incendiary bombs during the Blitz on London with a message that black people will accomplish what Goerring’s Luftwaffe failed to do. Bateman offers some significant differentiations of Black culture. In contrast with, say, Colin MacInnes’s identification of Black British communities exclusively with urban environments, Bateman extends ‘their’ cultural sphere to include rural spaces. Indeed, like Barnes’s backward post-industrial England, Bateman’s fictional Britain is figured as a post-apocalyptic vision of regenerative rurality, but unlike Barnes he imagines it as effectively utilised by a masterful Black population. But just as the totality of Britain is represented satirically by Bateman through the interplay of exclusive Black communities — itself a strategy that seems to encourage a racist response — the British landscape and environment is represented in a similarly metonymic fashion. Like Barnes, Bateman narrates only the south of England; both writers apparently share a mutual, chauvinistic understanding that the north is a place where people come from, rather than a place where they might live and interact successfully. However, Bateman’s narrative progresses to a point where he is able to conceive of Black communities sustaining themselves without the need to interpellate a figurative south against which to measure their relative success.
Unlike Barnes’s supposedly witty fictive repatriation of a homogenised Black British population, Bateman chooses to describe his subject’s own reconstruction of the world in their image, and so he describes a new cultural order in which Black subjects create new institutions that reflect their cultural differences and Whites become re-socialised in terms of Black power. In a passage at the very end of the book, Massam the doctor views a wedding: the best man is White and is figured as a subordinate, but tolerated, appendage to a Black marriage ceremony.
If we were to pursue a line of critical analysis based upon a perception of cultural resistance emerging from realisations of power-relations and interacting and affective cultural discourses, it might be argued that Barnes’s novel is potentially more harmful to multiculturalism than Bateman’s — notwithstanding the latter’s book being described as a ‘[t]errifying’ vision of Black racial supremacy. Like critics of eroticism in the visual arts, literary novelists tend to treat narrative representations of social identities as a kind of pornography. Thus, Barnes fetishises Englishness, reifying the concept and presenting it as a figuratively shaven, deodorised object of desire supplanting a more pungent original.
Despite his explicit and implicit discussions of postmodern textual strategies, Barnes’s novel is in fact a realist project, at least to the extent that it can be contextualised and historicised as the product of a literary culture anxious about its increasingly marginalised status in an entertainment market saturated with popular dramatic and reflexive narratives. Above all, England, England may best be described as a product of late-twentieth century British identity politics, a conservative response to the discourse of English identity in a postcolonial world.
Barnes shares with George Orwell a tendency to represent homogenised versions of an idealised English culture and identity. The irony of these writers’ satire is not lost to me, it is just that I regard the conservative nature of Barnes’s and Orwell’s dystopic fictions as kinds of manifestos, statements of intent, rhetorical narratives that seek to curtail the heteroglossic discourse of satire. Theirs is an Englishness which relates to the experiences of specific social groups and to particular kinds of cultural consumption. In the world of the B-Format paperback novel readers still apparently care about which pictures/novels/concepts/creative individuals they would save from a burning building. These are fictional worlds where a totalised, integralist version of English culture faces dissolution.
Such cultural integralism as Barnes narrates attempts to reconfigure ‘our’ understanding of the dynamics of everyday life in an age when historical images are as available for consumption as any other product. Of course, he suggests, ‘we’ are urban subjects, ‘we’ don’t really want to live in a faux-Georgian rural idyll. But neither, he implies, do ‘we’ want to see ‘our’ heritage, ‘our’ authentic historical legacy, go to the wall. New literary fiction, like Barnes’s, is designed for socially mobile individuals who crave aestheticised experiences, and, above all, a lifestyle, but it primarily serves to reveal a supposed morass of ‘non-culture’ in the spaces vacated by the same mobile subjects. If ‘we’ thought that reified social class had vanished from the literary novel after John Braine, ‘we’ were clearly very much mistaken. An audience still seems to exist for narratives that seek to determine precise degrees of social identity. And if ‘we’ imagined that the world, having failed to fly apart or implode following the ghostly prophecies of the plump-breasted, mad drama queen, Tiresias, or Orwell, was going to struggle onwards until solar meltdown, meteor-strike, psychic implosion Quatermass-style, or accidental Cold War-style mutually assured destruction, ‘we’ hadn’t counted on the tenacity of the discourse of the English literary novel. Only this time round it’s not syphilis, materialism, war, or totalitarianism that looms, spectrally haunting Europe, this time ‘we’ (finally revealed as the implied readers of such works) are figured facing the institutional disestablishment and disunity of Britain itself. At last, actual disintegration, apparently a real crisis! How will ‘we’ — that is, the implied readership of novelists and their over-sensitised, meta-astute audiences — cope? On the strength of Barnes’s latest work, poorly.
The image of the disintegration of a formerly unified English culture is cultivated and maintained as a going concern in literary fiction and historical narratives, this is one of the dynamics of cultural representation. Writers tend either to recognise this dialectical progress or to refute it. The narration of cultural decay (usually linked with figurative descriptions of degenerating morality) is as apparent in discussions of the decline of chivalry in the 14th century as it is in discussions of gender or art in 20th and 21st century literary novels and poetry. Similarly, the image of Britain, as it was once widely known, is often figured as a retrospectively unified ideal in literary and historical texts (most often linked, in the 20th century mindset, to the landscape of southern England). To suggest that networks of cultures may begin at specific moments to diverge from a fixed historical model is not one that bears even a cursory examination: even historians have given up on causality; the necessary contextualisation for any ‘event’ is an impossibility. Consequently, the figurative disintegration of an imaginarily unified nation such as Britain is a ridiculous notion, given its active internal cultural differentiations: the interplay of those ‘parts’ which constitute the united whole.
Neither Barnes, Orwell, nor Bateman discuss Britain except as an implied adjunct to England, and England itself is not named, the location being cumulatively established through place-names and recognisable cultural figures local reference points. Significantly, in the one potentially radical move in his novel (which he subsequently suppresses) Barnes differs from his predecessors is in his acceptance that the idea of England can only be progressed if it is first realised. After postcolonial fiction in English has totally reconfigured the way the language is perceived, and after ‘Britain’ has been all but disestablished, English-British (the hyphen represents the newness of the concept) writers can no longer simply claim a putative linguistic inheritance by opening their mouths, or by producing written narratives in ‘their’ native tongue. Similarly, there is no real case for recognising some putative aboriginal English form of expression, since Englishness is constructed from a complex of sources, none of which can be easily reduced to essentially ‘national’ modes of expression.
As I have suggested above, 20th century discourses regarding English regions tended to be formulated in the context of the negative presence of England. Cultural integralism – in other words, the reification of apparent homogeneity — is a reductive idea that works both to objectify external others and to minimise localised differences by further objectifying ‘dissident’ subjects. The former absence, or elision, of England within Britain was a massive ideological faultline that revealed the former power of the idea of England. Since England is becoming less ubiquitous in global markets and cultural exchanges it is no longer possible, as many critics have recognised, for England to be imagined as universal, and 20th century English writers like Julian Barnes tended to respond belatedly to realities of postcolonialism (then a concept barely 50 years old) by locating themselves more specifically in time and place, by inserting integralist notions of culture and region where England used to be.
Neil Palmer, 2000
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