Remembering Identity After Postmodernity. Melanie Ebdon PhD Thesis, September, 2003. University of Wales, Bangor Supervisor: Dr. Lucie Armitt LIw DDEF-NNYDDOIY LLYFRCE LL `(N UMI T7DIN TH" LL, LY r (? + r Abstract This study focusses on the outcomes of postmodernity with particular emphasis on memory identity fragmented and the reconstruction of after postmodern theories of the self. Chapter Two analyses Graham Swift's Waterland, lain Banks's The Crow Road and Margaret Drabble's The Peppered Moth which show the reconnection of identity to familial history, demonstrate cosmological, geological, genetic and and the necessity of the subject's connection to the formerly denounced metanarrative of history. Drabble's text also highlights a gender issue concerning representations of women and motherhood in contemporary fiction. In Chapter Three, Ian McEwan's The Child in Time and Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye illustrate the way in which the new physics has influenced concepts of identity as being interconnected. The Child in Time shows how this model also risks creating an a-historical, de-politicised subject, particularly if existing problematic constructions of gender are not reformed. This reformative project is one of the main achievements of Cat's Eye in which Atwood revises archetypal female iconography. Chapter Four discusses three texts from postcolonial India: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day and Arundhati Roy's The God of mall Thin s. These novels demonstrate the specific difficulties in constructing a coherent senseof self in a fractured political situation which mourns the broken connection to the motherland. Cultural imperialism and its psychological effects are brought to the fore here, showing the ways in which imperial ideals force the postcolonial subject to accept a hybrid identity. Women are doubly oppressed in these situations by both the machinations of an Imposed Western patriarchal system and the indigenous caste hierarchy and also by association with the motherland ideal of a culturally authentic, pre-colonial India. ChapterFive brings together the themesof gender,history, memory, colonisation and in Toni Morrison's Beloved Anne Michaels's the reconstruction of the self an analysis of and Fugitive Pieces. The effects of slavery and the Holocaust, respectively, are explored in these texts and both novels conclude with the necessityof finding ways to mourn loss and go on to historically Communal is representmodes of subjectivity as and socially connected. memory institutionalised dispossession, reclaimedas a necessaryantidote to violence and thereby identity from constructing a form of which progresses postmodemity. Contents Chapter Page 1 One: Introduction - Identity in Contemporary Fiction. 15 Chapter Page Two: Beyond Mourning - Waterland, The Crow Road and The Peppered Moth. Page 88 Chapter Three: Rewriting Realism in Cat's Eye and The Child in Time. Page 140 Chapter Four: Postcolonial Mourning in Clear Light of Day, Midnight's Children and The God of Small Things. Page 213 Chapter Five: Communal Memory in Beloved and Fugitive Pieces. Page 269 Conclusion. Page273 Works Cited. Many thanks to Dr. Lucie Armitt of the University of Wales, Bangor for your guidance and inspiration over the past nine years. All my family for your love and support. My friends for all your encouragement. Chapter One: Introduction- Identity in Contemporary Fiction. Inevitably the question will arise: what comes next? The logic of disillusionment will have to yield to somenew affirmation. ' Andreas Huyssen's comment concerns the development of Western cultural consciousness, particularly in reference to what he terms a "radical modernism of negativity. "' For Huyssen, recent decadeshave seena "memory boom" in contemporaryculture which is indicative of this desire to construct a "new affirmation. "3 The process of remembering is traced here through a collection of texts which demonstratethe attempt to `re-member' (in the senseof `put back together') a shatteredphilosophical terrain in new ways which are appropriate for the presenttime. This rememberingis undertakenon personal,social and national scalesin thesetexts, all of which demonstratethe desire to create a contemporaryontology in which identity is anchoredwith referenceto historical and temporal scales,familial and communal relationships,new developmentsin scienceand, in some cases,radically revised attitudes towards spirituality. JaneFlax discussesa concept of identity which she terms the "social self', a paradigm which relatesto this concept of rememberingand the construction of identity in relation to other elements. For Flax, as for many others within this study, a concept of interrelated ` Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, (New York: Routledge, 1995) 95. 