Postmodern Revisions of Englishness: Rushdie, Barnes , Ballard

Bentley, N

Abstract

This chapter examines the way in which postcolonial theory and discourses related to racial identity have impacted on a number of writers concerned with interrogating notions of Englishness in their fiction. It begins by identifying the way in which national identity has been approached by a number of theorists in terms of its narrativized construction and its relationship with literary modes such as realism, modernism and postmodernism. In this context it addresses the work of Benedict Anderson, Ian Baucom, Homi Bhabha, Timothy Brennan, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Doreen Massey, Nelly Richard, and Sara Upstone. It goes on to explore the way in which English national identity can be seen to have gone thorough a process of gradual and sustained reconfiguration as a response to a series of discourses in the post Second-World-War period including the dismantling of empire, mass immigration to Britain resulting in a multicultural society, and discourses associated with decline in terms of Britain’s standing as a world power. The second part of the chapter addresses the way in which English national and racial identities have been examined in the work of three writers using postmodern techniques in the period from the 1980s to the present. Salman Rushdie uses techniques associated with magic realism to examine the way in which national identity is constructed, and reconfigured. This is identified initially with respect to India in Midnight’s Children (1981) and Pakistan in Shame (1983), but this section concentrates on the way engagement with constructions of national identity is developed with respect to Englishness in The Satanic Verses (1988). The chapter shows in this latter novel that the perceived threat of invasion from immigrants begins to loosen established definitions of Englishness, at the same time as it imagines immigrants as monstrous or non-human invaders. The notion of foreignness in this context is explored both in terms of the novel’s thematic content and its deployment of literary modes. Julian Barnes’s England, England (1998) offers a deconstruction of the nation through its imaginative narrative of the creation of a theme park based on perceived and popular notions of Englishness. The novel engages with postmodern theories associated with Jean Baudrillard in terms of the way in which replicas and copies of national identity begin to shake the very fabric of the original upon which the copy is supposed to be based. In J.G. Ballard’s near-future dystopian novel, Kingdom Come (2006), England’s suburbs have been subsumed into a quasi-spiritual worship of consumerism, a process that leads to what one character in the novel defines as ‘soft fascism’. This results in a reconfiguration of a kind of Englishness that is located around sports clubs and St. George’s flags, and an inclusive attraction to the new social space of the Metro Centre, the novel’s representation of the kind of large scale shopping mall that has sprung up in Britain over the last twenty years or so. The novel examines the way in which the inclusivity around traditional national iconographies shows suspicion towards potential outsiders in terms of race and cultural ethnicity. This novel is discussed with reference to theories on fascism developed in the mid-twentieth century by Georges Bataille; and what Ballard observes as an examination of worrying developments in racial politics in Britain in the period after 9/11 and 7/7.

Citation

Bentley, N. (2015). Postmodern Revisions of Englishness: Rushdie, Barnes , Ballard. In L. Platt, & S. Upstone (Eds.), Postmodern Literature and Race (211--227). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107337022.018

• Publication Date: 2015-02
• Deposit Date: May 31, 2023
• Pages: 211--227
• Book Title: Postmodern Literature and Race
• ISBN: 9781107337022
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107337022.018
• Publisher URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/postmodern-literature-and-race/postmodern-revisions-of-englishness/F6C5564C015CA5DA613D157202F26A47