Marginality in the Contemporary British Novel

Nicola Allen

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781441181770
• eBook ISBN: 9781441147363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

The 'Marginal' as a concept has become an integral part of the British novel as it stands at the turn of the century. Both popular and literary fiction since the mid-1970s has seen an increasing emphasis on the marginal subject. This study offers readings of a wide range of contemporary British novels that represent characters or communities at the margin of society. Nicola Allen analyses three conceptual categories representing the marginal subject in the contemporary British novel: the character of the misfit or outsider; the emergence of the grotesque; and the rediscovery of previously marginalized narratives such as myth and fantasy. This innovative and original monograph focuses on the contention that the contemporary novel of marginality conveys a belief in the socially transformative powers of narrative, and suggests that narrative has played a central role in bringing marginal politics and marginal issues to the fore in contemporary Britain.

Part I
Critical Concepts and Precursors

Chapter 1
Critical Concepts

This chapter will establish definitions for the central ideas referred to in the main body of the book, outlining the usefulness of the work of French philosopher Georges Bataille in an examination of the marginal text. I will argue that the work of Bataille is of importance here because Bataille’s primary themes converge with those implicitly expressed in many of the novels under examination in this book in that both are concerned with challenges to rationality that nevertheless are committed to a reconstructive notion of meaning and shared universal principles. It is necessary first, however, to examine the complex relationship that exists between two divergent approaches to the marginal that occur during this period.

The first of these approaches uses the marginal in order to promote a particular polemic, usually linked to idealist, democratizing principles, as Chana Kronfeld suggests in her text On the Margins of Modernism (1996): ‘writing from a marginal position can – perhaps must – destabilise the norm of the literary and linguistic system by marking the unmarked, charging the neutral, colorizing the colourless, particularising the universal’ (Kronfeld, 1996, p. 72). This approach to the marginal regards the process of creating and making popular novels of marginality as a political act, that can help to counter the elitism of the mainstream, and shares the belief that Edward Said expresses in Culture and Imperialism (1993) that ‘The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them’ (Said, 1993, p. xiii). Writers of this category attempt to overcome this process at least in part through popularizing the novel of marginality.¹

The second approach sees writers adopt the marginal as a largely aesthetic device, and is perhaps evident in Graham Swift’s advice to aspiring writers: ‘My maxim would be for God’s sake write about what you don’t know! For how else will you bring your imagination into play? How else will you discover or explore anything?’ (Swift, 1990, p. 73), and at least at a topographical level the ethos of those writers that fall into this second category would appear to be largely devoid of any notions that social or moral justice can be achieved through the medium of the novel. W. G. Sebald expresses an aesthetically orientated reason for engaging with the marginal author or the marginal subject in order to make ‘better’ literature; Sebald states: ‘The more homogeneous a society is, the more writers it will produce, but the less good writers’ (Sebald, 2003, p. 22). Nevertheless, since both modes in various ways sustain a sense of the powerful quality inherent in such a transformative principle of marginality either ideologically or aesthetically as a means of drawing attention to its ‘newness’ and its sense of challenge, they both hope to reshape readers’ opinions and notions of aesthetic conventions. The latter mode by radicalizing the novel form (one which is essentially concerned with ideas) may ultimately have the effect of allowing people to revise their social and political views, albeit secondarily or tangentially.

Creative writers who utilize the marginal for a social purpose include Bernadine Evaristo, Caryl Phillips, Jeanette Winterson, Will Self and Pat Barker. Such a desire to create a socially transformative text effectively opens the form outward, developing an artistic response to key sociological and ideological currents, of which marginal identity itself is one; thus the ‘marginal novel’ can be read in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s belief that artistic works are best understood in the context of the societal conditions under which they were produced. These authors often situate themselves as belonging to a minority group (in the case of Will Self perhaps that of the committed intellectual or the lapsed drug abuser) and suggest through their writing that that which has been marginalized often has an immense relevance to the canonical in that the marginal has the capacity to highlight the exclusivity of the mainstream, and demonstrates its failure to account for and integrate a wide enough variety of experiences and peoples to reflect or relate to the community at large, leaving it open to accusations of elitism and irrelevance.

