The Horticultural Revolution

If you haven't yet, some of you may still want to read Zadie Smith's White Teeth one of these days, one of the most warmly celebrated British novels in the past decade (and one that could easily have been on our syllabus). Anyway, I happened to be thinking recently of the following passage that I thought I'd share with you. I don't think I'll need to gloss the allegory for you (it's perfectly overdetermined, but great fun all the same); the connection to our course, to the notion of multicultural British literature, etc., should be all too apparent. We've just experienced the last orders for "autogamy," while throughout the semester we've been celebrating "cross-pollination":

"If it is not too far-fetched a comparison, the sexual and cultural revolution we have experienced these past two decades is not a million miles away from the horticultural revolution that has taken place in our herbaceous borders and sunken beds. Where once we were satisfied with our biennials, poorly colored flowers thrusting weakly out of the earth and blooming a few times a year (if we were lucky), now we are demanding both variety and continuity in our flowers, the passionate colors of exotic blooms 365 days a year. Where once gardeners swore by the reliability of the self-pollinating plant, in which pollen is transferred from the stamen to the stigma of the same flower (autogamy), now we are more adventurous, positively singing the praises of cross-pollination, where pollen is transferred from one flower to another on the same plant (geitonogamy), or to a flower of another plant of the same species (xenogamy). The birds and the bees, the thick haze of pollen--these are all to be encouraged! Yes, self-pollination is simpler and more certain of the two fertilization processes, especially for many species that colonize by copiously repeating the same parental strain. But a species cloning such uniform offspring runs the risk of having its entire population wiped out by a single evolutionary event. In the garden, as in the social and political arena, change should be the only constant. Our parents and our parents' petunias have learned this lesson the hard way. The March of History is unsentimental, tramping over a generation and its annuals with ruthless determination. The fact is, cross-pollination produces more varied offspring, which are better able to cope with a changed environment.... If we wish to provide happy playgrounds for our children, and corners of contemplation for our husbands, we need to create gardens of diversity and interest."

Remembering the Future

Last Orders seems to me to present a very disjointed and, to a certain extent, chaotic representation of time. Jack’s instructions, concerning the spreading of his ashes provides the motivation or driving force behind the novel. There is a sense in which these instructions come from the past or someplace decidedly not the present, yet catapult the characters of the story into the future. Jack’s old friends move into their respective futures with an increasingly strong preoccupation with the past. The title itself would seem to suggest a movement into the future, yet the narration resists such directional simplicity.

In this story, there is not progressive sequence of events but rather a linear presentation of non-linear events. The narrative moves forward not through logical progression but through an episodic recollection of past occurrences. Within the context of Seamus Deane’s quote, posted earlier by Professor Reimer, the story seems to suggest a “remembrance of the future” rather than an “anticipation of the future” and moves forward by looking back.

While most of the texts that we’ve read so far balance the idea of past, present and future with a stronger emphasis on the future (eg Eureka Street and the Good Friday Agreement), Last Orders seems to privilege the influence of past events. While this may be a topic to discuss after finishing the novel, it would be interesting to consider the ways in which the narrative and characters within free themselves from the past in order to “anticipate” the future.

Swift, Swiftly

Well, now that there's a container for lingering thoughts about Dirty Pretty Things, it seems we need one for our last novel. I hope you're having a good weekend in advance of (sigh) our last week together. We move on, of course, to our last novel: Graham Swift's Last Orders. Swift was born in South London (where I think he still lives) in 1949, and he has written at least three terrific novels (in addition to a few others): 1983's Waterland, 1992's Ever After, and 1996's Last Orders. John Banville has called Swift "one of England's finest living novelists." Waterland was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Last Orders, of course, won the Booker Prize. There's also a good movie version of Waterland out there (with Jeremy Irons playing the role of history teacher, Tom Crick). Swift's work often explores the contingencies and instabilities involved in the ways we understand and narrate history. The middle of the twentieth century -- and especially World War II -- tend to loom prominently in his novels. It may be that with Last Orders we'll find ourselves needing to return to our conversation from earlier this semester about post-imperial melancholy and nostalgia. Referring to Waterland and Last Orders, the critic Donald Kaczvinsky has suggested that "Swift's two major novels explore origins and ends, questions of identity, and the textual nature of the self."

Last Orders has been accused (rather unfairly) by some as borrowing too heavily from Faulkner's plot & technique in As I Lay Dying (a novel also about disposing of a friend's remains), which may partially explain the controversy that ensued after the novel won the Booker: for example, V.S. Naipual bitterly remarked that "the Booker is murder ... it is useless. No one knows what a novel is any more -- it is foolish. All novels written now are debris -- new characters in old work."

