Lad Trouble: Masculinity and Identity in the British Male Confessional Novel of the 1990s [1. Aufl.] 9783839411612

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Andrea Ochsner Lad Trouble

CULTURAL STUDIES • EDITED BY RAINER WINTER • VOLUME 35

For Nick Hornby, who gives a voice to the less articulate.

Andrea Ochsner (PhD) teaches English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

Andrea Ochsner

Lad Trouble Masculinity and Identity in the British Male Confessional Novel of the 1990s

CULTURAL STUDIES

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

© 2009 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Layout by: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover: photocase.com: audiographer; Manuel Krall, München Typeset by: Andrea Ochsner Printed by: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-1161-8 Distributed in North America by:

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements

7

Preface

9

Introduction: The Structure of Feeling in the 1990s Millennial turn and crisis management Who is not afraid of feminism? – New Laddism as a relapse into pre-feminist behaviour? The male confessional novel as a middlebrow phenomenon of the 1990s Outline of the book

19 19 27 30 34

PART I: THEORY AND CONTEXT Changing Narratives – Changing Societies The 1990s: a short overview The literary landscape of the 1990s The crisis of identity Identity and narration The structure of feeling Masculinities and their crises Confessional Writing: The (Re)Construction of a Literary Genre Genus and its application: the problem of genre From gender to genre: male-authored books – towards une écriture masculine The male confessional novel as a late modern type of Bildungsroman The confessional mode The problem of inadequacy

39 40 47 55 66 68 72

81 81 88 95 101 111

Cultural Studies and Popular Culture: Struggling with a Problem Child High culture versus low culture: subverting a dichotomy Cultural studies’ predicament or the spectres of Marxism What is popular culture? The profane makes secure: popular culture and the everyday Popular fiction and genre: the face and its brows Deconstructing the popular: iterability and the politics of reading

117 118 126 133 138 141 146

PART II: WRITING IDENTITY IN THE MALE CONFESSIONAL NOVEL Structures of Obsessions Musical excess in High Fidelity Lost in the Land of Love in My Legendary Girlfriend Sleepless in London in Time for Bed

159

Structures of Non-Commitments Friends versus wife in White City Blue Procrastinating marriage in Mr Commitment

235

Structures of Prolonged Adolescence Men will be boys in About A Boy Single fatherhood in Man and Boy Having it both ways in The Best A Man Can Get

275

Conclusion

339

Epilogue: The Lad Lit Project

345

Appendix: Interview with Nick Hornby

357

Bibliography

369

160 190 212

237 259

277 300 321

A C K N OW L E D G E M E N T S This book project would not have been possible without the support of quite a few people whom I would like to thank heartily. I consider myself lucky to have been able to complete my project in such a reassuring and sympathetic environment. This book is based on my dissertation manuscript which has been accepted by the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Specifically, my thanks go to: Balz Engler, who has always encouraged my endeavours to engage in interdisciplinary research, and with whom I had a number of very inspiring discussions that have left their mark on my work. Rainer Winter, whose supportive engagement, his own work and our highly appreciated academic friendship were a chief source of inspiration. My colleagues and friends at the English Department of Basel University, whose constant support has been invaluable. My greatest thanks go to Peter Burleigh, a greatly valued friend and colleague with whom I have been working and teaching for the last few years, and whose suggestions and comments have always been a great inspiration. The academic term of 2004/05, I was able to spend as a research fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at the University of Cardiff which was a very important experience, both academically and personally. I want to thank the staff and students at the Centre, specifically Catherine Belsey, Martin Kayman and Laurent Milesi. I also want to thank the Swiss National Foundation and the Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft for supporting me financially during that year. A great thank you goes to the Werenfels-Fonds of the Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft as well as to The Cooper Fonds whose financial support made this publication possible. I also want to thank Nick Hornby for inviting me to his writing studio and for answering all my questions concerning his work. It was a great pleasure to meet Nick in person and to get to know the man who wrote the novels that were my first port of call when I started my project in 2004.

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By the same token, I would like to thank Alexander Kelly, codirector and actor of Third Angel. Their Lad Lit Project was a stimulating source for the empirical part of my thesis, and I am very indebted to Alex for talking to me about Lad Lit Project and for letting me have the script, parts of which are reprinted by courtesy of Third Angel in the epilogue. A thank you goes to all the anonymous readers whose reviews on amazon.co.uk were a major source for my empirical investigation. I am very much indebted to Faith Kent and Janet Shepherd for reading and commenting on my manuscript. I would also like to thank Jennifer Niediek from transcript whose editorial professionalism was of great help. In my view, it is impossible to be successful in one’s professional life without an equally satisfying private life and a supporting circle of friends. Therefore, I want to show my appreciation to my family and friends who have been a great source of strength to me, and whose closeness and affection were most invaluable during the lonely time of writing. A special thank you goes to Mike O’Rourke, a good friend and mentor of mine, who has encouraged and supported me from my early student days.

PREFACE It is not true that men are unwilling to change. It is true that many men are afraid to change. (bell hooks)

Who has not suffered at one stage in their lives from a serious identity crisis? It affects us all, just like the great dramatic characters of the world stage. When King Lear begins to lose his sanity towards the middle of the play of the same name, he queries: “Who is that man who can tell me who I am?” As a royal character, he firmly believes that people recognise him in his past splendour, and that his subjects function as a mirror in which his power and identity are reflected. King Lear of course is wrong in trusting his regal prerogatives, and in the course of the play, he turns mad and, as a consequence, transforms from a king into a human being; into a ‘normal’ man. The subject matter of this book neither concerns mad kings nor troubled princes – neither confused bourgeois adolescents nor angry working-class rogues, but quite simply ordinary young, British men as we encounter them in the fiction of the 1990s. Taking into consideration the postmodern identity crises with regard to nation, ethnicity, class and gender, I intend to cast light on the phenomenon of the male confessional novel that supposedly articulated the crisis of masculinity in the 1990s. The male confessional novel is a term that was coined by the media and used by the book market to categorise a specific genre of male fiction that is more commonly referred to as ladlit. For reasons that will become obvious, I prefer the term male confessional novel, but when I think it appropriate, will sometimes refer to ladlit as well. Before I properly introduce the topic, I want to express some general concerns that have guided my work. Doing research in the field of literary and cultural studies is a fascinating and controversial business. It is fascinating because the object of study is multifaceted, embracing almost every single aspect of our culture and everyday life, and the different perspectives and angles from which the object of study may be approached are no less multifaceted. But this vast array of perspectives is also responsible for the

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controversial nature I mentioned. Does one privilege the text over the context? Is there a difference at all between text and context? What exactly is the merit of a close reading? Shall we aim at revealing the meaning of a poem, novel or drama, or should we concentrate on the material conditions in which a literary work was produced? Does it matter whether the author comes from a working-class background or from the educated middle classes? Why do we take a different approach to a Renaissance drama than to a contemporary novel? Does it matter whether a book was written by a man or a woman? And talking about gender, in how far does it matter whether the main protagonists in a novel are male or female? There are countless questions, and I have not even mentioned the problem of theory yet. But before delving into the muddle of theoretical approaches, let us first get back to the fascinating aspects of literary and cultural studies and ask ourselves why, apart from its allembracing nature, is doing cultural studies a fascinating business? The answer, in my view, is simple: because it provides material to make sense of cultural crises. This is not to suggest that we should take an apocalyptic view on life – far from it. I believe that by taking a reasonable outlook on culture, based on an articulated theory that also involves practice, cultural analysis bears the potential to make the world a better place. Saying this, I do not actually refer to any big changes like inventing a new drug to prevent AIDS – it is not in the nature of the human and social sciences to come up with inventions that may change the world on such a big scale. But they can bring about changes that enhance the understanding of how people communicate about global and world politics, about gender and ethnicity, and last but not least, between each other, nations, groups, or individual people. In this respect I want to emphasize my main concern expressed in this project, namely the little but nonetheless essential changes that fiction can initiate in readers. Books function as resources to make sense of oneself and of one’s relationships. They advise, help, reassure, console. Secondly, books are not always read in the way the author, the publisher or the book-market intended, but they can also further oppositional readings. By reading books against the grain, books are ‘rewritten’ as it were, according to the personal preferences and needs of a particular reader. A book does not contain a meaning, but is a composite of possible interpretations. I depart from the premise that we are in the midst of a cultural revolution which started in the 1960s and with whose impacts we still have not come to terms – and probably never will. In particular, I have two aspects of the cultural revolution in mind. They are both of scientific and personal interest to me since being a woman working in academia, I have encountered them in various ways, and it seems that they are rooted and have likewise resulted in misunderstandings be-

PREFACE

11

tween different parties, men and women on the one hand, and scholars from different academic backgrounds on the other. The first aspect refers to the cultural turn, including poststructuralist approaches, which has had an immense impact on scientific theory and on the academic discourse in which it has been negotiated. The second aspect, which is still considered to be an important reason why our culture is in crisis, is the impact of feminism. In other words, the misunderstandings that exist between men and women and those between scholars will be guiding the argument in this thesis and will be addressed in various ways. These two cultural milestones have proved to revolutionize the whole of the human and social sciences. The way we think about meaning, sense, being, the past and the future, life and death today is shaped by the ideas and insights the cultural turn and feminism – both as socio-cultural and academic phenomena – have brought about. In other words, the very basics of Western philosophy have been put into question. Aristotle, Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Freud appear in a different light, and despite the fact that they still matter, their works, which had been the very foundation of occidental thinking, have been subjected to a critical scrutiny which could not be more radical. The changes the social and human sciences have undergone have also brought about some discomforting phenomena, such as theory wars, blind spots, and neglects, spectres and repressions. Consequently, one could argue that there is something uncanny to the social and human sciences. The terms do not only serve as passing references to Freud and Derrida, but are meant to pay tribute to different neglects which in my view have proved to be serious obstacles within the human and social sciences. I would here also like to take the opportunity to make transparent the position I see myself in as a researcher by way of addressing three problematic issues. First of all, I do not believe in truth values, and hence distance myself from any research that is positivistic, essentialist and directed at ‘finding the truth’. I understand cultural research as offering ways of reading in the sense that the different discourses and discursive formations that circulate at a specific point in time are disentangled in order to reduce the complexity of culture and offer clues and intimations for feasible interpretations. Second, I do not want to give the impression of being objective. Research is marked by human agency in terms of personal experience; any claim to the contrary would amount to drawing a veil over things. Research has much too long been governed by the wrong assumption, namely that the researcher conducts her analysis from the outside and may therefore remain detached and impartial and produces objective

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data. Terry Threadgold very acutely summarises this problem, claiming that [w]hat we have is a world constructed in and through discourse, meaning and representation, and the people in that world are constructed in the same way. The semiotic and psychoanalytic and post-structuralist and now feminist story that rewrites the liberal humanist and capitalist narrative of individualism sees subjectivities, too, as a function of their discursive and bodily histories in a signifying network of meaning and representation. This means, among other things, that there is no way for those subjects ever to be outside that network as ‘objective observers. The ‘knowing’ subject of ‘science’ is no longer one of the characters in these new stories. In them subjectivities are always inside and sometimes struggling to be also outside the signifying processes and practices of/in which they speak. (1990: 3)

