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Satire, Identity and State-Of-The-Nation Novels in Jonathan Coe’S Fiction

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Satire, Identity and State-Of-The-Nation Novels in Jonathan Coe’S Fiction UNIVERSITATEA DIN CRAIOVA FACULTATEA DE LITERE ȘCOALA DOCTORALĂ „ALEXANDRU PIRU” SATIRE, IDENTITY AND STATE-OF-THE-NATION NOVELS IN JONATHAN COE’S FICTION SUMMARY Îndrumător științific: Prof. Univ. Dr. OLARU Victor Doctorand, ȚACU Andreea Daniela CRAIOVA 2020 SATIRE, IDENTITY AND STATE-OF-THE-NATION NOVELS IN JONATHAN COE’S FICTION SUMMARY In his essay, The Paradox of Satire, Jonathan Coe argued that “if you could not cleanse the world of its deformities, you could at least laugh at them” (Coe 2013: 3435). Coe’s novels are often regarded as satirical accounts of contemporary Britain, wrapped in what foreign audiences identify as the English sense of humour. Over the last five decades, Britain has experienced radical political, social and economic changes, from the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 to the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union in 2017. This period of tension and concern permeated literature and was translated into a series of political novels regarded by the critics as contemporary state-of-the-nation fiction. Jonathan Coe is considered one of the harshest critics of British recent history and his poetic perspective on life is remarkably tied to the historical circumstances of Great Britain during the last decades. The combination of literariness with humour and wry observations about politics and society is probably what helped him achieve great critical recognition as well as commercial success. However, we find it quite surprising that Coe’s fiction has prompted rather little serious academic discussions, beyond some assertions related to his technical artistry or to the political aspect of his novels. There is no doubt that the satirical discourse is the main ingredient in almost all of Jonathan Coe’s novels. From the first satirical works of fiction, the writers have written not only to reveal a personal indignation regarding a certain aspect of their contemporary societies, but mostly with a clear sense of ethical concern for the public interest, aiming to dissolve the inequities and abuses, to expose the faults of the society that needed to be corrected. If satire has historically been used as a means of disproving those in authority, this artistic expression evolved over time, reflecting the mentality of the context in which the satiric work was written. A very wide concept, which made it a real challenge for the literary critics to clearly define, satire encapsulates several characteristics. The two most important components of satire, humour and ethics, persisted over the years, from Aristophanes to contemporary writers. Comedy became an essential ingredient in the process of creating efficient satires, and in Jonathan Coe’s fiction comedy is translated in the form of dark 2 humour, irony, sarcasm, cynicism, leading to a different kind of laughter, bleaker and wrapped in nostalgia and melancholy. Postmodern satirical novels envision the protagonists as allegorical representations of the vices in the contemporary society and they have the tendency to depict a rather dystopic panorama of the world. Although satire is the core of most of Jonathan Coe’s novels, what immediately drew our attention was the fact that his fictional works are not restricted to mere political and social criticism, but they deeply reveal the complexity of the postmodern condition and expose the characters’ inabilities to react to the dilemmas posed by postmodern times. Moreover, we observed a very close relationship between satire and identity, translated in a mutual influence between satirical devices and identity construction, by means of opposition and otherness. Our research encompasses an interdisciplinary approach to literary criticism, aesthetics, literary stylistics, cultural studies, politics and studies of identity, and the analysis is theoretically inscribed in the framework of discourse analysis around postmodernity. Our interpretations rely heavily on the studies of Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon, Brian McHale, Terry Eagleton, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lance Olsen and Patricia Waugh. The theoretical discussions around the issues of identity and identity formation are based on the scientific works of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud, as well as on the very recent study of Massih Zekavat Satire, Humour and the Construction of Identities. Since our research left behind the concept(s) of identity and/or otherness defined in relation to colonialism, the studies of Edward Said did not represent a priority and were not approached in the process of analysis. As the title of the thesis suggests, this study is devoted to analysing the literary works of Jonathan Coe, a contemporary novelist whose satirical socio-political fiction encapsulates some particular features of postmodernism and illustrates a sort of shift in today’s satirical fiction, marked by a proclivity to highlight human vulnerabilities in order to expose broader social and political vices. The subject of our investigation is an in-depth analysis of six selected works by Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up! (1994), The House of Sleep (1997), The Rotters’ Club (2001), The Closed Circle (2004), Number 11 ─ Or Tales that Witness Madness (2015), and Middle England (2018), in the context of contemporary British satire, pointing out the current functions of satirical devices within a postmodern text, the relationship between satire and 3 identity and between satire and state-of-the-nation novels, in order to illustrate both the evolution of satire as a stylistic device and Coe’s contribution towards redefining the contemporary English novel or, as Mellet argued, his contribution to giving a new impulse to the metafictional and postmodern writings (2015: 16). The objective of this research involves the analysis of satire within the postmodern context, in order to determine the efficiency of such stylistic device (or even literary genre) in relation to the current realities generated by postmodernism. Although Coe is also regarded as a realist novelist by some literary critics, his novels are deeply anchored in the logic of chaos specific to postmodern fiction, due to the intentional fragmentation of his writings, the multiple genres mixed together in complex plots which feature intertextuality, narrative loops, multiple perspectives and constant shifts in time and space. Throughout the thesis, we adopt various research methods. However, a combination of non-structured qualitative analysis and structured quantitative analysis governs most of our research. Generally, the methodologies applied in our study derive from textual criticism, mostly inscribed in contemporary and postmodern literary theories. Starting from a more general framework, marked by our intention to (re)define the concept of satire and to trace back Jonathan Coe’s literary influence, and closely moving on towards more specific issues, embodied by the use of satire as a means of approaching socio- political problems and by the relationship between satire and identity, our main research questions run as follows: 1. How did the poetics of satire change from Jonathan Coe’s first political novel to his later satirical works? 2. What is the effect of satire and comic forms in depicting contemporary Britain? 3. Is it of any help to write a novel about the political difficulties in an already unstable society? Can satire actually lead to a positive change or it just makes things worse? If comic forms usually distract from the potential sadness of the situation, does it mean that satire distances the readers from the brutality of real life, dissolving anger and preventing them from taking action? 4. Is there any close relationship between satire and identity within a postmodern literary work, given the fact that both concepts are present in almost all walks of contemporary life? 4 5. Can the mechanisms of satire contribute to the formation of social and individual identities? 6. What is the role of satire in writing state-of-the-nation novels? The critical reception of Jonathan Coe’s novels is also an important focal point in the research process, predominantly throughout the first part of the thesis. We analyse, compare and contrast critical reviews from different social and cultural backgrounds, focusing especially on British, Spanish and Romanian criticism. As we have already mentioned, what surprised us from the beginning was that Jonathan Coe’s fiction has attracted quite little academic research, although the writer received a lot of public attention after the publication of What a Carve Up! (1994). It even seems that his novels were better received by the common readers in continental Europe than in the United Kingdom. Consequently, the number of critical materials was very scarce, consisting of only three books dedicated exclusively to the analysis of Coe’s novels, two of which are designed as introductory guides to his novels; two PhD dissertations and one collection of critical essays. Therefore, in supporting and proving our hypothesis, we approach a corpus-based analysis and we also rely on a great number of interviews with the author, to supplement the lack of critical material. Accordingly, the research methods consist of interpreting and comparing primary sources. Biographical and historical materials are also used in order to establish the social and political climate in which Jonathan Coe wrote. The results are supported with a number of critical essays on the author and with several periodicals which deal specifically with the subject of politics in the United Kingdom. The
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