Kent Academic Repository Full text document (pdf) Citation for published version Hristova, Hristina (2015) The Happiness Index. Master of Arts by Research (MARes) thesis, University of Kent,. DOI Link to record in KAR https://kar.kent.ac.uk/54599/ Document Version UNSPECIFIED Copyright & reuse Content in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of research The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record. Enquiries For any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: [email protected] If you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html The Happiness Index Hristina Hristova Research MA, The Contemporary Novel: Practice as Research University of Kent September 2015 Supervised by Scarlett Thomas and Amy Sackville Extract Word Count: 43,133 words Critical Essay Word Count: 2,272 words Table of Contents: Critical Essay, ‘”Time passing and her life”: making sense and other life skills in The Happiness Index’ 3 The Happiness Index, Extract 11 Appendix One, Novel Opening 145 Bibliography 191 2 ‘Time passing and her life’: making sense and other life skills in The Happiness Index In her 1965 collection, Questions of Travel, Elizabeth Bishop places and displaces her speakers who are ‘here or there’1 within a poetic world where ‘little is known and much is puzzling’.2 As Colm Tóibín has persuasively argued, the constant questioning of truths in Bishop’s work, coupled with the omission of the large and focus on the small, invite us to think of her speakers as temporary, isolated and inherently lonely. In this world with ‘no detail too small’3, her speakers are barely there, observing the relation between things without being necesaarily at the centre of events, like ‘the state that floats in brackish water, / held together by mangrove roots’4 or the ‘tremendous fish’ held ‘beside the boat, / half out of water’5. Taking as its epithet the closing lines of Bishop’s ‘Questions of Travel’, The Happiness Index takes up these themes of wandering and relative uncertainty. I have attempted to press questions rather than supply ready answers. Is conformity safer than rejection of societal values? What are those values? And how do we go about defining, let alone rejecting, these norms by which we live? The following essay aims at offering an insight into the decisions behind the novel’s structure, style and themes. My intention was for the reader to recognise as normal Vibekke’s sense of unhappiness and disillusion; an understandable response to overprotective partners, depressed parents, discounted dinners, and the incredible, seamless marketing of such packages of family, work, and life as something to aspire to. The novel tells of Vibekke, one of the six unhappiest people in Denmark. However absurd that sounds, it is. The Happiness Index makes much of banal labels, drawing attention to the strange nature of the language we use to represent human connections and activity. Put forward by her 1 Elizabeth Bishop, Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters, Questions of Travel from the collection Questions of Travel (New York: The Library of America, 2008), p.75. 2 Colm Tibn, On Elizabeth Bishop (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015) p.1. 3 Elizabeth Bishop, Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters, Sandpiper from the collection Questions of Travel: Elsewhere (New York: The Library of America, 2008), p.125. 4 Elizabeth Bishop, Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters, Florida from the collection North & South (New York: The Library of America, 2008), p.24. 5 Elizabeth Bishop, Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters, The Fish from the collection North & South (New York: The Library of America, 2008), p.33. 3 eccentric father to take part in an international happiness study that measures and compares her to other Danes (and in turn other States’ populations), Vibekke struggles to find a purpose, to picture herself in the ways others around her seem to do, as part of family, individual, and professional understandings of herself go. Things change, or at least her context does, when a marketing agency sends her to an isolated Costa Rican beach to look after sea turtles ‐ alone with a cameraman, a dog named Bono, and three other miserable people. As real a scene as reality TV can come up with. Throughout the plot, I have attempted to record Vibekke’s struggle to lead a life that is not empty, and to join up these facts of existence into a reality in which she recognizes herself as herself. ‘A stranger to myself and to the world’6 It seems to Vibekke’s mother and to Mia, her partner, that life passes her by, that she is unable or uninterested in changing course: ‘I know when the sink taps time passes. I know when morning comes and it’s a new square on the wall calendar’.7 I have used the concept of passing as a leitmotif throughout the novel: trains pass, days pass, water passes under the kayak as Vibekke is out at sea with her father, who she thinks of as ‘Jens/dad’. With this constant movement, I wanted to illustrate Vibekke’s relative stillness, and position as an outsider within her own life: by choosing to remain uninvolved, Vibekke allows for events to happen of their own accord rather than to be influenced or wished for by her, thus shifting responsibility away from herself. Others initiate things that happen to her, she doesn’t readily take responsibility for her actions. However, Vibekke is hardly ever, if ever, interested in blaming others for her unhappiness. She finds herself crying in the shower one afternoon at her girlfriend’s but this is as unremarkable to her, it seems, as the toast she just ate or the next waitressing job she’ll work. Vibekke allows for ‘time to carry’ her.8 ‘I know things kind of just happened. They always do. Right in the middle of everything. You could be having breakfast or sitting on top of dead turtles, and suddenly, everything changes.’9 Perhaps the most striking manifestation of this is found in Vibekke’s denial of societal norms of adulthood and refusal to strive for indicators of success such as owning property, having a stable career, and being in a committed relationship. 6 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979) pp. 25. 7 See pp. 147 of this Submission. 8 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979) pp. 25. 9 See pp. 140 of this Submission. 4 Undeniable as these positions are, it is not that Vibekke articulates a political stance or even a conscious life choice. She is no activist or hippy, she hasn’t ‘dropped out’ for conscious reasons of conscience as such. This speaks of Vibekke’s existentialist outlook as much as her sense of lost independence in a world that does not really allow it because of the desires and expectations of others. Denmark or Costa Rica, Mia or Ali, breakfast or dinner. Circumstances of Vibekke’s life begin to take on the structure of choices to be made and decisions to be followed through, whether or not Vibekke realises them as such. Is Vibekke depressed or protesting? Is her life brave or futile? Through the process of redrafting what was originally a coming‐of‐age/coming‐out story, I have now left these questions unanswered, with the implication that they may be unanswerable in a poetic world in which we can recognise ourselves only through our representations of ourselves to others, or in reflections of ourselves by others’ reactions to our actions. This is not only a striking effect of marketing and TV reality, but also arguably a condition of how we come to understand the world relative to ourselves through language, as we process the world around us by organising random events into cause and effect sequences, or narratives.10 Circumstance and uncertainty Circumstances are always contingent: Vibekke cannot effect her own situation or escape her emptiness. She feels out of control as the nothingness she feels is so overpowering that nothing matters. As Vibekke is forced to make decisions, the outcome of these leaves her unchanged. When she chooses to have an affair, the Vibekke who leaves behind long‐term partner Mia is the same Vibekke who wakes up in bed with Ali. Nothing has changed. In the same way that the novel opens during ‘winter‐like spring’11 – a spring that is not really spring but only resembles one, it ends with similar uncertainty on which Vibekke comments: ‘[m]aybe not knowing is OK.’12 The many ‘maybes’ Vibekke is surrounded by open up the number of possibilities and increase the pressure of having to make a choice ‐ a responsibility, which Vibekke finds exhausting. When asked about why she is different, Vibekke 10 As Paul Ricoeur reads Aristotle’s Poetics, ‘[t]o make up a plot is already to make the intelligible spring from the accidental, the universal from the singular, the necessary or the probable from the episodic’. Time and Narrative, Volume 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 41. 11 See pp.