Doing research thus means engaging with cultural texts and by doing so, producing new texts. This is a process that involves personal experience and therefore necessarily involves a certain degree of intervention and interference. Furthermore, research is always embedded in a specific historical and social context and hence is local and temporary rather than universal and transcendent. Third, I do not wish to dedicate myself to one single theory because I do not believe that such a monolithic perspective could do justice to the sort of research I am conducting. I very strongly align myself with Stuart Hall’s concept of articulation. Articulation has two meanings: “‘Articulate’ means to utter, to speak, to be articulate. It carries that sense of language, of expressing, etc. But we also speak of an ‘articulated’ lorry (truck): a lorry where the front (cab) and back (trailer) can, but need not necessarily, be connected to one another. The two parts are connected to each other, but through a specific linkage, that can be broken. An articulation is thus the form of connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions” (Hall 1996: 141). It is this idea of articulation in the sense of expressing different things in conjunction with each other, in and through discourse, that I find the most fruitful. So if, for example, certain aspects of poststructuralist theory lend themselves to the analysis of narrative fiction, they may be used alongside a cultural materialist or new historicist perspective. In terms of theory, there is another problem to be addressed. It is in fact related to my third concern insofar as it refers to the so-called ‘Theory’ with a capital T. Cultural Theory1 has become a very fash1

Against the background of the cultural turn, most significantly the poststructuralist turn within the human and social sciences, many different approaches to culture and understandings of “doing critical (cultural)

PREFACE

13

ionable label to term the genealogy of the theoretical toolbox that has emerged over the last thirty years. It is heavily indebted to poststructuralism in which it sees a political potential for resistance. However, because this potential for resistance is mainly seen as one ‘from above’ it has wriggled itself around the tension between high culture and popular culture by preferring the former while neglecting the latter. The affiliation with the modernist avant-garde is quite significant – the latter has also been its main domain of analysis and in my view, makes the project of poststructuralism, despite the post a rather modernist enterprise. Therefore, it seems quite paradoxical that a) poststructuralism is busy deconstructing binary oppositions such as high/low or male/female if it does not apply this insight when it comes to choosing its subject matter, and b) that poststructuralism and postmodernism are sometimes put into the same basket. What has been a particular concern of mine is that I have noticed that ‘cultural studies’ has become an umbrella term with a rather controversial touch. Whereas some literary departments claim to ‘do cultural studies’ alongside ‘literary studies’ which at closer inspection then is simply revealed to be the inclusion of other cultural texts alongside literary texts, other literary departments refurbished themselves or split up from literary studies department, distancing themtheory” have emerged. They may be, however, summarized by grouping them into four main “camps”, bearing in mind that the term “critical theory” has more than one source, i.e. tradition. The first approach is sociological, usually harking back to the so-called founding fathers of the sociology of culture like Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, and Mannheim (cf. Jenks 1993, Smith 2000). Second, there is the critical theory of the Frankfurt School with representatives such as Adorno and Horkheimer and, of the so-called young Frankfurt generation, Jürgen Habermas. Cultural studies, which is not so much an independent approach as an interdisciplinary project that as its representatives never become tired of emphasizing, evolved out of the work of representatives of the socalled New Left such as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and E.P. Thompson and their critique of traditional cultural criticism associated with F.R. Leavis and his followers (cf. Milner/Browitt 1994, Winter 1999, Milner 2001) is the third perspective I have in mind. Apart from literary studies (cf. Easthope 1991), cultural studies has also challenged the theoretical and empirical framework of media studies (cf. Winter 1997b and 1999a). And fourth, there is the sort of critical theory that is strongly rooted in poststructuralism. Poststructuralism, gaining more and more influence from the 1970s onwards (cf. Belsey 1980), is at the same time an elaboration as well as critique of structuralism, emphasizing the inadequacy of the traditional understanding of truth, meaning, and knowledge, thus foregrounding the openness and instability of “texts”. Poststructuralism questions the whole tradition of Western thinking and is thus attacks both idealism and materialism. For a synthesizing attempt between critical theory à la Frankfurt and cultural studies, see Kellner (1997).

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selves from ‘doing cultural studies’ altogether, claiming to do Critical or Cultural Theory with a capital T sense, i.e. engaging in what they take to be a politically engaged poststructuralism focusing on high culture, leaving the popular culture to the cultural studies and media departments. This kind of cultural studies often stands in a somewhat hostile relationship to a third kind of cultural studies which is practiced within media studies and which focuses on the mass media as its central focal point and therefore analyses popular culture rather than elite culture or the arts. Whereas I think that the latter kind of cultural studies has brought forward the most interesting methods of analysis, including ethnographic audience research, I am still of the opinion that its focus on the mass media is rather narrow in scope. This is why I think that the study of literature, from which field cultural studies originated, should be reconsidered taking on board the insights the more media centred cultural studies has produced within the past twenty years. Cultural studies has always been indebted to the notion of intervention. Such a position radically challenges those postmodern approaches that distance themselves from political engagement and attempts at reconciling the concept of destabilized identity with identity politics that have not abandoned the possibility of agency and ultimately, a better world. To sum up, it does not seem to be clear anymore what doing ‘cultural studies’ actually implies. I do not think that including the odd film or advert into the teaching syllabus alongside the works of Milton and Shakespeare does amount to doing cultural studies, nor does cultural studies solely comprise everything that is popular or broadcast in the media as often wrongly assumed by the capital T-people. Given this controversy, I believe we are in desperate need of some weeding and clearing up. By doing so, I would like to refer to Andrew Milner who makes the useful distinction between modest and immodest cultural studies. Modest cultural studies amounts in terms of its subject matter to the second version sketched out above, i.e. the study of popular culture as it is often done at cultural and media studies departments. According to Milner, the immodest version “is defined in terms of a new methodology connecting the study of the popular to the study of the literary” (Milner 2005: 22f). The reason why this ‘double movement’ could happen, Milner concludes, lies in the sociological turn the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies underwent after the appointment of Stuart Hall as director in 1968. In retrospect […] this ‘separate development’ of an institutionally distinct, non-literary cultural studies alongside a still theoretically inviolate English literature appears not so much as a radical innovation but as an unhappy compromise. For the real promise of cultural studies had always been con-

PREFACE

15

tained, not in the discovery of a new empirical subject matter, but in a ‘deconstruction’ of the very theoretical boundaries that hitherto demarcated literature from fiction, art from culture, the elite from the popular. (ibid)

This double movement then, as Anthony Easthope put it, would be one by which “literary study becomes increasingly indistinguishable from cultural studies and cultural studies makes incursions into the traditionally literary terrain of textuality” (Easthope in Milner 2005: 23).2 Trying to be truthful to the real promise of cultural studies, I am going to suggest a multipurpose and eclectic framework according to which the male confessional novel can be made useful to grant us a meaningful insight not only into the textual but also the social fabric of specific period of time. As might already have become clear, despite my preference for certain kinds of poststructuralist thought, I do not believe that there is nothing outside the text. To put it differently, whereas I believe that certain aspects of poststructuralism and deconstruction are quite useful if not necessary to do cultural analysis, I am not completely satisfied with their treatment of the difference between text and context and agree with Balz Engler asserting that the two are complimentary (1991: 182). Being complimentary, however, does not – at least from a poststructuralist point of view – necessitate two completely distinct parts; they may overlap. I therefore would like to suggest a modified concept of context, which does not preclude the possibility to articulate poststructuralism within a cultural materialist perspective – on the contrary, it is this very conjuncture that in my view brings about the most interesting insights if one believes relativism and eclecticism are no bad things. Without fuelling any misunderstanding here, I am convinced that we live in a predominantly textual world and that meaning is indeed made textually. However, there is something that cannot be captured in texts only, and I also believe that this something is readable between texts. It is therefore neither extratextual nor locked in a text either. Rather, it is a free-floating surplus between texts. I would like to call this extra- or intratextual something the structure of feeling. The structure of feeling of the 1990s was marked by a general insecurity as well as by the more specific crisis of masculinity. By es-

2

Milner’s approach to which my study is much indebted may be summarised under the heading ‘literature, culture and society’ and which refers to his seminal publication of the same title. Literature, Culture and Society (2005 [1996]) traces the history and institutionalisation of cultural studies back to the beginnings of Left Leavisism in the late 1950s drawing on the writings by Williams and Hoggart, the influence of the Frankfurt School and Roland Barthes’ semiology.

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tablishing an interdisciplinary3 matrix against which these phenomena can be retrospectively made sense of, I hope to contribute not only to bridging the gap between the social and human sciences, but also to shed some light on what I believe to be a universal problem that has no particular timeframe, namely the complexity of gender identity and human relationships. I have always felt that there is an unnecessary and to me inexplicable gap between the social sciences and the humanities. Whereas the latter have been very reluctant to include empirical investigations in their research, the former have shown little patience with the close reading practice of cultural texts. I must admit that I have found it rather difficult to gather empirical material with regard to my subject of analysis. The internet has been a valuable source, and I have been lucky enough to interview one of the most popular male confessional writers of the 1990s, Nick Hornby. By embedding literary analysis in a broader, socio-cultural investigation of the 1990s I wish to address a readership interested in interdisciplinary research. Therefore, the question of how much of the theory on which my argument is based can be taken for granted, is a serious question to be considered. Since I do neither want to bore those who are familiar with the theoretical approaches I am using nor to overwhelm those who are not trained in literary and cultural analysis to the same extent, a good part of the theoretical approaches I am indebted to are explained in the footnotes. It is my decided aim to make literary analysis socially relevant. Even though most literary scholars think that this is the case with any analysis presented, I often feel that these analyses are not easily accessible to those who come from a different scholarly background. I think 3

In the light of the fact that cultural studies as a project has foremost been described in terms of interdisciplinarity – and been attacked for the very same matter because of its apparent fuzziness, the concept must be freed from its reputation as a term of convenience to describe an approach that goes beyond the sort of analysis that is conducted in more clearly defined academic fields such literary studies or critical and cultural theory. Interdisciplinarity, sadly, is more a buzzword (Moran 2002: 1) than an achievement. The reason for this might partly be grounded in the reluctance with which expert knowledge is shared among scholars, but also the fact that the formation and institutionalisation of disciplines as it can be accounted for historically does not actually further interdisciplinarity. Our systems of knowledge, including those of higher education, i.e. the universities, have not yet undergone the institutional changes that are needed to achieve interdisciplinarity, let alone transdisciplinarity. As long as the established power regimes that govern academic institutions are not reformed, creative inter-/transdisciplinarity will always be a thing of the future.

PREFACE

17

it is necessary that the social sciences and the humanities try to find a common discourse because they have a mutual interest in understanding cultural phenomena such as human relationships. Furthermore, I think it is high time that the insights gained from critical investigations within the social sciences and humanities were made a accessible to a non-academic readership as well. This is one of my main concerns here, which is reflected in the structure of the book as well as in my language use.

INTRODUCTION: T H E S T R U C T U R E O F F E E L I N G I N T H E 1990 S Do you think it’s easy to be a man in the 90s?