Bourdieu perceives that changes in the literary field are the result of changes in the power relations in the political and social fields; in The Field of Cultural Production (1993) he notes that ‘change in the space of literary or artistic possibilities is the result of change in the power relation which constitutes the space of positions’ (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 32). Authors such as Evaristo attempt to extend the relationship between the text and society. In an interview with Alistair Niven, Evaristo expresses a belief that the text can facilitate as well as reflect change, articulating explicitly her desire that society ought to re-examine British history from different perspectives, hinting that it might take a fictive text (such as her own novel The Emperor’s Babe: A Verse Novel of Londinium, 211 A.D (2001), which acknowledges Fryer’s work) to highlight the lesser known historical re-examinations of British history.

A. N: Do you think people like Peter Fryer and Ron Ramidin, historians of the black experience of Britain, are themselves unacknowledged and should be better known?

B. E: I think so yes, I would say that the majority of the British population have never heard of Peter Fryer and I think that it is important that these books are brought to light and that we re-examine British history from this perspective.

A. N: Was that really your motive in writing this book?

B. E: Yes. (Evaristo, 2004, p. 280)

Authors such as Nicholas Blincoe, Toby Litt, A. S. Byatt, and Jim Crace take a different approach to the marginal, which prioritizes an aesthetic rationale rather than a solely political one. Its very prevalence suggests that the marginal seems to exert an immense influence over the contemporary British novel regardless of which particular approach to the issue that an individual writer adopts.

Alan Sinfield aligns the evocation of the marginal perspective with a growing scepticism concerning the idea that European and North American humanism can lead to a universal culture. He notes:

At first sight, the ‘man’ of European and north American humanism, in whose name ‘good’ culture was allegedly produced and has usually been read, seems to include everyone; that is why this seemed the culture for welfare capitalism and left culturalism to proclaim. But in practice ‘man’ always has a centre and a boundary. The function of the concept after all is to distinguish man from not man, and this means that someone is marginal and someone gets left out. (Sinfield, 1997, p. 300)

This represents a very perceptive reading of the efficaciousness of rendering something as culturally central. Sinfield’s very insistence that ‘someone is marginal’ can be read as a counter to the humanist ideal of a universalizing culture that finds a voice in what Malcolm Bradbury terms the ‘traditional’ form of the novel. Moreover, Sinfield identifies in this process of making someone marginal a reduction or effacement of subjectivity, thus implicating such a centralizing ‘liberal’ culture in a dehumanizing process, a denial of rights and agency. Fiction can and has found itself implicated in that process.

In The Location of Culture (1994) Homi K. Bhabha suggests that the ‘ambivalence’ of colonial rule creates a capacity for resistance in the performative ‘mimicry’ of the colonizer’s aesthetic processes. Bhabha discusses authors such as Toni Morrison and Nadine Gordimer, and seeks to locate culture in the marginal, ‘liminal’ spaces between dominant social formations. In the introduction to The Location of Culture Bhabha defines the ‘liminal’ negotiation of cultural identity across differences of race, class, gender and cultural traditions.

It is in the emergence of the interstices – the overlap and displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. How are subjects formed ‘in-between’, or in excess of, the sum of the ‘parts’ of difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender, etc.)? How do strategies of representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of communities where, despite shared histories of deprivation and discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and priorities may not always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even incommensurable? (Bhabha, 1994, p. 2)

For Bhabha cultural identities cannot be attributed to predetermined, ahistorical cultural traits that delineate the principles of ethnicity. ‘Colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ should not be regarded as separate and independent entities. Instead, Bhabha suggests that the negotiation of cultural identity involves the continual exchange of cultural performances that in turn produce a mutual representation of cultural difference. As Bhabha argues in the passage below, this ‘liminal’ space is a ‘hybrid’ site that witnesses the production – rather than just the reflection – of cultural meaning:

Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. (Bhabha, 1994, p. 2)

As Benjamin Graves argues in the contemporary period, Bhabha’s liminality model engages culture productively in that it enables a way of rethinking ‘the realm of the beyond’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 1) that until now has been understood only in terms of the ambiguous prefix ‘post: postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism’ (http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldircource/bhabha/bhabha2.html). Bhabha’s notion of ‘liminality’ can be likened to marginality because it not only pertains to the space between cultural collectives but between historical periods, between politics and aesthetics.

