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Mémoire M2 COE 2905 MEMOIRE DE MASTER 2 RECHERCHE ETUDES ANGLOPHONES Imad Zrari Année universitaire 2016-2017 The Blurring of Politics, Postmodernist Aesthetics and Writing in What a Carve Up! and Number 11 , Jonathan Coe Sous la direction de Laurent Mellet Professeur des Universités en Littérature et Cinéma Britanniques REMERCIEMENTS La réalisation de ce mémoire a été possible grâce au concours de plusieurs personnes à qui je voudrais témoigner toute ma reconnaissance. Je voudrais tout d’abord adresser toute ma gratitude au directeur de ce mémoire, Laurent Mellet, pour sa patience, sa disponibilité et ses précieux conseils, qui ont contribué à alimenter ma réflexion. Je voudrais également exprimer ma reconnaissance envers mes amies et collègues, Jacqueline Kempton et Blandine Michel, pour leur soutien moral et intellectuel. Enfin, une grande pensée pour ma mère qui a toujours valorisé l’éducation. 2 Table of contents Introduction ................................................................................................................... 5 I. Satire, Engagement and Humor in Coe’s Novels ................................................ 9 1. Coe as a Political Satirist .............................................................................. 9 a. Coe’s Background and Influence ................................................................................. 9 b. WACU : an Acrid Criticism of Thatcherism ................................................................ 12 c. N11 : A Dark Portrait of Blairism and Cameronism in the Same Vein as WACU ? .... 15 2. Present Versus Past ..................................................................................... 21 a. When the Past does not Pass… .................................................................................. 21 b. Coe’s and the Immediacy: Current Society Issues ..................................................... 23 3. Politics and Humor ..................................................................................... 25 a. Coe, the Humorous Satirist for All? ........................................................................... 25 b. When “Britain is in Danger of Sinking Giggling into the Sea” .................................. 28 4. The “Coesian” Position… .......................................................................... 32 a. The In-between, the Lack of Political Positioning and Indeterminacy ...................... 32 b. A Real Protest to Overturn the Status Quo or a Bowdlerized Satire? ........................ 36 II. Postmodernist Aesthetics and the Issue of Label ............................................... 40 1. The Usual Recipe of Postmodernism with Post-Postmodern Sprinkles ... 40 a. The Continuous Intermingling of Genres ................................................................... 40 b. The Collage and Patchwork ....................................................................................... 42 c. Post-Postmodernist Sprinkles ? .................................................................................. 44 2. The Parody of the Parody of Parody? ........................................................ 46 a. The Gothic Novel and its Parody ............................................................................... 46 b. From a Parody of a Detective Novel to an Academic Detective Novel ..................... 47 3. An Antagonistic Whirl of Magic, Realism and Tragedy ........................... 49 a. The Condition of England Novel and the Dickensian Dimension ............................. 49 b. A Tragic Story? .......................................................................................................... 52 c. A Fantasy Novel Tinged with Magical Realism ........................................................ 54 d. A Swerve to Dirty Realism? ....................................................................................... 56 III. The Blurring of Writing and Writing the Blurring ............................................ 59 1. The Blurring of History and Story ............................................................. 59 a. Macro-Narration Versus Micro-Narration ................................................................. 59 b. The Autobiographical: Coe himself in the Novel ....................................................... 62 c. The Artist or Would-be Artist: Authorial Self-Reflexivity ........................................ 64 2. The Blurring of Arts ................................................................................... 67 a. The Picture, the Instant and the Freeze-Frame ........................................................... 67 b. An Almodavarian Writing and Aesthetic ................................................................... 70 c. The Mirror and the Dream: Coctalian Devices to Image Coe’s Imagination ............. 72 3. An “Eye” for an “I” and a “Voice” for a “character”? ............................ 76 a. The Blurring of Narrative Voice(s) ............................................................................ 76 b. The Eye(s) and the Spectator(s) ................................................................................. 79 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 82 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................ 87 4 Introduction Jonathan Coe, the author of eleven novels, has indisputably the wind in his sails. His contemporary Nick Hornby calls him “probably the best English novelist of his generation” (108). His output includes experimental fictions, panoramic depictions of the British society, political satires, and above all the lives of emotionally disturbed individuals. Coe has more than one string to his bow; he is also famous for being a biographer, a music commentator and a film critic. However success was not immediate. With his first three books – The Accidental Woman in 1987, A Touch of Love in 1989 and The Dwarves of Death in 1990 – Coe did not make a big name for himself. His career actually took an important turn in 1994 with What a Carve Up! (WACU ) which has remained Coe’s most admired and discussed novel and most importantly his signature accomplishment. The book, translated into sixteen languages, was a success in the United Kingdom but also abroad and won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, an award given annually since 1948 to a foreign language book by a group of literary directors in France. Indeed, Coe’s work is most admired in France, Italy, Germany and Greece. For many observers and critics, WACU is still his best work and Coe is most of the time referred to as the “the author of What a Carve Up! ” (Moseley 2). According to Merrit Moseley, Coe began to occupy a different position in British fiction with the publication of this novel. With his latest novel entitled Number 11 (N11) , one could assume that Coe has intended to offer a sort of sequel to WACU . This idea of a sequel would first seem difficult since Coe made sure to slay all the Winshaws at the end of his novel. Indeed, the sequel has more to do with echoes that is to say the story and history of this family who took prominent positions in the Thatcher era resurge several times while survivors strive to celebrate their remembrances. N11 is once more the testimony of Coe’s narrative complexity as it is divided into five parts, linked to one another but each telling a story with characters set in different periods, from 2003 to 2015. Apart from the economic crisis and its wide range of injustices – precariousness and foreign labor exploitation – Coe lampoons the British politics such as Tony Blair’s intervention in Iraq or the policies of austerity. In this novel as well as in WACU , the author tries to capture a political atmosphere with a satirical, realistic, fantastic and humorous tone, and to take a critical look at the evolution of our societies. Coe is not only a satirist; he is also famous for challenging and redefining the contemporary British novel. As Laurent Mellet argues in Les politiques de l’intime , Coe is hailed for “the narrative complexity and ingenuity” (16) of his books, giving a new impulse to the metafictional and postmodern novel, and for many academics, offering a “new literary object” (16). In 2004, Coe analyzed the contemporary British Novel thus: In the last three decades the British novel has reinvigorated itself…by recognizing the multi-ethnicity of modern Britain and opening itself to influences from other cultures; by tapping into the energies of popular film, music and television; by turning its back on modernist elitism and rediscovering the pleasures of humor, storytelling, demotic, and so on. (Guignery 16) These words encapsulate his literary philosophy and style by advocating for the multiplicity of influences and frames, a generic hybridity, a use of humor and a will of cultural democratization. This dissertation will be a means to undertake and to discuss the critical assessment related to Coe’s work stimulating academic discussions among critics. Indeed, before 2015 no book in English was written on Coe’s work. The first to write a monograph in French is Laurent Mellet, Les politiques de l’intime in 2015, in which he explores the relations between the political and the intimate, two notions that seem antagonistic at first. In doing so, he analyzes the way Coe politicizes the intimate through characters, plots and narratives. Mellet shows how Coe re-defines the
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