The frame/plot of this novel is rather simple, but our job will be to figure out where this novel fits relative to our various lines of inquiry this semester. Why does it belong in a course on "Multicultural British Literature"? What kind of England are we looking at here? What thematic currents from our earlier novels does this novel pick up? Does it help us to think about some of our buzzwords like intineraries, maps, London, historical trauma, masculinity, class, space, etc.? Recalling Eureka Street, can we make anything of the fact that there seems to be a mix of comedy and pathos in this novel?

Don't forget to refer to Sara's helpful index of the various characters and related partners/children (posted below), and feel free to weigh in with some comments here about the novel in advance of Monday's discussion.

Homing Instincts

We're in the "home-stretch" now, too, I guess, or coming full circle, or merely approaching our final class meeting (which is not in fact an end, I hope, being the intellectual migrants that we all are). It seems appropriate that we began our time together with Grace Nichols's declaration that "wherever I hang me knickers that's me home" (though we never did end up reading and discussing this poem together after I gave you the handout, did we) and end with Okwe's emotional message to his daughter "I'm coming home" (and with Jack Dodds's journey to his last resting place). This class, at times, has been quite centrally concerned with the poetics of home, on so many levels (the family as nation, the national motherland, the alternative spaces and sanctuaries, the rhetoric of pedestrianism, the writer who is forced to move from one temporary home to the next to evade a fatwa, the exiles and migrants who know home as much as an idea as a geographical place, etc.). In contemplating the converging discourses of "the home" and "the nation" in Dirty Pretty Things (what ideas of the nation require these ghosted non-citizens to seek homes on rented couches and in the subterranean shelter of a crematorium?), we might think more generally about the implications of our spatial imaginaries and our terminology. In our own country and our own cultural moment, what kind of work is being accomplished with a designation like "homeland security"? What kind of logic of belonging and exclusion is being installed with the word "homeland" in this case? One senses how importantly our inquiry this semester branches out to our own modest migrant sensibilities, to our own understanding of ourselves as citizens of a national space.

Frears's film's poignant rendering of more responsible, nuanced gradations of homelessness seems to me to be an important contribution to our inquiry this semester, even as it may in some respects cross over into the former. Recall James Clifford, from that important 1994 essay, "Diasporas," that we discussed earlier this semester: "How do diaspora discourses represent experiences of displacement, of constructing homes away from home? What experiences do they reject, replace, or marginalize? ... What is the range of experiences covered by the term [diaspora]? Where does it begin to lose definition"? (302, 306). Caren Kaplan, another theorist of postmodern travel and migrations, cautions us against homogenizing the terms and understandings of displacement and travel, fearing that we'll end up "masking the economic and social differences between kinds of displacement in a homogenized 'cosmopolitanism' and generalizing nostalgia through a celebration of the condition of exile." The Satanic Verses certainly created a wonderfully rich and complicated test case for these questions and ideas (at times Rushdie has seemed to fail the test, such as when Chamcha flees burning Brickhall for India, but not always and probably not ultimately). The perils of not understanding discourses of displacement in a nuanced way were also evident (if you recall) in Barbara Bush's apparently callous reading of the experience of Katrina refugees who ended up seeking sanctuary in Texas: "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." Do you think she might learn something from Okwe?

A Brief Look Back (FYI)

Some of you may still be contemplating a revision of the Research Review paper. I just yesterday saw this quote by Cynthia Ozick (from an interview in the May/Summer 2009 edition of The Writer's Chronicle) in response to the question of what it means to be a review writer, and I thought you might find it interesting (she finds a more articulate way of framing my assignment directive to find opportunities to turn your review into a broader conversation, making it a hybrid genre that combines straight review and an essayistic sensibility): "A review is a job of probity: of honest and honorable responsibility to a fellow writer's craft and thought. Otherwise it will be nothing more than a hit-and-run verdict, a vacuous Yes or No in a brief final paragraph. This may be why a serious review will generally turn into a review-essay, where there is space enough to engage critically, both broadly and vertically, with prior and contemporary culture. When I saw that my reviews were becoming actual essays, I wondered whether there might be some connecting theme among them that expressed, unwittingly, the Zeitgeist, or, with far less hubris, one writer's idiosyncratic perspective, whether literary or moral."

Last Orders Family Tree

Hey.

I've started reading Last Orders, and I'm really enjoying it so far. I did, however, have a lot of trouble keeping track of all of the names and places that get thrown around in the first hundred pages or so. So, I started keeping a kind of family tree on the last page of my book.  And I thought that since I have it anyway, I'd offer it up here.

I'm putting it up in the comments section following this post.  In a lot of ways, I think that figuring out the connections between people is part of the fun of Last Orders, so you may not want to read this right away.  But if you get to page, say, fifty, and you still don't know who's who, (which is about where I was when I started writing things down) it might be worth glancing at.

I think I've managed to avoid almost all major plot spoilers.

(Eric, if this isn't something you want posted, please feel free to take it down - I won't mind ^_^).

Hope it helps!