MILLENNIAL

TURN AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT

This question, screamed by Gary in utter desperation at his girlfriend Dorothy in the comedy Men Behaving Badly,1 epitomizes the crisis of masculinity that was omnipresent in the 1990s. Men did not know what was expected of them, nor how they should relate to women. Was it more appropriate to adopt the New Man-behaviour that was hailed during the 1980s and to come across as sensitive, emotional and knowledgeable about the latest invention in the men’s cosmetics market? Or was it more advisable to subscribe to the concept of the New Lad and behave in a reactionary and antifeminist, or quite simply – as the title of the sitcom suggests – in a bad way? In short, men were confused. My subject of analysis, the male confessional novel of the 1990s, stands in direct relation to this ‘men are in crisis-phenomenon’. Termed ‘ladlit’ by the book market and the media, this specific genre of fiction gives voice to the confusion and uncertainty the young men of the 1990s were allegedly preoccupied with. I say ‘allegedly’ because it cannot be established whether, as Beryl Benwell puts it, New Lad was simply a necessary new market invention, or a genuine manifestation of the zeitgeist of the early 1990s […]” (2002: 150). In my 1

Men Behaving Badly was a highly successful comedy series in the 1990s, created by Simon Nye and broadcast on BBC from 1992 to 1997. The situation comedy is based around two male characters, Gary and Tony who share a flat, and their two female counterparts, Dorothy, Gary’s girlfriend, and Deborah, who lives above Gary and Tony. Deborah fights Tony’s advances until she finally gives in to him in the last series. The two men mostly indulge in drinking beer in front of the television, talking non-sense. As Neil Morrissey, who stars as Tony, admits: “Like most blokes we resolve all our problems by having a lager in front of the TV and not talking about anything” (www.bbc.co.uk/guide /articles/m/menbehavingbadly_7774265.shtml).

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view, it was a mix of both. However, it does not matter whether the market created or reflected the New Lad-phenomenon since it was an issue widely discussed and hence of a certain social importance. People who could relate to it probably did not let the “chicken or egg” question influence their conviction that men were in crisis, nor did they give too much thought to whether the reaction to this crisis manifested itself in the guise of New Laddism. To put it differently, the crisis of masculinity and the New Lad-phenomenon were part of the public discourse at the time and therefore form a serious object of analysis. It is believed that the phenomenon of the New Lad and the genre of ladlit were initiated by the publication of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (1992) and the launch of the British magazine Loaded (1994) (Cockin 2007: 107). The latter targets the young, urban male who is into girls, sports and fast cars, but who also has an interest in lifestyle questions. The promotion slogan of Loaded runs “For Men Who Should Know Better”. Given the fact that the magazine was started as a response and challenge to the 1980s ‘feminist-friendly’ and ‘fashion-based’ (Benwell 2003: 6) New Man-magazines such as GQ, Arena and Esquire, it implies a return to a more traditional form of masculinity – men should be men again.2 They should know better than to adopt the sensitivity the 1980s movement of the New Man promoted. Before the launch of men’s lifestyle magazines, this view was also shared by the publishers themselves who felt that men were less enthusiastic about reading general lifestyle material. “Glossy magazines were seen as rather feminine products, and ‘real men’ didn’t need a magazine to tell them how to live” (Gauntlett 202: 154). The clash of these discourses, in my view, was responsible for the insecurity that allegedly affected men in the 1990s. This insecurity cannot be considered isolated, though; it has to be placed within the wider context of the zeitgeist of the 1990s. When the world was getting ready for the year 2000, the hopes that were linked to that incisive moment were clouded by the various alleged crises that had marked the 1990s and that were undoubtedly going to stay with us beyond the millennium – the millennial anxieties were manifold. The impact of globalisation had reached a point of no return, probably culminating in the terrorist threats and attacks fuelled by an increasing fundamentalism at the beginning of the new millennium. Hardly a day went by without the media telling us that our cul2

According to Ben Crewe, Loaded’s clear-cut image that ultimately guaranteed its success is based on the editors’ aversion to the concept of the New Man. Apparently, James Brown, one of the editors, in a controversy with The Guardian, insinuated that “the middle-class identity that the New Man signified was incompatible with masculine heterosexuality (Crewe 2003: 101f.).

THE STRUCTURE OF FEELING IN THE 1990S

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ture was in crisis. Gone were the days of security one might once have felt as a result of both the nation state and the nuclear family. Everything had changed – everything was different as the postmodern structure of feeling had captured us without exception; the effects of globalisation, from an economic as well as general cultural perspective, seemed inescapable. Electronic mail and the establishment of the worldwide web had opened incalculable possibilities in terms of communication and globalized marketing and trading. At the same time, the newly established electronic networks soon came to be considered a huge risk because as the new millennium was approaching, the danger of widespread computer malfunction, usually referred to as the year 2000-problem, also known as the millennium bug, became imminent. The concepts of time and space had been transcended, and the notion of where and who we were had become challenged by the multiple options of the risk society including the already mentioned global media and communication technologies that enable us to take part in spectacles hundreds of miles away from our location.3 Furthermore, interventions such as cloning or the human genome project began to challenge the traditional notion of natural reproduction. Man has succeeded in manipulating nature to a point where virtually everything may fall victim to human interference and manipulation. In short, nothing is certain anymore – everything is in crisis. We worry about culture and identity and for that matter, about our cultural identity. We struggle against the decline of our cultural tradition into postmodern disinterestness and eclecticism, and the impending downfall of ‘serious’ culture. 4 We also fear that the nucleus of any healthy society, the family, is in danger because of the genderquake.5 There are no clear-cut demarcations anymore. In terms of cultural and artistic appreciation, being ‘cultured’ no longer refers only to knowledge 3

4

5

Risk society is a term coined by the sociologists Anthony Giddens (1990) and Ulrich Beck (1992) who understand risk society as one that is future-oriented and prepared to deal with the plethora of problems that modernization has caused such as pollution, natural disasters and unequal wealth. The definition also incorporates new family concepts. Neither Giddens nor Beck talk about postmodernity as they understand their approach as the project of reflective modernity (cf. Beck 1996 and 1997). I do not argue that the phenomenon of cultural crisis is particularly postmodern or specifically characteristic of the 1990s because culture, at least from the viewpoint of some cultural critics, has always been in crisis. Therefore, Terry Eagleton has a point when he claims that “[i]t is dangerous to claim that the idea of culture is nowadays in crisis, since when was it not? Culture and crisis go together like Laurel and Hardy” (Eagleton 2000:37). I do however claim that the some aspects of the cultural crisis of a period such as the 1990s are particular and specific. The term is used by Imelda Whelehan (2000) and refers back to Naomi Wolf’s Fire with Fire (1993).

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of the so-called canonized classics. In today’s postmodern, predominantly middle-class culture, Pierre Bourdieu’s (1987) thesis about the homology between class distinction and aesthetic appreciation already sounds rather old-fashioned because being an expert on hiphop music, soap operas and internet chat-rooms now belongs as equally to our cultural capital as does the expertise on Shakespeare’s plays. Or so it is claimed. Being a mother does not automatically mean being a housewife anymore. Being a father does not mean one has to be the full-time breadwinner anymore. There are different models of being a mother or father, husband or wife, male or female partner; in short – of being a woman or a man. These crises, we are told, have an immediate effect on how we perceive ourselves, i.e. on how we construct and negotiate our identity. Consequently, we are faced with an identity crisis. To answer the question ‘who am I?’ is no straightforward business anymore because the choices that may be made are not only multiple but also unfixed and short-term. Someone might be a middle-aged husband, father and business man during the day, but take on a completely different identity when entering a virtual chat-room in the evening, for example by pretending to be a 25-year-old, unemployed bachelor. He might decide to start a second family at the age of forty, or when faced with a midlife crisis, take time out on Barbados or open a pub on a Greek island. He might even get tired of being heterosexual and either become homosexual, transsexual, or, if willing to undergo surgery, a ‘proper’ woman, i.e. take on an altogether different gender and/or biological identity. What does it mean to be a man at the turn of the millennium anyway? Given the fluidity of gender concepts and their permeable boundaries, is it still adequate to talk of men and women? Are two genders enough, or was it not time to accept that there are more, as does Anne Fausto-Sterling in “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female are Not Enough” (2002). The question of gender identity will be of importance throughout this book because against the background of postmodern identity politics, masculinity cannot be conceived as an essential category anymore.6 While still being married, our man in question might be a New 6

Because the confessional novels that are at the centre of attention in this book exclusively focus on heterosexual masculinity, reference is here made to heterosexual maleness and masculinity only. It goes without saying that this is just one – albeit the dominant one – version of masculinity, and I am aware of the fact that by discussing just one specific form of masculinity, I am excluding homosexual masculinity, the whole spectrum of female and transsexual masculinity, and thus considerably reducing the complexity of the subject. For the study of alternative masculinities, I would like to refer to Sedgwick (1985 and 1990), Feinberg (1996 and 1998), Halberstam (1998 and 2005) and Noble (2004). For insight into how female masculinity is thematized in

THE STRUCTURE OF FEELING IN THE 1990S

23

Man, looking after his children and doing the washing-up to give his wife some space to have a professional and private life apart from being a wife and a mother. He might even use cosmetics and shed the odd tear when he is unhappy. But he also might want to do away with all that ‘feminist stuff ‘in order to be a ‘lad’, especially when he goes out with his male friends. In other words, constructing one’s gender identity is a multi-layered and very complex process.7 In this book, I am going to concern myself with the question of how the notion of masculinity and male identity is negotiated and articulated in the male confessional novel. One reason why this particular genre makes such an interesting research topic with regard to gender identity formation is the fact that, before the turn of the millennium, the two new forms of masculinity already touched upon above, the New Man and the New Lad had emerged. According to Sean Nixon, these two types of masculinity are in fact ‘two distinct cultural scripts through which the link between masculinity and consumption is established’ (Nixon 2001: 375). The New Man-script developed in the mid-late 1980s and started to dominate the consumer markets in the UK, most of all those of menswear, grooming and toiletries, and, as in the case with the later, New Lad, consumer magazines (ibid: 374). “The New Man is generally characterized as sensitive, emotionally aware, respectful of women, and egalitarian in outlook – and, in some accounts, as narcissistic and highly invested in his physical appearance” (Gill 2003: 37). He is as likely to be gay as straight. By contrast, the New Lad is depicted as hedonistic, post-(if not anti-) feminist, and pre-eminently concerned with beer, football and sex. His outlook on life could be characterized as anti-aspirational and owes a lot to a particularly classed articulation of masculinity. A key feature of some constructions of the New Lad is the emphasis on his knowing of and ironic relationship to the world of serious adult concerns.8 To summarize, the New Lad is reluctant to grow up and tries to prolong adolescence at all costs. Benwell argues that the implications of the masculinity crisis

7

8

the fiction of the 1990s, see Feinberg (1993), Winterson (1993), Kay (1999) and Waters (1999); for established classics in the field see Hall (1982 [1928] and Woolf (1992 [1928]). I am referring to these cultural changes in the present tense because they have been affecting society for the last couple of decades and are still very dominant today. It was, however, during the 1990s that they got the greatest attention, especially concerning gender relations and the impact of the new media. As we will see, the awareness of not acting one’s age is articulated in a very ironic fashion that results in the fact that most male confessional novels are supposed to be very ‘witty’ and ‘funny’.

