Andrea Levy

Contemporary Critical Perspectives

Jeannette Baxter, David James, Jeannette Baxter, David James

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441147585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Andrea Levy has emerged as one of the most significant and popular voices in contemporary black British writing both in the UK and abroad. Drawing on a familial history of emigration, her critically-acclaimed novels - including the multiple award-winning Small Island - attempt to bring a variety of voices to the representation of black experience in post-war Britain. This book is the first of its kind to be devoted to Levy's work. Combining historical, theoretical and textual perspectives, the volume hosts a wide range of current critical approaches to Levy's fiction. With chapters written by leading established and emerging scholars, the book explores issues of literary form, diasporic literature and cultural value, the BBC TV adaptation of Small Island, while also shedding fresh light on Levy's critically neglected early works. The book also includes a new interview with Levy herself, a timeline of her life, chapter summaries, as well as guides to further reading and online resources, making this an essential companion to the writings of one of the most exciting voices in contemporary fiction.

CHAPTER ONE

Unhappy Bildungsromane

DAVE GUNNING

Chapter Summary: One effect of the situation in which Levy’s later writing receives far more critical attention than the earlier works is that her first two novels occasionally seem to be read through critical models that might be better suited to the material that comes after. Most work that interprets Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994) and Never Far from Nowhere (1996) by reading them as examples of the bildungsroman form can seem guilty of this, imposing a celebratory vision of individual and social transformation on novels that in fact are far more concerned to trace the constraints and lack of meaningful change in the lives of their young female protagonists. This chapter wishes to retain the idea that the bildungsroman offers a useful way to read these explorations of loss and limitation (often determined as much by class as by race), but to suggest that a more nuanced conception of the form, divorced from too-easily positive associations needs to be mobilized to read these unhappy texts.

In Andrea’s Levy’s first novel, Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994), the narrator Angela Jacobs presents a range of vignettes from her childhood in Highbury, North London, interspersed with an account of her father’s death from cancer during her adult years. Levy’s second novel, Never Far from Nowhere (1996) tells the stories of two sisters, Vivien and Olive Charles, as they grow up in Finsbury Park, the former eventually leaving for art college in Kent, while the latter is unhappily separated from her husband and forced to raise her daughter alone. These novels are frequently read alongside Fruit of the Lemon (1999) as examples of the bildungsroman form within which Levy worked early in her writing career. Yet, seeing these three works as a trilogy of novels of formation risks conflating them in unhelpful ways. The third book contains elements that do not feature in the first two, revealing a different way of working through the challenges of the bildungsroman, one that is more at ease with the transformations of personal identity captured within the form. In paying attention to the first two novels in isolation, we may get a more precise sense of exactly how Levy is able to stretch the conventions of the novel of (self-)formation, thereby avoiding in turn the danger of reading these novels only in terms of how they anticipate her later critically celebrated works.

In an important position paper that looks to distinguish a new current in black British writing of the twenty-first century, John McLeod approaches Levy in ways that set more recent work like Small Island apart from those texts produced in previous few decades. McLeod invokes Levy’s 2004 novel as an example of writing that moves away from intense interrogation of the dilemmas caused for people negotiating the twin poles of identity signalled in the compound phrase ‘black British’. Instead, Small Island points to alternative means of addressing questions of race and nation that are able to look outwards beyond constricting borders imposed by a narrow focus on the individual experience of racial and national belonging. He labels this new literature ‘black writing of Britain’ and finds in it an engagement with new forms of narrative, frequently based around ‘cultural zygoticism’: a process of twinning and doubling that is required always to search for similarities and parallels. This strategy rejects the introspection of a narrow identity politics, reflecting the fact that ‘black writing of Britain is an important contributor to a broad series of debates about the identity of the nation in an international context, one that shadows a set of concerns much wider than solipsistic and exclusivist diasporic matters about “myself” ’ (McLeod 2010: 51). As part of McLeod’s attempt to show that a new internationalist sensibility has manifested itself in innovative formal structures, he contrasts recent writing with the model set out by Mark Stein’s important work on the ‘black British bildungsroman’. McLeod argues that the bildungsroman’s ‘key concerns’ of ‘subjectivity and consciousness’ seem to have become dated, though he acknowledges that the particular model set out by Stein did not see the form as tracing only a ‘crudely individualistic endeavour’, but allowed for a ‘synchronisation of private and public transformations’ (McLeod 2010: 47).