Graves reminds us that Bhabha’s model is useful as it construes the liminal as a position that allows for a meeting point between the centre and the marginal. In a discussion of a museum installation by African-American artist Renee Green, for instance, Bhabha describes the exhibit’s post-modern stairwell as a ‘liminal space, in-between the designations of identity [that] becomes the process of symbolic interaction, the connective tissue that constructs the difference between upper and lower, black and white’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 4). Bhabha also alludes to different types of marginality; in the quote above, he implies class in the words ‘upper and lower’, and also discusses race and gender, believing that the liminal is a better working title for those texts that have previously been regarded in terms of post-colonialism and post-modernism etc. This book shares this concern and Chapter 2 discusses the relevance of using the term ‘marginal’ to find something communicable across socially subordinated groups.

Bhabha’s text also introduces a number of potentially serious problems, however, in its translation to the complicated process of collective social transformation. Graves notes that Bhabha’s formulation of a liminal space between (rather than supportive of) national constituencies is problematic in that Bhabha’s liminal space itself could be said to occupy a privileged, textual, discursive space accessible only to academic intellectuals that fails to properly account for the exiled working classes in the same way that the traditional novel, as defined by Malcolm Bradbury, can be said to exclude marginalized groups.

Bradbury argues that the prime theme of the novel of manners that forms the benchmark of the ‘traditional’ form of the novel is ‘the ethical conduct of man in a society relatively stable and secure’ (Bradbury, 1973, p. 32). The general ethos of such a text would largely substantiate the notion that the social and moral worlds are both rationally definable and contiguous since:

[I]t explores dissonances between ethical absolutes or social virtues and the particular individual experience of these, and since it ends with a restoration, that replacement of the social norms, the giving back of sons to fathers and lovers to lovers. (Bradbury, 1973, p. 32)

Thus within Bradbury’s concept of a traditional form, although a text may contain moments which delve into the comedic, or the irrational, the novel is still, in essence, easily rationalized and finally construed within traditional notions of a ‘rationally definable’ world. Marginality results from that centring and moreover, as Kronfeld suggests, there is a history of inverting this process, responding to this act of suppression or exclusion by using the marginal as an exemplary model that can challenge that traditional reliance on rationality. She traces the origins of evoking the marginal to the formation of the modernist canon, noting:

[…] canonical modernisms often cluster around deviant, atypical examples. Modernism at large is obsessed with the marginal as exemplary, in its choice of stylistic and intertextual models, in its selection of paragons, and in its thematics. (Kronfeld, 1996, p. 71)

Kronfeld believes that the marginal can be regarded as a powerful force within modernist art, which she believes expresses marginality through stylistic and thematic innovations. The use of the marginal as an exemplary model did not decline with the end of the ‘golden age of modernism’ (Kronfeld locates this end point as the closing stages of the 1930s) however, but instead continues into the contemporary era and has been appropriated by many different authors. Examples of authors who represent the marginal in their novels range from modernist Virginia Woolf to John Fowles, each of whom represents the servants alongside the more usual ‘central’ characters in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) respectively, encompasses Zadie Smith in White Teeth (2000) and Hanif Kureishi in The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album (1995), both of whom investigate cultural hybridity and the positive and negative effects that the ‘doubly marginalised’ status that feeling ‘half’ affiliated to two or more cultures can create and extends to Graham Joyce and Will Self who create fantastic non-realist means of ‘marginalising’ their characters to allow for an investigation into the human need to ‘belong’ in texts such as The Limits of Enchantment (2005) and Great Apes (1997). This aesthetic rebalancing has been achieved at least in part by means of a return to a ‘belief’ in the importance of narrative (rather than deconstructive or stylistic forms). Richard Kearney expresses the impulse towards narrative forms that he regards as being at the heart of human experience.