24

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arguably resonate in the widely observed regressive and adolescent tendencies acted out by New Lad- magazines in which a nostalgic retreat to infantile forms of behaviour, including scatological obsessions, puerile humour, an absence of references to work or social responsibility, an obsession with 70s and 80s culture […] and a kind of rebellious posturing against ‘adult’ authority (or possibly feminism’ could arguably be seen as symptomatic of some sort of crisis of adult masculinity. (2003: 14)

While I agree with Benwell’s observation, I want to draw the attention to the difficulty of accounting for these tendencies. Some scholars have assumed that laddish behaviour must be viewed as retrosexist (cf. my discussion of Whelehan’s position below) and a backlash against feminism and feminist achievements (Gill 2003), others claim that there is no crisis of masculinity but of working-class (Heartfield 2002) or that men have always been in crisis (Kimmel 1989).9 In view of the above outlined zeitgeist of the 1990s, I personally understand the crisis of masculinity as a specific, gendered form of identity crisis. Whereas I am aware of the fact that the reasons for the masculinity crisis are manifold, I here mostly confine myself to the discussion of masculinity as an unstable and ongoing identity project. The postmodern condition has furthered the proliferation of lifestyles and gender scripts, two of which are going to be of specific interest. New Man and New Lad are frequently represented as products of particular chronological moments, with New Man representing the zeitgeist of the 1980s and the New Lad the 1990s. Indeed, one of the most common cultural narratives of masculinity in the 1990s (alongside the discussion of its alleged crisis) is the story of the displacement of the New Man by the New Lad. I will claim that the distinction between these two types of masculinity which are often depicted as mutually exclusive only ever be9

Psychoanalysis offers an explanation to a more general crisis of masculinity. In Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (1924) Freud tries to explain how incestuous desires of little boys towards their mothers are brought under control through the fear of castration. These desires are sublimated by the super ego and at puberty become directed towards girls/women. This sounds very simple and straightforward. However, the process of redirecting ones desires has been challenged by a different view on how males and females gain their gender identity. See for example Karl Figlio (2000). In how far the claim about the male insecurity due to the fear of castration holds true is probably something that will never be answered, especially in contemporary society where the notion of gender has replaced the concept of sex, and gender identity and gender roles are perceived as socially constructed rather than biologically transferred. The distinction between sex and gender has again been radically questioned, cf. Butler (1993), Elam (1994: 42ff.) and Frey Steffen (2006: 75ff.).

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comes apparent in the market segments mentioned above, most of all in men’s magazines. In the genre of the male confessional novel, however, this clear-cut demarcation blurs. By drawing on a number of male confessional novels I will show how protagonists struggle to reconcile these two cultural scripts, including a number of variations thereof. I understand this juggling of gender identities to be a direct effect of postmodern uncertainty and the crises I mentioned above. I consider the (re)articulation of masculinity and the experimenting with gender scripts as an expression of the structure of feeling of the 1990s, a term I prefer to the one of zeitgeist. The structure of feeling is a concept proposed by the Welsh cultural critic Raymond Williams in the 1960s, and is supposed to capture the tension between experience in the sense of culture as it is lived and the forms through which it is lived.10 The structure of feeling differs from the hegemonic culture because it refers to the “emergent culture of a new generation” (O’Connor 2005: 79). With regard to my object of analysis, I propose to understand the crisis of masculinity as experience and the male confessional novel as one form through which the crisis is expressed. The concept of the structure of feeling that has probably been more criticized than approved of, but that has never ceased to preoccupy cultural studies scholars up to the present day.11 Specifically, it has always been emphasized how difficult, if not impossible, it is to bring structure into accord with feeling, i.e. the empirical with the emotional. It is important to realise, however, that the need for recon10 Williams sometimes calls ‘experience’ practical consciousness, cf. (Couldry 2000: 122). 11 Williams concept has widely been accused of being “fuzzy”, implying too much while yielding too little in terms of analytic potential. Most critics, however, have overlooked that the coinage between structure on the one hand and feeling on the other hand opens up a whole variety of analytical as well as practical possibilities. The structure, i.e. the material basis of cultural articulation, tied up in the market and technology of late capitalism, constrains the ways in which cultural production, for example in the form of narrative fiction, is achieved. The feeling on the other hand implies a kind of articulation which may transcend the practicalities of modern technology and give voice to socio-cultural phenomena such as gender or race relations, career planning, or just the “banalities” of everyday life. It is important to note that at least in his early use of the concept, Williams “insisted upon the privileged position of the literacy documentation of a period, despite his admission that literature could only be understood alongside other, social, economic and political practices” (Ashley 1989: 166). In cultural materialism (cf. Sinfield 1989), an approach to literature that emerged out of Williams’s work, literature is understood as one practice among a whole variety of cultural practices, and it is in the latter sense that I want to emphasize the importance of the structure of feeling with regard to my analysis. Despite its ambiguous reception, the concept has recently enjoyed some sort of a revival (cf. Filmer 2003).

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ciliation of the two parts of the concept has become redundant if seen from a poststructuralist point of view. The critics who doubt the validity of the structure of feeling have been trapped in what Derrida terms logocentrism, searching for a stable centre, an origin that enables the structure but cannot account for something as ‘fuzzy’ as feeling. It is precisely this seemingly insurmountable paradox that accounts for what we term identity crisis and which is reflected in the novels under scrutiny. It is no good claiming that the alleged crises deprive us of stability and hence endanger our existence. Rather, it is to argue that those crises, including the paradoxes on which they are grounded, lay the very foundation for our existence. This may sound somewhat obscure at first. However, given the fact that (gender) identities have ceased to be clear-cut which results in the freedom – or agony – of choice, we can only ever acquire an identity, as fluid and unfixed it might be, by choosing from a whole spectrum of identity scripts, without knowing whether what have chosen the ‘right’ one. In short, the structure is destabilized, or rather, dislocated, by the feeling. From this perspective, Williams’s structure of feeling becomes a truly deconstructionist concept and hence makes more sense than ever.12 To substantiate this argument I will bring my analysis of the male confessional novel into dialogue with post-structuralist and contemporary sociological thought that was produced during the same period. Specifically, I will draw on Jacques Derrida, and to a slightly lesser extent, on the sociology of Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman.13 It is my contention that despite being completely different in terms of genre, style and readership, all the texts in question share the issue of uncertainty and the problem of identity crisis, expressed through the discourse of difference, and it seems far from coincidence that all these books were produced and published during the same decade. Reading these texts alongside each other rather than using the one to analyse the other opens up a particularly fruitful way of doing intertextual research in the field of literary and cultural studies. Secondly, by combining literary analysis with sociological thinking, I not only 12 Derrida was very reluctant to propose a clear-cut definition of deconstruction since that would be against the principle of deconstruction. There are however, a couple of publications in which he explicitly refers to the concept, such as in “Letter to Japanese Friend” (1995) and in “A Taste for the Secret” (2001, with Maurizio Ferraris). 13 I will draw on concepts put forward by Derrida in the 1990s, such as for example the archive, the arrival or the notion of hospitality. However, some of his older writings such as on the pharmakon and the supplement will also be discussed. While the latter date back to the 1970s, they have marked Derrida’s writing throughout his career and I therefore consider it justifiable to bring them into play even though I am claiming that his main concerns coincide with those discussed in the male confessional novel of the 1990s.

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intend to transgress boundaries, but try to bridge the unnecessary gap between the social sciences an the humanities. Thirdly, I hope that my interdisciplinary approach helps to free deconstruction from its often rigid application to canonical texts and thus regains it political implication that more often than not is overlooked by its critics. Before I go on commenting on my scholarly intentions with regard to the male confessional novel, I wish to establish what consequences the feminist movement has had on the conceptualisation of masculinity. In doing so, my main concern lies with the third wave feminist movement.

WHO

IS NOT AFRAID OF FEMINISM?

AS A RELAPSE INTO PRE-FEMINIST

– N EW LA DDI SM BEHAVIOUR?

The third wave feminist movement preoccupied itself with the definition of gender categories and their implications, especially by drawing on poststructuralist theories.14 According to Andrew Milner and Jeff Browitt, “[t]he politico-intellectual effects of the developing union between feminism and post-structuralism were essentially twofold: first there was a shift in general feminist preoccupations from political economy and sociology to literary and cultural studies […]; second, there was a shift within feminist cultural studies, away from a characteristically structuralist interest in how the patriarchal text positions women, and towards a new interest in how women readers produce their own resistant, or at least negotiated, pleasures from texts” (Milner and Browitt 2002: 135). This mainly French post-structuralist feminism is very ‘intellectual’ in character and therefore sometimes 14 Feminism nowadays, from a historical as well as thematic viewpoint, is usually divided into three separate phases. The first phase dates back to the 19th century suffragette-movement that was primarily designed to acquire political rights for women. In literary studies, first wave feminism is often associated with the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft (cf. A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792). The term feminism as it is used in everyday conversation usually refers to this second wave feminism, as do the derogative term ‘libber’ or the German term ‘Emanze’ (from ‘Emanzipation’ En: emancipation) Second wave feminism was initiated with the above mentioned ‘revolution’, namely the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s. It is directed against the unequal distribution of power between men and women in private and public life, work and culture. Second wave feminism has triggered the academic study and feminist theories that focus on the complex ways women have been denied social power and equality. Feminism has widely been received in sociology, philosophy, literary and cultural studies and in various ways has analysed how the patriarchal social structure has favoured and empowered men while putting women at a disadvantage.

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gets accused of being “centred on the deconstruction of maledominated academic knowledge, rather than on the empirical reality of women’s life in patriarchy” (ibid).15 However, the Australian feminist philosopher Grosz maintains, “feminist struggles are […] occurring in many different practices, including the practice of the production of meanings, discourses and knowledges […] This struggle for the right to write, read and know differently is not merely a minor or secondary task within feminist politics” (Grosz, cited in Milner and Browitt 2002: 136). This struggle has reached yet another level, with regard to both men and women. Reference is here made to Stuart Hall who calls the process of how texts are produced, circulated, and received ‘the struggle to signify’ by which he tries to capture the complex relationship between language and ideology. The latter influences the way texts are produced and received, or in Hall’s terminology, encoded and decoded. What is at stake here, of course, is how signifying practices define who we are, that is, our identity. The Cartesian dictum cogito ergo sum has long been substituted by the dictum I signify therefore I am. It is almost forty years since the beginning of the women’s movement, but the quest for equality has not yet ceased to preoccupy feminists, sociologists, cultural critics and human scientists. Should we not have already entered the post-feminist phase? Some people seem to think so. Women have been invited to leave their domestic realm to take part in the public sphere of economic managerialism and global capitalism; there are female engineers, female doctors, female pilots and female bus-drivers. And male nurses for that matter. But as Whitehead and Barrett point out,”[d]espite the fact that the situation of women has been ameliorated, they still carry the burden of multiple roles, still receive lower wages, suffer discrimination in terms of job opportunities and stepping up the career-ladder. Therefore, there can never be a ‘post-feminist’ era’” (2001: 5). Imelda Whelehan seems to share this opinion, claiming that [...] feminism’s success has been announced rather prematurely, and what we seem to witness at the level of popular culture is, on the one hand, a flourishing of nostalgia for the ‘old order’ of babes, breasts and uncomplicated relationships, and on the other a sense of powerlessness that as, taken individually, such images are ‘harmless’ or trivial, so there is no clear platform for critique (Whelehan 2000: 178).