Stein’s account of the black British bildungsroman therefore seems crucial in approaching black British writing of the 1990s, especially if we accept McLeod’s implication that the form’s historical moment is firmly located in that decade and has been seen far less in the new century. Stein partly signals his wish to think beyond a conception of bildungsromane as concerned only with identity in the narrowest sense by choosing to refer to his texts not as novels of formation, but of transformation – the changes that occur are not confined only to the subjective development of the individual, but are equally brought about within the fabric of society of a whole. It is not just that the form allows new subject positions to come into being through the imagining and representation of ways of being that combine ‘black’ and ‘British’; there is also an irresistible pressure on the surrounding society to change and make available locations within which these new types of selfhood can be formed and lived out: ‘the black British novel of transformation [. . .] has a dual function: it is about the formation of its protagonists as well as the transformation of British society and cultural institutions’ (Stein 2004: 20). Most significantly, Stein’s account of this function insists on the causal links between these two spheres of change, as the developing individual within the text both figures as and initiates ‘a symbolic act of carving out space’:

through the process of subject formation, the bildungsroman negotiates the formation of its protagonist or protagonists within the social world that is encountered and shaped. While the individual, then, struggles with family, education, and the experiences of society at large, this struggle is significantly not without consequences for the cultures within which it takes place. (Stein 2004: 30–1)

Stein does not, however, accept that this process results in a smoothly homogeneous new configuration of society, but rather argues that the disruptive dynamic brought into being by the irruption of new forms of selfhood into the national space may persist in forging a new society that is fluidly heterogeneous – able to preserve fragmentation rather than trying to recuperate the disparate pieces of a newly fractured culture into a unified whole. In doing so, he is able to argue against the need for an author consciously to express a particular vision of social transformation before being able to produce the unruly and disturbing subjectivities that find form in the bildungsroman, thereby insisting that black British authors need not be ‘burdened with certain responsibilities that can curtail his or her work’ (Stein 2004: 54).

Nonetheless, the bildungsroman is frequently seen as required to display a form of unity in its resolution. While this may not take the form of a defined social vision (and the black British bildungsroman discussed by Stein in fact most frequently end with moments of transition or metamorphosis, with acts of travel rather than of settling), there does nonetheless seem to be a need for correlation between the situation of the protagonist and that of the society, even if it is merely that they each remain unsettled and portray identity at the point of becoming, rather than being. Michael Perfect captures this neatly in his description of the resolution of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), which, in its embodiment of the values of ‘individuation and socialisation’ he considers a paradigmatic ‘multicultural bildungsroman’, ‘with the novel celebrating the adaptability both of its immigrant protagonist as well as that of the multicultural metropole’ (Perfect 2008: 119). The bildungsroman can therefore seem a celebratory form, not only commending the strength of the individual protagonist for finding a way to conquer the alienation brought about by the privations of minority identity, but also applauding the new social spaces that have opened to allow for the lessening, if not quite the elimination, of prejudice.

It seems pertinent, then, to question why, given the bildungsroman’s association with individual development and flourishing and desirable social transformation, Levy’s first two novels read as examples of the form. These books portray situations of entrapment, lack of agency and the curtailment of individual flourishing by institutional indifference or hostility. To describe either as offering a happy ending for its protagonists or a meaningful reshaping of social norms seems to involve a wilful blindness to just how bleak the plots of these stories are. In fact, although both McLeod and Stein do describe the novels as bildungsromane, these critics’ analyses, at the level of content, are slight. McLeod sees Levy’s ‘preoccupation of [sic] Black British identity’ in her first three novels as superseded by Small Island’s ability to relocate its concerns ‘beyond the realm of subjective selfhood by nurturing an analogous vision of social and cultural admixture as constituting the veiled reality of the British nation’ (McLeod 2010: 49). However, the analogous connection between the ‘new’ writing of a heterogeneous nation and the ‘old’ vision of multiplicity at the level of the individual is built only upon the example of Fruit of the Lemon, at the end of which Faith Jackson finally finds herself able to understand ‘the inability of words like “Jamaican”, “black” and “British” fully to capture her manifold filiations’ ( McLeod 2010: 49). Stein’s study equally finds in Faith’s journey the material for an extended survey of how the black British bildungsroman links the development of the individual to the restructuring of social understanding. Faith perhaps falls harder than any of the other young women in Levy’s early fiction, suffering a distressing nervous breakdown after witnessing an act of extreme racial violence, but she also finds redemption in a way that does not seem available to Angela Jacobs, or Vivien and Olive Charles. Her journey to Jamaica and subsequent discovery of her diverse lineage is, in Stein’s words, ‘a voyage of discovery’ that ‘is not so much a discovery of roots as a charting of routes’, as she ‘seeks to clarify for herself how she relates to her Jamaican and African family history’, a knowledge that will ‘impact on her identifications within London’ (Stein 2004: 80). While Stein has nothing to say about Never Far from Nowhere, his brief reading of Every Light in the House Burnin’ is far less convincing than that he gives of Levy’s third novel. Here, he finds in Angela’s statement that England is her ‘birthright’, a clear indication of Levy’s ‘didactic’ purpose in ‘contrasting an accepting and passive Mr Jacob’s with a determined and therefore successful Ange’ (Stein 2004: 48). Yet, as I will discuss below, this confident ascription of meaningful agency to Angela, pitted against her complacent parents, is made deeply problematic by the novel.