2 Huyssen, T_DIlight 2 3 Huyssen, T_vilight 9. 4 Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemnorarv West, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) 232. 2 identity is a positive move towards creating a new ontological pattern, one which overcomes the postmodern preoccupation with the fragmented self. Jean Francois Lyotard's statement in the introduction to his landmark work The PostmodernCondition has acquiredtotemic significance due to the fact that it acknowledges the most basic common denominators of the postmodernphenomenon: "I define postmodernas incredulity toward metanarratives."S These metanarratives are those philosophical precepts by which existence was formerly explained, such as Time, God and History, concepts which enforced a perception of reality which was most germaneto the imperious selfhood of Enlightenment thought, a bourgeois, insular concept of identity. Postmodernity's resistance to overarching narratives extends into a critique of oppressiveauthoritarianism, a valuable aspectof the discourse,yet where postmodernityfails is in the need to reconstructafter such a processof deconstruction. In the postmodernera, cultural consciousnesswas perceivedto be involved in the dismantling and rearrangementof fragments,in the play with meaning. While this perspectiveundoubtedly had its place, postmodernity is currently felt to be weaningdue to its lack of constructive, progressivevolition. StevenConnor identifies this stasisas a particularly postmodernfeature: "It is as though postmodernity had borrowed from the modem its capacity for breaking with the past, its quality of self-possession,while losing all its forward impulsion. The past is abandoned,without the vocation towards the future."6 This position has somevery seriousconsequences when applied to the topic of identity, the 5 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condidtion: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi (1984; Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984) 27. 6 Steven Connor, "The Impossibility of the Present: or, from the Contemporary to the Contemporal, " Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, eds. Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (New York: Longman, 1999) 21. 3 development of which is thrown into crisis as there can apparently be no evolution, given this barricade of thought. Postmodemity is therefore a discourseinspired by loss; the loss of metanarrativesand the conceptof identity which those metanarrativessupported. In her psychoanalyticreading of postmodernity,Wendy Wheeler identifies two possible responsesto loss: [w]hat we call postmodern seems to consist in the struggle between melancholia and mourning-between, on the one hand, nostalgic turns to the past and a masochistic sense of social fragmentations, and, on the other, the attempt to imagine differently ' reconstituted communities and selves ... It is important to distinguish betweennostalgic melancholia and a healthy remembering. The melancholicside of postmodernity is that which is most readily representedby psychosis: diffuse, manic, engaged in the play of meaning (which at root is really a crisis of meaning), increduloustowards the metanarratives,and ready to question any structure whilst simultaneouslybelieving itself to be beyond question. However, the mourning aspectof postmodernityand, more importantly, its product, is the acknowledgementof the loss of former principles and the creation of new ones, a point which Wheeler goes on to make: we might therefore say that the outcome of postmodernity, seenas the attempt to live with loss and uncertainty as a permanentcondition, would be the discovery or invention of ways of being in the world which move beyond the harsh individualism of utilitarian modernity, and towards a different way of accounting for and valuing human needs.8 This creation of a new perspectiveforms part of Julia Kristeva's work in Black Sun on the relationship between melancholia and mourning in which she concludes with a study on the value of artistic formulation as a way of overcoming depression. In the culmination of ' Wendy Wheeler, A New Modernity? Change in Science, Literature Politics, (London: and Lawrence and Wishart, 1999) 74-75. 8 Wheeler, Mom 74-75, emphasis in original. 4 her argument,Kristeva advocatesthe use of "sublimatory solutions" as a way of healing psychic collapse in which the subject undergoes a cathartic process of representation, creating beauty out of the depressive state, thereby enabling them to heal. Relating to psychology, sublimation can be defined as the translation of primitive energies into socially acceptable activities.' As Kristeva explains, "Works of art thus