15 Typical exponents of French post-structuralist feminism are Julia Kristeva, Helène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. For an introduction to feminism and poststructuralism, see Weedon (1987).

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While I totally accept Whelehan’s argument in the sense that there is a current tendency to re-naturalize areas of sexism, i.e. that we have somehow entered an era we might term retrosexism, I would like to put into question the second part of her claim namely that the ‘postmodern ironic laughter’ with which this retrosexism is received can be simply put down to postmodern cynicism. Contemporary maleauthored or male-focused popular culture is often summarised under the term ‘laddishness’ or New Laddism. It is new in the sense that men were asked not to behave in a laddish way in the light of second and third wave feminism. This emerging new laddishness is now viewed as a backlash against feminism. And in some aspects, rightly so. However, it is my argument throughout this book that we have to differentiate between different sorts of articulated ‘laddishness’ and that we must not toss every single contemporary popular cultural product addressed to men or focused on men into the same bin labelled ‘retrosexism’. There are always different perspectives from which a social phenomenon – and such I understand the re-emergence of laddism, including the male confessional novel which is accused of retrosexism by feminist critics and scholars – can be addressed and criticised. But there is no clear-cut message, and as Bradford accurately summarises, ladlit is a particular brand of fiction by men that has proven both popular and contentious – contentious because commentators are divided on whether it is a commendable examination of maleness or the perpetuation, thinly disguised prefeminist manifestation. (2007: 143)

It is exactly this tension between the different reaction to the popularity of ladlit or the male confessional novel that makes it into an interesting subject of study. It furthermore underscores the claim that meaning cannot be pinned down, and the discourses that follow a literary or publishing phenomenon such as this particular genre create a battleground for contesting interpretations. I will provide sufficient evidence to show that there are different categories and gender scripts, and that at least part of the retrosexism accusation may be qualified in the light of my findings.

30

THE

LAD TROUBLE MALE CONFESSIONAL NOVEL AS A MIDDLEBROW

PHENOMENON OF THE

1990S

As already pointed out, there exist other labels such as ladlit (Showalter 2002; Cockin 2007) or cynical young men (Niergaden 2000) both of which at least partly comprise the writers I count among the male confessional novel writers. Elaine Showalter views the ladlit of the 1990s as a continuation of the “romantic, comic, popular male confessional literature, stretching from Kingsley to Martin Amis” (2002: 60) to writers such as Nick Hornby, Tim Lott or David Baddiel.16 Showalter makes a vital point by denying Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim (1958) the status of a typical angry young man novel, claiming that “[t]his lad is not an angry young man at all, not an existential rebel or political revolutionary, but rather someone who would prefer to be happy, loved, and settled” (2002: 65). Unlike Jimmy Porter in Looking Back in Anger or Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, Lucky Jim does not make use of the defiant working-class rhetoric that characterizes the works of the Angry Young Men of the 1950s. Therefore, I also understand the male confessional novel to belong to the tradition of Kingsley Amis rather than of Alan Sillitoe. At the end of her comparative study of the laddish Jim of the 1950s, the lucky John of the 1980s and the funny Jim of the 1990s, Showalter comes to the conclusion that the genre of ladlit has exhausted itself and is in need of redefinition. From a contemporary viewpoint, I would now argue that Showalter was at least partly wrong because ladlit has proved to be surprisingly persistent even though – and there I agree with her – a lot of the publications read like mere imitations of the early novels such as those by Hornby or Lott. Cockin comes to a similar conclusion, asserting that [i]n their use of contradiction, ironic wit and ideological vacillation, chicklit and ladlit have elicited diverse responses of intense identification and alienation, proving to be a surprisingly long lasting phenomenon, provoking 16 Joseph Brooker refers to Showalter, maintaining that she identifies ladlit as a key sub-genre of the 1990s which follows the tradition of Kingsley and Martin Amis. In Brooker’s view, the latter’s “mixture of sexual confession, cheeky humour and anxious introspection has been vital in shaping the sub-genre, though as verbal craftsmen none of the other writers mentioned by Showalter [Nick Hornby, Tony Parsons and Tim Lott, ao] are fit to light Amis’s cigarettes” (2006: 6). Brooker’s rather condescending tone and his insistence on the term ‘sub-genre’, which Showalter does not use in her article, makes clear that he does not think the ladlit authors share Amis’s literary talent. This example, again, shows how reluctant literary scholars are to accept authors such as Nick Hornby as ‘literary’ authors who deserve the same sort of attention as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes or Salman Rushdie.

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debates about aesthetic value and contemporary ethical questions. (Cockin 2007: 120)

Cockin endorses Bradford’s view (see above), but puts the success of the genre down to the tension between identification on the one hand and alienation on the other. In my analysis of reader reviews that I include in the discussion of the novels in Part II, the claim of the responses in terms of identification and alienation will be thoroughly confirmed. But let me come back to the problem of offering a clear-cut definition of the genre of ladlit or the male confessional novel, which is by no means as easily achieved as sometimes insinuated by the critics of popular literature. By the same token, I tend to disagree with Göran Niergaden who has coined the term ‘cynical young men’ as a comparative category to ‘angry young men’. In a very lucid and plausible essay Niergaden exemplifies how the protagonists of the 1990s are too tired to feel angry anymore and have become cynical instead. However, his argument lacks credibility in terms of categorisation. Niergaden tries to underscore his thesis by using the work of three authors as examples; Christopher Brookmyre’s Quite Ugly One Morning, Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. Whereas Brookmyre’s and Welsh’s protagonists undoubtedly display the sort of cynical behaviour Niergaden describes, and I agree with his rather explicit conclusion that they “show a terribly disillusioned type of hero which cannot be matched with the concepts of Sartre’s ‘nausea’ or Camus’s ‘alienation’ any more” (2000: 231; my translation), these novels share more with the tradition of the American hard-boiled novel than with the English lineage from Amis to Hornby. In my view, putting Hornby in the same basket with Brookmyre and Welsh does not stand up to scrutiny; Hornby’s characters maybe cynical to some extent, but they neither take drugs, murder people nor harbour any preferences for sodomy or necrophilia. Therefore, I regard the concept of the cynical young men – in Niergaden’s sense – as unsuitable for the novels of my corpus. As for the term ladlit, I have certain reservations, too, because it is a rather broad term and is sometimes applied to all books written by male authors for a predominantly male readership. Writers who are usually listed among the ladlit authors are, for example, Ben Elton, Andy McNab or Alex Garland, all of whom, in my view, are rather different from those I consider to be typical male confessional novel writers. It is interesting to note, however, than on amazon.co.uk ladlit exists as a separate genre, which includes

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most writers mentioned above, i.e. the representatives of ladlit, the cynical young men and the male confessional novel.17 The category or genre ‘male confessional novel’ is in fact a label created by the publishing industry, trying to match the zeitgeist of the 1990s and the then increasing interest in this type of genre fiction and was born with the publication of Nick Hornby’s bestseller High Fidelity in 1995. 18 The typical male confessional novel is a first person narrative written by a male author in the 1990s. It is likely to have an urban setting (London in most cases), and features a male protagonist who struggles with adulthood both in terms of professional and private choices he is forced to make. “[…] ladlit creates for the reader a sense of the immediacy of youth and the strangeness of maturity imbued with an awareness of its inevitable onset” (Cockin 2007: 108). Male confessional novels usually contain long, pseudo-philosophical monologues as well as witty dialogues and more often than not display a rather ironic tone, bordering on the cynical from time to time. Usually at the beginning of the novel, the main male protagonist who is in his late twenties or early-to-mid-thirties has come to a point in his life where he evaluates the status quo in terms of career, love and friendship, and in most cases, starts thinking about mortality and death. Another characteristic of the male confessional novel is that it openly addresses the question of gender in general, masculinity in particular and therefore the issue of identity formation. Most of the male anti-heroes in these novels have failed in one way or another and are thus busy trying to come to terms with their being average and finding a place where they fit in. Most novels do not offer a straightforward solution but draw attention to the problem of how life is governed by the very possibility of undecidability and making choices. To sum up, male confessional novels usually express a distinct fatigue with postmodern ontological insecurity, as well as an implicit critique of present-day consumerism. Even though the British male confessional novel is a specific cultural phenomenon of the 1990s, just as its female counterpart – the female confessional novel or chicklit – have their precursors; Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë might just be two cases in point. Just as their forerunners that today belong to the canon but were not considered ‘high literature’ when they were first published, the male confessional novel is more often than not considered to be popu17 The books can be found under fiction/contemporary fiction/1970s onwards/ladlit (www.amazon.co.uk/Lad-Lit-Books/s/qid=1220558832). 18 Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones Diary is often considered to be High Fidelity’s female counterpart, a novel that, like Hornby’s, has enjoyed great popularity and has been turned into a likewise popular film of the same title.

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33

lar rather than literary.19 As this is certainly true if one judges the popularity of fiction in terms of sales figures, it does not do justice to its manifold cultural implications, i.e. to the various uses it may be put to. I am going to elaborate on the problematic distinction ‘high culture versus popular culture’ later (chapter 3). Here I confine myself to emphasizing that when it comes to categorizing the male confessional novel, I give preference to the term ‘middlebrow’. I will elaborate on the term more extensively in chapter 3, but I do already pre-empt my argument by emphasizing the twofold use middlebrow suggests. On the one hand, it can bridge the gap between high and lowbrow; on the other hand it questions the dichotomy high/low by replacing them both. Despite its popularity, the male confessional novel, so far, has not really been a research topic for literary scholars. One reason for this is of course its connotation with ‘light’ rather than ‘serious’ fiction. Furthermore, the books published by other British authors, those considered ‘serious’ and who became well-known around the same time as Nick Hornby’s, were preoccupied with a different set of questions than the ladlit-authors. As becomes visible from a number of essay collections on the contemporary novel published in the late 1990s, the topics dealt with during that time were questions as to how to make sense of history and deal with the past on the one hand, and how to accommodate ethnic minorities (either immigrant or national minorities such as Welsh or Scottish) and cultural hybridity on the other hand. Authors such as Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Pat Barker and Ian Sinclair represent the former whereas Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, James Kelman and Caryl Philips belong to the latter. In short, the ‘serious’ novel of the 1990s had its rather limited fields of interest such as, for example, the past, myth, cultural hybridities and social pathologies which located the mode of narrative somewhere between magical realism and surrealism. This is why giving the male confessional novel closer attention is required because it tried to satisfy the revived need for realism. But there are other reasons why, despite this neglect from academia, the male confessional novel is a compelling genre to study. To start with, the sales figures themselves indicate how popular these books are, and therefore, we can assume that a wide segment of the reading public takes an interest in this specific type of fiction and adopts what they have read into their daily discourse. Second, these books were produced, circulated and read at a specific time. The study of these books gives us insight into what the generation of twenty to 19 For a discussion of how contemporary literature could be canonized, especially in a teaching context, see Bentley’s article “Developing the Canon: Teaching Contemporary Fiction” (2007).