Perfect engages with Levy’s novels in a different article to his discussion of the multicultural bildungsroman. Interestingly, he never actually uses the term to describe these novels, showing an awareness that the texts are often too despairing of the possibility of development to be easily associated with the label’s positive connotations. However, his analysis of Every Light in the House Burnin’ and Never Far from Nowhere through the lens of Edward Said’s strategy of contrapuntal reading – in Perfect’s words, ‘reading for what remains unspoken in a text’ (Perfect 2010: 32) – offers a useful perspective in understanding why these first two books are regularly connected so freely with a version of bildungsroman form that in fact fits only their successor. Perfect’s intention is not to enact a contrapuntal reading of Levy’s fiction, rather to demonstrate that the texts themselves have ‘developed an increasingly “contrapuntal” conceptual framework, and that Small Island in particular can be understood as a form of contrapuntal writing’ (Perfect 2010: 32). While this account of how Levy has become increasingly concerned with ‘narrating rather than negating the imperial past’, and of how her conviction to do so requires an engagement ‘with a multiplicity of contrapuntal voices’ (Perfect 2010: 32), seems a useful approach to Small Island, it is not clear that it is quite appropriate in reading her first two fictions. Indeed, Perfect’s wish to trace a line of ‘formal and conceptual developments in her works’ (Perfect 2010: 32) risks reading the earlier novels in the light of the later ones, and ascribing an historical consciousness to the early books that does not in fact emerge until much later in her career. Perfect’s reading of Every Light in the House Burnin’ asserts that it is ‘a novel that insists on the importance of where one has come from’ (Perfect 2010: 33), a claim I would not dispute, though I remain unconvinced that the text suggests that this requires Angela to know anything of her parents’ life in Jamaica. His reading of Never Far from Nowhere insists that the novel warns of the need for a better awareness of ‘the importance of historicizing one’s society, one’s ancestry and oneself in the fight against racism, prejudice and ignorance’, and that realizing the hybridity of their Caribbean roots would have helped Vivien and Olive to more productive resolutions of their situation, but it is hard to see how the novel practically demonstrates this (Perfect 2010: 34). He describes Fruit of the Lemon as enacting a ‘(re)constructive’ healing for Faith (Perfect 2010: 37), but to imply that Levy intended for readers of the earlier books to imagine such a healing for the characters seems to attribute a consistency to her oeuvre that is not borne out by her actual aesthetic choices. Of course, a contrapuntal reading can freely suggest such an ignorance of the past is the cause of these young women’s bleak situation, though such reading for what is not said is always by definition speculative; but to locate this absence as an authorial choice makes a different, and probably less sustainable, claim. Perfect’s work is valuable, however, not only because its theoretical model does seem far more applicable to Levy’s later novels, but also for the way it reveals through detailed analyses an assumption that is more casually made in McLeod and Stein’s arguments: that because Fruit of the Lemon finds a recuperative version of the past that allows for a bildungsroman-style resolution, the earlier two books might be seen as less fully worked-through variations on the same theme, rather than operating to suggest a different message.