Every human experience is a life in search of a narrative. This is not simply because it strives to discover a pattern to cope with the experience of chaos and confusion. It is also because each human life is always already an implicit story. Our very finitude constitutes us as beings who, to put it baldly, are born at the beginning and die at the end. (Kearney, 2001, p. 21)

The links between the two phenomena of a return to narrative and the shift towards expressing the marginal subject within the novel have remained largely untheorized, a failing that this book attempts to address by exploring the changing dynamic between marginality and narrative in the British novel between 1975 and 2005. This 30-year period is essential in this process since it witnesses a re-emergent emphasis upon the importance of narrative forms in the novel during a period characterized by a concomitant and widespread critical belief in the perceived failure of both post-modernism and liberal humanism to create texts that truly democratize the form of the novel, or its aesthetic-cultural significance. David Harvey asserts that ‘the rhetoric of postmodernism is dangerous for it avoids confronting the realities of political economy and the circumstances of global power’ (Harvey, 1989, p. 117). The contemporary shift into marginal space and subjectivities attempts to avoid the trap that Harvey asserts, and this novel of marginality aims precisely to engage with and confront the reader with ‘the realities of political economy and the circumstances of global power’ by employing experimental stylistic and thematic innovations, yet not succumbing to a Lyotardian deconstruction of ‘meaning’.²

Whilst not succumbing to the total deconstruction of ‘meaning’ contemporary writers and readers are still wary of an overreliance on the ‘rational explanation’ to account for experiences that cannot be fully accounted for through the rational processes of science and the enlightenment style of criticism. Something remains in the contemporary era of Northrop Frye’s assertion that

[…] the positive value-judgement is founded on a direct experience which is central to criticism yet forever excluded from it. Criticism can account for it only in critical terminology, and that terminology can never recapture or include the original experience. The original experience is like the direct vision of colour, or the direct sensation of heat or cold, that physics ‘explains’ in what, from the point of view of experience itself, is a quite irrelevant way. (Frye, 1957, p. 27)

Frye’s dissatisfaction with the gap between ‘experience’ and rational explanation perhaps explains the public willingness to accept; as Marguerite Alexander notes ‘that fictional explorations of madness, neurosis, hysteria, breakdown, might yield “truths” about the human condition of equal value to those that the novel has traditionally offered’ (Alexander, 1990, p. 85). Thus, it is no longer unusual for a text to make it problematic to easily distinguish between what is ‘real’ and what is not; as Salman Rushdie highlights in his novel The Satanic Verses (1987) when Gibreel considers his adolescent experiences in Mumbai.

Sometimes when he looked around him, especially in the afternoon heat when the air turned glutinous, the visible world, its features and inhabitants and things, seemed to be sticking up through the atmosphere like a profusion of hot icebergs, and he had the idea that everything continued down below the surface of the soupy air: people, motor cars, dogs, movie billboards, trees, nine-tenths of their reality concealed from his eyes. (Rushdie, 1988, p. 21)

Angela Carter similarly evokes a world beyond the grasp of the rational conscious mind in Nights at the Circus (1984) when Beauty appears to withdraw from the world because of her exploitation.

She sleeps. And now she wakes each day a little less. And, each day, takes less and less nourishment, as if grudging the least moment of wakefulness, for, from the movements under her eyelids, and the somnolent gestures of her hands and feet, it seems as if her dreams grow more urgent and more intense, as if the life she leads in the closed world of dreams is now about to possess her utterly, as if her small, increasingly reluctant wakenings were an interruption of some more vital existence, so she is loath to spend even those few necessary moments of wakefulness with us, wakings strange as her sleepings. Her marvellous fate – a sleep more lifelike than the living, a dream which consumes the world … (Carter, 1985, p. 86)

Carter and Rushdie both present a feeling or a sense of something, which can be said to be real but which lies outside of the process of rationalization that so characterizes the progress of action in a more traditionally realist text; a process which Bernard Bergonzi argues has been largely deconstructed as a product of a particular nineteenth-century realist standpoint which prizes only a limited version of the rational (Bradbury, 2001, p. 3). If the rational has been questioned nevertheless Philip Tew asserts the continuance of ‘meaning and external reference’ in the fictional text:

Although postmodernism depends upon emphasising a reflexive, closed system of language reference and a crisis of knowledge, as most novelists know at least intuitively, meaning and external reference both persist. (Tew, 2004, p. 6)

Bataille writes explicitly on the transgressive element within literature in Literature and Evil (1973). Bataille’s text seeks to challenge Jean Paul Sartre’s assertion that ‘literature is innocent’ with the contradictory thesis that literature is complicit with evil as a means of reaching a fuller level of communicatio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Critical Concepts and Precursors
• Part II: Marginal Texts and Contexts
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index