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LAD TROUBLE

thirty-somethings were preoccupied with. The 1990s were some kind of a transitional phase, the big caesura being the change of parliament in 1997 when Labour won the general election after eighteen years of Conservative government and Tony Blair took office. The authors as well as readers of those books grew up in Thatcherite Britain, hoped for the big change and later, to a greater or lesser extent, were disappointed by New Labour and its Third Way Politics. I will elaborate on the socio-cultural and political climate of Britain in the 1990s in more detail in the following chapter. A third reason why it is worthwhile having a closer look at the desperate young men of the 1990s is that the gender topics discussed in those books tie in with the post-feminist discussion of their time. A lot of what is being negotiated in terms of gender relations and labour division stands in direct relation to the ongoing gender debate either inside or outside academia. Linked to that, I see a fourth reason in the fact that during the 1990s, quality papers increasingly began to cover social and gender issues. Therefore we are here confronted with a high degree of intertextuality. Last but not least, and as I have already mentioned above, the male confessional novel has its various precursors. There has been a long tradition of confessional writing, initiated by Jacques Rousseau and taken up by people such as Thomas de Quincey. What might even be a more plausible starting point in terms of comparison is of course the Bildungsroman, which has a primary and often quoted representative in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. It will therefore be one of my arguments that there are striking parallels between the Bildungsroman and the male confessional novel. A third precursor I see in the Angry Young Men Generation, because both the 1950s and the 1990s were decades of transition and dissatisfaction even though the exponents of the 1990s were not so much angry as maybe cynical or defeatist. These generic similarities will be put under closer scrutiny in chapter 2.

OUTLINE

OF THE BOOK

In Part I, I will first provide a short summary of the most important developments that marked the political and cultural discourses of the 1990s before discussing the literary landscape of that period. I will then elaborate on the notion of identity and its various crises, including the problem of inadequacy and the crisis of masculinity. In the second chapter, I will focus on the relationship between gender and genre and between the male confessional novel and its precursor, the Bildungsroman. Part I will be concluded by the chapter that forms the

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core of my theoretical approach, namely the discussion of the notion of popular culture. Part II contains the analysis of eight male confessional novels, subdivided into three sections; structures of obsessions, structures of non-commitments and structures of prolonged adolescence, followed by a concluding chapter, summarising the insights gathered from the analysis. In order to get an insight into how the male confessional novel was conceived by its readers, I supplement my interpretation with reader reviews I collected on amazon.co.uk. Readers’ opinions are very rarely taken seriously in academic practice because literary scholars are usually not too fond of empirical material, which, in my view, is a big shortcoming. My analysis will be supplemented by an epilogue discussing The Lad Lit Project and an appendix consisting of an interview I conducted with Nick Hornby. The novels that will be discussed in the main part are High Fidelity and About a Boy by Nick Hornby, White City Blue by Tim Lott, The Best a Man can Get by John O’Farrell, Man and Boy by Tony Parsons, Time for Bed by David Baddiel, and My Legendary Girlfriend and Mr Commitment by Mike Gayle.

P ART I: T HEORY

AND

C ONTEXT

CHANGING NARRATIVES – CHANGING SOCIETIES In this first chapter, I am going to sketch out the cultural climate of the 1990s by looking at some socio-cultural and political changes in conjunction with the topography of the literary landscape of that decade. By doing so, I intend to show how the social and the literary discourses intersect in the sense that they concern themselves with the same problem areas. These include the increasing choice of lifestyles on the one hand and a likewise increasing sense of insecurity on the other, which, taken together, hint at an ubiquitous crisis of identity. Identity crises take on various forms, and after briefly mapping out the more general crisis of national identity as articulated in both political and fictional discourse at the time, I will then elaborate on my own approach to theorize identity before turning my attention to the crisis of masculinity that is at the forefront of the male confessional novels in my corpus. Based on the assumption that the insecure male identity prevalent in those books can be understood as a specific articulation of masculinity in the 1990s, I will show how conceptualising Raymond Williams’s structure of feeling in conjunction with the notion of performativity as put forward by Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler lends itself well to come to terms with the problem of gendered identity. By drawing on both cultural materialist as well as poststructuralist thought, it is my aim to work towards a new theoretical understanding of popular fiction in general and the male confessional novel in particular, and thus suggest a new direction for literary and cultural studies. Specifically, I will maintain that in the male confessional novel it is not femininity that is the alleged other and hence the marked gender in a phallocentric, malestream culture, but masculinity itself. As a consequence, masculinity becomes a site of intense struggle for legitimation. This claim will be based on my reading which reveals both a confessional and incriminating tone whereby in the male confessional novel, masculinity is at the same time excused as well as ac-

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cused.1 My claim thus stands contrary to what has been assumed in feminist criticism which attacked New Laddism for its alleged retrosexism.2 As pointed out, the male confessional novel, as well as the male culture of the 1990s as a specific target market has often been regarded as retrosexist, i.e. as a backlash against feminism. As I hope to show, the confessional framework of the novels can be read as a re-articulation or re-signification of masculinity, a gender(ed) identity that is far from being homogenous as often has been suggested by those critics who use the term ‘lad literature’ or ‘lad culture’ as a unified cultural script. With regard to the structure of feeling, I contest that this is a concept often underrated by literary scholars and cultural critics, and that when it is rearticulated in the light of poststructuralist thought of the 1990s it will be reinvigorated and again become a most useful tool for cultural analysis. In my understanding, the structure of feeling is a genuinely deconstructionist concept, the stable (structure) being displaced by the emotional (feeling).

THE 1990S:

A S HO RT O VE RVI EW

Historical overviews usually comprise a summary of the period in question. We are all very well acquainted with summaries such as those of the Second World War or the post-war period of the 1950s. 1

2

There is an interesting parallel between the discourse of the courtroom and the discourse in the novel. The narrator in a novel functions as witness to give testimony to what happened. In first person narrative, this testimonial function coincides with that of the defendant. Consequently, the two discourses that are separated in a legal procedure, i.e. the discourse by which testimony is given to something external and the confession/defence with direct bearing on oneself, are blurred. In the courtroom, as Radstone correctly claims, “[a]t stake in the discourse of the confessant is the question of their guilt or innocence” (2006: 168). With regard to the male confessional novel, the subject of the confession is not so much about guilt or innocence, but as we will see, inadequacy. Furthermore, I would like to maintain that against the background of the new social movements and the bulk of work that has been accomplished in queer theory, the masculine behaviour displayed in the male confessional novels is just one version of masculine behaviour (albeit not homogenous as I hope to argue convincingly). This gendered behaviour, or performance as I will call it later, despite its heteronormative grounding to which a majority ascribes, has come under attack not only from feminism but from other versions of emancipatory theories that question the gender binary of masculinity/femininity. Reference is here made to masculine identities such as drag kings, tomboys, butches, and female-to-male trans-genders etc. (cf. Halberstam 1998).

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What makes our enterprise somehow special, though, is the fact that we are dealing with the recent past. The problem that invariably arises if one reflects on and writes about the recent past is that it is too close and too far away at the same time. It is too close because little has hitherto been written about it, and too far away because too much has happened since then in order to remember it accurately. In a way, the 1990s still seem close enough as we still feel their resonance in the first decade of the new millennium. However, in our fast-moving and fast-changing world, the 1990s already seem to be more than a couple of decades away. In terms of science and technology, it seems a long time since the world-famous cloned sheep Dolly made the news and the human genome project was announced, or since mobile phones first became visible and audible on the street, trains and buses. Many of the social phenomena that emerged at the time are still visible and active, or in Williamsonian terminology, have become dominant. Yet we are only just capable of mapping out some of the characteristic trends and their consequences of the period of ten or fifteen years ago. Historically speaking, the 1990s stand between two very specific, most incisive decades. The 1980s were characterised by the decline of communism, culminating in the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the German reunification in 1990. The turn of the millennium saw the beginning of a new form of global terrorism, starting with the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001.3 In short, the 1990s were not so much shaped by a grand narrative like the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s or the Neo-Marxism and Cold War ideology that to a large extent dominated the 1980s. Quite on the contrary, during the 1990s we were left both to dissolve the remnants of the past and to anticipate the problems of the decade yet to come.4 3

4

Even though England was not directly involved in these events, they affected global politics to a siginificant extent. The terrorist attack of 9/11 fuelled the increasing ethnic conflicts and a general xenophobia. Muslims since then have often been the victims of acts of discriminiation. In other words, the tensions between East and West have increased. Furthermore, the 1990s also saw the beginning of increasing racial tensions. Even though apartheid in South Africa officially ended in 1994, power still seems to reside with the white male. The O.J. Simpson case in 1994 may serve as an example to emphasize the ongoing inequality resulting from racial discrimination. I would like to emphasize that I do not wish to play down the ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia nor the atrocities they entailed. Since I am here concerned with global changes on the one hand and those that affected Britain in particular on the other, the Yugoslav wars did not contribute to the sort of identity crisis I am investigating in this book. I would like to make the same qualification with respect to the Gulf war of 1990/91 and the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

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The 1990s do stand, however, for one significant cultural phenomenon, namely the invention of the worldwide web and the increasing growth of the internet. Much of what we understand by globalisation, another term that had its heyday in the 1990s, is almost unthinkable without the world wide economic network that is accessible through the internet. The relationship between space and time has been completely inverted since it is now possible to partake in almost any event worldwide provided one has access to the internet. In comparison to what the internet makes possible in terms of translocalization, the opening of the Channel Tunnel in 1994 seems rather ephemeral. Here it is not the place to dwell on the various implications of the internet and internet-related activities, and while I am fully aware of the fact that this sketchy overview can never do justice to the manifold cultural transformations that took place during the 1990s, I will nevertheless mention two more cultural changes that in my view are of interest, especially with view to the notion of identity crisis I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter and which will form the core of my argumentation: the gay liberation movement and the mediatisation of everyday life. In the 1990s, homosexuality lost a good part of the stigma that was formerly attached to any behaviour deviant from heteronormative sexuality. Pop icons such as Elton John or Melissa Etheridge publicly defended their sexual orientation, and Bill Clinton, President of the United States of America at the time, was unusually supportive of progay rights. Apart from its huge impact on identity politics and personal freedom, the gay liberation movement also helped destabilize heteronormative masculinity. In the gay community, ‘masculinity’ takes on multifarious forms, ranging from the macho image to the drag queen and male-to-female transgender. This development influenced the process of gender identity construction beyond measure because it adds a considerable number of new lifestyles from which to choose. Additionally, it makes the process of differentiation much more complex. (Heterosexual) men face the challenge of designing their sexuality and gender behaviour against a whole set of ‘others’, i.e. female sexuality and feminine gender behaviour has ceased to be the unified Other against which men used to position themselves. The second incisive cultural change I want to emphasize is the explosion of the media and the mediatisation of everyday life. No decade ever before saw such an increase in printed paper as did the 1990s. Reference is here likewise made to daily newspapers, Sunday newspapers and popular magazines, in terms of additional titles as well as in terms of size of individual publications. Within the market segment of popular magazines, the launch of men’s lifestyle magazines is a case in point. Loaded, FHM, Maxim, Men’s Health were all launched