It may be useful briefly to figure the formulations offered by the critics discussed above in terms of Homi Bhabha’s influential account of the relation between national imaginaries and the subjects who must live within them. His contention is that nations speak always with a double voice: the ‘pedagogical’ address that relies on a continuity of national space across time, and the ‘performative’ address that recognizes the diversity of national subjects at any given moment. Although their respective terms of reference may frequently contrast, each address is essential. Their ‘conceptual ambivalence’ brings into being what Bhabha calls ‘the site of writing the nation’ (Bhabha 1994: 145). Stein’s model of subject-formation coming to create new formations of social relations within the nation seems an example of the pedagogical being necessarily re-shaped by the unruly disorder of the performative; Perfect’s contrapuntal strategy as a direct challenge to the logic of the pedagogical that might make it more accountable to the realities of the performative; and McLeod’s internationalization recasts the space of the performative and thus opens up a wider canvas for the pedagogical. In trying to avoid attributing an historical consciousness to Levy’s first two novels which is never textually indicated as being there, it seems unwise to try to suggest that they perform a direct assault on the integrity of the pedagogical national narrative – such as Perfect finds more convincingly in her later works – and the narrowness of their spatial concerns and disavowal of analogical links to external situations seems to rule out McLeod’s model (from which they are, of course, explicitly excluded). It is then perhaps to Stein’s model to which we might most valuably return, but with a view to seeing why these novels do not stage a successful assault against pedagogical norms – what is it about the performative stagings of identity in Every Light in House Burnin’ and Never Far from Nowhere that leaves them unable to disrupt pedagogical exclusion? What makes a novel a non-celebratory, or unhappy, bildungsroman?

A recent challenge to reading black British literature in terms of the bildungsroman has been made by Vedrana Velickovic, who questions whether the verse-novels of Bernardine Evaristo (including Lara (1997), which Stein reads in a pairing with Fruit of the Lemon) should be seen as conforming to the formal model of the novel of formation. Velickovic argues that ‘as a genre of resolution [. . .] the Bildungsroman risks normalizing Evaristo’s complex engagement with loss’ (Velickovic 2012: 75–6). Her reading emphasizes the prevalence in Evaristo’s books of the state of ‘(un)belonging’ – a partial and always incomplete resolution of identity conflict – and cautions against celebratory conceptualizations of black British narratives. She does so through a focus on melancholia, here indicating the state of irrevocable loss that can be read in societies that fail to address their blighted racial histories. Velickovic is concerned to note that melancholia need not always be seen as negative, but might also generate positive strategies which look to rearticulate the injustices of the past and remind society of their continuing pernicious effects, and argues that ‘the significance of (un)belonging lies precisely in what is less a melancholic “inability” in Evaristo’s narratives to resolve cultural and personal conflicts, and more a melancholic obligation to resist neat resolutions as simply being about the protagonist’s identity negotiation’ (Velickovic 2012: 67). Her detailing of Evaristo’s strategies suggest an historical consciousness at work in these novels not wholly dissimilar from that which Perfect identifies as the contrapuntal narratives of Fruit of the Lemon and Small Island, and Velickovic’s model perhaps also cannot be carried across to Levy’s other novels for the same reasons as Perfect’s. However, the notion of melancholia does offer the basis of a useful way into reading Levy’s unhappy bildungsroman. Although Velickovic reads Evaristo’s melancholia as played out in her conscious revisiting of history, it is useful to note that the melancholic subject need not always recognize their own symptom, nor comprehend exactly what object has been lost. Indeed, melancholia may be an overdetermined condition, with no single, easily identifiable root. As in the case of the seemingly perfect Mrs Simpson in Every Light in the House Burnin’, who babysits the young Angela in her spotless flat, the maintenance of a particular social identity might belie a deeper disturbance. Mrs Simpson cleans her house every day: ‘she wiped and dusted furiously, like she had something to hide’ (Levy 1995: 134–5). It is soon revealed that this pristine woman’s marriage is a torrid battlefield, despite the public faces she and her husband show. Melancholia offers a useful way into understanding how the staging of unified identity might often at best be a coping strategy for repressing deeper disturbance, or, at worst, a conscious deception of both others and oneself. A seemingly unified identity is not necessarily the sign of a happy individual. I do not agree with Velickovic that we should abandon the critical model of the bildungsroman so easily in reading black British writing, but there does seem to be a pressing need to expand its definition and find a way to account for its melancholic, unhappy forms.

If the sources of melancholic disaffection are overdetermined, so too of course are the constituents of identity. If Angela suffers a marginalized position within Every Light in the House Burnin’, then it is one rooted in discriminations based not only on race, but also on gende...