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in the 1990s and posed a contemporary challenge to those founded in the 1980s (such as QM, Arena and Esquire) which by the mid-1990s seemed rather outdated and out of touch. Furthermore, the introduction of satellite and digital TV make the choice of channels almost boundless, and the invention of reality TV, best known from the programme ‘Big Brother’ added yet another dimension to the partaking in other people’s lives. So whereas the internet changed the notions of place and time, other electronic media such as television programmes altered the sense of the private and the public. To sum up, I would like to maintain that the 1990s were marked by an increase of choices. These choices, at the same time, are likewise responsible for a growing sense of freedom and democratisation and also for a distinct awareness of insecurity. The more lifestyle choices there are at hand, the more difficult it becomes to construct an identity with which one feels comfortable and secure. Also, since those lifestyle choices are constantly increasing, the process of identity construction is never quite finished and becomes a lifelong project. These developments can probably be traced back to at least the beginning of the modern period and therefore do not exclusively apply to the 1990s. However, what makes the 1990s stand out within the modernisation process and hence legitimises the claim to understand the 1990s as a special decade, though, is the fact that they marked the end of a century, a century that probably had seen more changes than any preceding one in terms of technology, entertainment and lifestyle proliferation. As is probably always the case at the turn of a century, or even more so at the turn of a millennium, there is a certain fin de siècle atmosphere, which in the historical discourse culminated in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). In the critical theory debate this atmosphere of ‘we’ve reached the end of an era’ found its outlet in the discourse of posthumanism5, initiated by Donna Haraway’s provocative publication A Manifesto for Cyborgs (1991 [1983]), announcing the end of classical humanism which was supposedly going to be superseded by posthumanism, a new cultural framework largely based on the ideas of techno-scientific knowledge.6 5

6

Posthumanism has been critically received in the humanities, mainly because its prefix has led to misunderstandings. Posthumanism, or at least in the sense that critical posthumanists understand the term, does neither deny the humanist tradition, nor advocate a future without human beings. Critical posthumanism is an affirmative approach that does not place human beings above other species but articulates possible encounters between different species (for an example of a critical posthumanist approach to literature, see Rossini 2009). Another recurrent phenomenon of fin-de-siècle atmosphere is the attempt to regain what apparently has been lost, and in terms of identity

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Human knowledge in the Kantian sense is not the primal source for control any more since the limitations of human intelligence have long been proved and consequently, the discourse of human intelligence is displaced by the discourse of artificial and technological intelligence. This new trend in cultural theory was fuelled by two interrelated developments, an ever increasing technological innovation on the one hand, and by what is usually referred to as the postmodern condition on the other.7 There again, we are faced with a kind of paradox because the ever-increasing technologization, embracing almost every aspect of our daily lives, including our bodies, clearly involves the human desire for control. We do not content ourselves with the principle of chance any more, not even in our own creation, but prefer to ‘design’ our lives. To sum up, the mentioned process of democratization now encloses the individual at its very core. On the other hand, by enlarging the repertoire of options concerning identity constructions and lifestyles, late modernism has shaped the cultural imaginary to a degree where decision-taking as such becomes a lifelong project and has therefore plunged us into a maze of cultural scripts from which we are compelled to choose in order to define and re-define, articulate and re-articulate our identities perpetually, a process which undermines the above notion of control. Both developments involve a displacement and fragmentation of discourses on a global level and of subject positions and identities on the personal level. However, as we will see later, if contemporary culture is most of all one of fragmentation – a claim that has been likewise brought forward by postmodern and poststructuralist thinkers – there must be something called unity as well, at least as an idea if not as an empirical manifestation. Fragmentation and difference only ever make sense in juxtaposition with their antithesis, i.e. unity.

7

politics, this often turns into a going-back-to-our-roots-movement. In the 1990s, this development could be observed in several cultural domains, such as the reclaiming of British pop music by bands such as Oasis, Blur or Pulp or by representatives of grunge music which was replaced by alternative rock after the mid-1990s. I would like to clarify my view concerning the postmodern condition in anticipation of what follows in the next chapter. In compliance with the British sociologist Antony Giddens (cf. Giddens 1991), I do not think the ‘postmodern’ is so much different from the modern. In other words, where other scholars talk about the postmodern or postmodernity, I refer to the post-traditional or quite simply, the late modern condition. As for the adjective ‘postmodern’, I have a more divided view since I feel that when it comes to artistic expression in terms of example irony, collage and pastiche, there is something specific that can be distinguished from ‘modern’ features. Therefore, I also use the term ‘postmodern’ but with a specific reference to the arts rather than a historical condition.

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There is yet another paradoxical phenomenon which I do not want to leave unmentioned. As we have seen, thanks to new technologies including the internet, the world has become globalised, which at the same time entails numerous advantages and disadvantages. In the debate on globalisation in the 1990s, the ‘McDonaldization’ of the world has became a key-term, literally meaning that you can get the same tasting hamburger whether you are taking a lunch break in San Francisco, Paris, or Tokyo; on a more metaphorical level, MacDonald’s stands for the standardization process of commercial goods around the world. By eating hamburgers, drinking Nespresso and using Windows, we all support the same creators of everyday goods, MacDonald, Nestlé and Microsoft. In short, consumption and entertainment has been standardized. What has become of local customs, specialities and traditions one might ask; how is it possible to stand out, as an individual, from all the others if we are seduced by the global market to dress alike, to eat the same food and to watch the same TV programmes? As some cultural studies representatives have shown, though, globalisation and its accompanying standardization does not mean that we all become cultural dopes, consuming without thinking, i.e. subscribe to the credo ‘I consume therefore I am’. We can use those products in different contexts and therefore enter a process of resignification. It is furthermore possible to oppose these consumer trends, i.e. to boycott McDonald’s, to use Macintosh rather than a PC or to grind ones’ own fair-trade coffee beans instead of relying on the prefabricated coffee capsules which George Clooney advertises so convincingly.8 The paradox I mentioned is grounded in the contradiction between standardization and individualization, the latter trend often mentioned as a cultural trait of the late 1980s/1990s, too. It takes an effort to be different nowadays. First, one is easily seduced into buying these standardized consumer goods, and second, in our fast-moving world, what seems like an alternative, an individual choice today, might be part of mainstream culture tomorrow.9 The 1990s seem to have been a decade of democratisation, and in the guise of global economics and consumerism on the one hand and emergent social movements on the other, affecting both the public and the private; at least the political, technological and cultural changes suggest as much. Before I sketch out the literary landscape of the

8

9

Cf. de Certeau (1988); Morely (1980, 1986, 1992); McRobbie (1991); (Fiske 1991a, 1991b); Radway (1987,1989, 1992); Winter (1995) and Göttlich/Winter (2000). I am here thinking of music genres, body arts such as tattoos and body piercing, but also of the whole spectrum of extreme sports.

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1990s, I will briefly comment on the changes that took place in the United Kingdom. In terms of British politics, the 1990s were marked by several decisive and incisive moments, too. In 1991, Margaret Thatcher had to step down after leading the country for twelve years. British conservatism was intrinsically associated with Thatcherism and her successor, John Major, did not succeed in upholding Thatcher’s legacy. In fact, during his Premiership from 1991 until 1997, Britain could not bring itself either to dismiss Conservatism or to change direction. The general election in 1992 is testimony to the rather curious situation at the time, as Kenneth Morgan summarises: The public mood was not heroic. Neither the Conservatives, nor Labour seemed especially confident and the public displayed some apathy towards both. Intellectual and cultural opinion appeared strongly in favour of a change after 13 years of Tory rule; the silent majority were less committed. […] When the campaigning began, it was Labour which seemed to hold the initiative. The polls almost universally showed a strong and rising lead. The party combined attacks on the social consequences of Thatcherism with an emphasis on its own moderation. It was no longer a party committed to high taxation, massive public spending, more public ownership, or the defence of the unions. […] The class war was over, if indeed it had ever begun. (Morgan 2001: 510f)

However, the Tories won the election because [d]espite everything, it seemed the voters still saw the Conservatives as the party of greater prosperity and national unity, Labour that of higher taxation and divided counsels. Neither it nor its leader inspired ultimate confidence. The party of change and of a better future, it seemed, was identified rather with a stagnant past, certainly not with the opportunity state. Labour had argued that it was time for a change. But the voters felt that this had occurred eighteen months earlier, with a change of prime minister. The 1992 election, therefore, proved to be a turning-point at which British politics obstinately refused to turn. (Morgan 2001: 512)

In that respect, the 1990s were a decade during which, curiously, both the search for change and stability were big public issues. It comes as no surprise that it was during the 1990s that identity crises, national, cultural, or personal, seemed to loom around every corner. Therefore, despite the absence of any major conflict such as a war or a global catastrophe, as accurately observed by Nick Bentley,

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[t]he 1990s […] can be seen as the only decade in the twentieth century, except perhaps the Edwardian decade (1900-10), that the possibility of global war has not had a significant effect on the cultural imagination, and this is despite the abundance of regional wars during the 1990s in the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East. (2005: 3)

We must conclude that, in contrast to preceding decades, the 1990s are not easy to pigeonhole as opposed to preceding decades. This, in my view, makes them a most interesting decade for analysis. As far as Britain is concerned, I suspect that it was precisely because of this lack of major disruptions and crises from without that the general unease that manifested itself in what I earlier called ‘millennial anxieties’, translated into a quest for political change and national confidence within. In order to show how these anxieties were taken up by the literary institution, I am now going to provide a short summary of the topics that were dealt with in the British novel at the time. This again will help us to envisage the notion of identity crisis which is going to be the main focus in the novels I am going to discuss in Part II.

THE

LITERARY LANDSCAPE OF THE

1990S

During the 1990s, the problem of national identity, its challenge by increasing multi-ethnicity and hybridity, and the desire to make sense of the past manifested themselves in several genres of narrative fiction.10 Historiographic metafictions such as those by Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Pat Barker or Beryl Bainbridge are testimony to this development.11 In Julian Barnes’ novel England, England (1998) for example, the protagonist Jack Pitman creates a fictional heritage park on the Isle of Wight which displays replicas of what he thinks are English top attractions and thus makes England’s national identity the subject of discussion. As Sarah Henstra maintains, in England, England, “[r]ather than grounding identity in a historical reality, memory is discovered […] to be one performative operation amongst many in the service of the ongoing re-iteration of selfhood” (2005: 97). Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy is based on reports by soldiers who served in WW I and is a brilliant attempt at writing psychologically informed history. The trilogy follows the story of psychoanalyst W.H.R. Rivers, who, in the first book of the trilogy, Regeneration (1991), is asked to psychologically treat the war poet Siegfried Sas10 For a good introduction cf. Tew (2007). 11 Cf. Amis (1995, 1997); Barnes (1991, 1992, 1996, 1998); Barker (1991, 1993, 1995), and Bainbridge (1991, 1996).

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soon. The Eye in the Door (1993) is the story of patient of Rivers, Billy Prior who suffers from a multiple identity disease. In the last volume of the trilogy, The Ghost Road (1995), which won the Booker Prize in 1995, Rivers is himself thrown into a crisis in which he tries to exorcise the ghosts of the past. As we will see, even though the male confessional novels, at first sight, seem to satisfy an altogether different need from the historical fictions such as those by Barnes or Barker, there is a similar preoccupation with what Henstra calls ‘ongoing reiteration of selfhood’ (ibid.). But let us stay for a moment with the category of historiographic metafiction to which novels by Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt or Jonathan Coe also belong because they, too, draw attention to the notion of identity crisis and the problem of ontological security.12 Those books are characterized both by a specific nostalgia for the past and an anxiety for the future. According to Stephen Baker, commenting on Rushdie, [t]here is little or nothing in this writing that is fixed, settled or secure. It is as though Rushdie’s novels were meant to recreate for their readers the disquieting, if exhilarating, semblance of an outside world in constant flux and redefinition, that world of capitalist modernity described by Marx and Engels: ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned’. (2003: 146)

Other writers were also concerned with the problem of identity; names such as James Kelman, Jeanette Winterson or Joseph Connolly come to mind. The works of these authors often challenge the limits of realism by either ironically insisting on them (Kelman) or by clearly transgressing them (Winterson). Kelman’s novel How late it was, how late (1994) starts off in an overtly realistic mode with the main protagonist finding himself lying in the gutter after a night of excessive drinking but later adopts a more and more expressionist style.13 Con12 Cf. Rushdie (1994, 1995); Carter (1991); Byatt (1990); Coe (1994, 1997). The term ontological security I understand in Giddens’ (1991) sense, referring to the positive and reassuring experiences people make in order to envision the future. In the light of the postmodern dissolution of boundaries and introduction of new identity scripts, ontological security has become a problem category and has sometimes been re-termed into ontological insecurity. 13 How late it was, how late by Kelman, who was born and bred in Glasgow, won the Booker prize in 1994 and is testimony to an increasingly awareness of British writers that are not English. Another popular Scottish writer to be mentioned is Irvine Welsh, whose novel Trainspotting (1993) was turned into a successful feature film (1996; dir: Danny Boyle) of the same name. Even though there are certain similarities between the two authors, the differences are more abundant. I agree with

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versely, in Winterson’s novels, the notion of identity usually forms the core problem, in Written on the Body (1993) to the extent that the gender of the main protagonist remains unrevealed. In other words, in the narrative fiction of the 1990s there is often a mix between realist and expressionist styles. However, one cannot help noticing the fact that there is a distinct desire for realism, and it is my claim that the male confessional novels provide exactly that sort of realism that the writers such as Winterson or Kelman either subvert or altogether neglect.14 The era during which the male confessional novels by authors such as Nick Hornby, David Baddiel, Tom Lott, Mike Gayle and Tony Parsons were written was marked by post-Thatcherite politics.15 Some of the novels, however, explicitly deal with the value-system which was promoted by Thatcher’s government. According to Dominic Head “Thatcherism, as an international political phenomenon, was a radical and diverse political strategy that stimulated outrage from the novelist” (Head 2002: 45). When Margaret Thatcher disappeared from the political scene, John Major took over; the Thatcher legacy (usually associated with terms like free-enterprise, privatisation, and deregulation) was deeply ingrained in the political but also socio-cultural structure. Most of the young writers composing their first works at the time grew up in Thatcherite Britain. A caesura, of course, was experienced after Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister in 1997, and a wave of optimism swept the country. Nevertheless, on a deeper level, the cynicism which began to prevail among the younger generation, unhappy with Drew Milne who claims that “[t]he novels of both Welsh and Kelman are constructed through loosely linked short stories rather than through sustained plots, but the resistance to narrative conventions is motivated differently. Kelman’s work avoids the fast-moving and almost cinematic storytelling techniques of Welsh. His work deliberately resists the dominant terms of the capitalist media and culture industry, articulating a politicised critique of trends within literary modernism” (2003: 159). 14 I would like to point out that some of the novels mentioned, particularly those by Irvine Welsh, have been read in the light of the reinvention of realism. Welsh’s fiction for example is written in the Scottish vernacular which per se creates a strong sense of realism (cf. Riach 2005: 45). Furthermore, a very important point to make with regard to the problem of realism in contemporary fiction is that the revitalisation of realism has been noticeable since the 1970s and has partly to do with the market demand in the field of popular and genre fiction (cf. Padley 2006: 128f). 15 Post-Thatcherite politics refers to the efforts by the New Labour Government to redefine and reshape British social democracy after years of strict neo-conservative rule. New Labour was faced with the tricky task of weighing social justice against economic sufficiency. Some argue that New Labour’s goals were not very different from Thatcher’s, and that Blair’s has in fact continued the Thatcher legacy more than differed from it (cf. Driver/Martell 2002).

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the promotion of middle-class values during the reign of Thatcher, never really subsided because New Labour has never been able to fulfil the promises made at the dawn of the alleged new political era. Looking back now, this can be claimed without reservation.16 The question in how far the socio-political atmosphere of this specific period is reflected in narrative fiction is of great interest because novels do not just entertain; they are also vital sources to the study of socio-political and cultural developments, and therefore contribute to a structure of feeling. British fiction has always had a concern for history, and Rod Mengham correctly states that “[…] contemporary British fiction is concerned with other times and places” (2003: 1). This applies to writers like Graham Swift, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Barry Unsworth and Kazuo Ishiguro. For other writers, however, history assails the present. In the fiction of writers such as Joseph Connolly, Will Self, Christopher Brookmyre, and Irvine Welsh, the narrative is saturated with the conditions of contemporary society, i.e. the conditions of the British 1990s. The same observation, in my view, applies to the male novel confessional novels by Nick Hornby, Tim Lott, David Baddiel, Mike Gayle, Tony Parsons and John O’Farrell.17 Their often cynical tone has earned the authors of those novels, alongside others like Christopher Brookmyre, Joseph Connolly or Irvine Welsh, the label ‘cynical young men’ which of course harks back to the Angry Young Men of the 1950s. In short, by dealing with the contemporary construction of male identity (Hornby), the erosion of social norms and values in small-scale relationships (Connolly), the corruption in the media and the business world (Brookmyre), and the specific ways of negating the middle-class value system (Welsh), these writers fulfil two functions. They provide texts which can be located within a network of contemporary discourses, yet also shape these discourses. By exposing how representatives of a specific generation 16 If truth be told, some of those promises were quite similar to those made by Thatcher in the first place. 17 An early example of the male confessional novel that has never been mentioned in any publication on ladlit – probably because it has been out of print for some considerable time – is Pepper (1993) by Tristan Hawkes. In the typical fashion of the male confessional novel it is a 1st person narrative which is set in London. “Pepper follows the fortunes of Richard, a hard-drinking, fast-talking young advertising executive, who falls head-over-heels in love-at-first-sight with Pepper, a red-haired, sartorially inept, yet endearing newcomer to his office. Tongue-tied and stricken when faced with the object of his desire, Richard bolsters his fragile ego with a prodigious intake of alcohol and other mind-bending substances. Once on the slippery slope, everything begins to spiral out of control, and Richard proceeds to lose not only Pepper, but also his job, his friends, his house, his dog, his self-respect, and almost all of his marbles” (Hawkes 1993).

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within a specific culture feel and think, and by laying bare the means by which they articulate their thoughts and feelings, they jointly provide material to make sense of a particular way of life of the 1990s.18 Unlike the Angry Young Men of the 1950s, though, the cynical young men of the 1990s do not look back in anger, i.e. they do not make class an issue, nor do they express the regret that things have stayed the same. What the typical male protagonist of a 1990s novel does is digest political disappointment and fatigue, the erosion of social norms and values, the possibilities of late modern escapism, and the construction of reality by the media by presenting himself as a victim of the time he lives in. He does not, however, express this in an explicit way but contents himself with bemoaning the negative effects with which he has to deal and fight against in his everyday life. In a way it may sound paradoxical that the young men of the 1990s seem to suffer from nostalgia because they seem far too young to understand what nostalgia really means. But as Niergaden observes, time is fast-lived, and the generation of the nineties already looks on the eighties with a feeling of nostalgia (2000: 236). Especially against 18 Cf. Connolly (1995, 1996, 1997, 1998); Brookmyre (1997, 1998), and Welsh (1993, 1994, 1998). I owe the term ‘cynical young men’ to Göran Niergaden (2000) who understands the novels by Brookmyre, Welsh and Hornby to fit the category cynical young men as an emerging phenomenon in the literary landscape. He does not, however, mention Joseph Connolly in this context. But I would like to include him because his writing shares many of the features which according to Niergaden are typical of the cynical young men-novels. Specifically, I am of the opinion that Connolly is probably one of the most cynical authors of the 1990s. Faber and Faber, Connolly’s publisher, hailed him as ‘The New Master of Black Comedy’ (The beginning of his first novel, Pour Souls, published in 1995, may give a flavour of Connolly’s cynicism: “At the moment he said he would break her neck, he knew their love was dying. Of course, Barry had said it loads of times before – meant it once or twice – but this time, God help him, his two hard thumbs were pressing deep and bruising into Susan’s throat”). Just like Tim Lott’s second novel, Rumours of a Hurricane (2003), the story is set in the mid-1980s and makes ‘Thatcher’s poor lost souls’ the object of a most fiery and cynical attack. Another author that might be counted among the cynical young men writers is Geoff Nicholson. In Bleeding London (shortlisted for the Whitbread Fiction Award in 1997) he paints a very bleak picture of the English capital. Stuart, one of its protagonists, is obsessed with the question of death: “You think London isn’t a necropolis? Let me tell you it is. And people love it” (279). A little later, he muses on the form of death: “But death is not a literary form. It is formless and always with us; common and ubiquitous, just like sex. A long time ago, I had a girlfriend who said there wasn’t a single square foot of London where somebody hadn’t had sex. I’m sure she was right and I felt the same must be true about death. Every square inch of the city must be infused with mortality. Boadicea, the plague, the Luftwaffe, queer-bashers, gangland shootings, natural causes; they’ve all done their bit” (281).

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the background of the fast changing entertainment sector, the young generation, in their late twenties and early thirties, can already look back on several dominant music styles.19 This nostalgia, however, is very rarely explicitly dealt with in those novels; the male antiheroes do not engage in a critical discourse, trying to change the world. What they do instead is engage in a cynical discourse about the status quo, by at the same time deconstructing the chance for change. The 1990s, as I have already mentioned, were marked by an increasing awareness of how gender differences were acted out in relationships and everyday life. Publications on the topic proliferated at the time, in scholarly discourse as well as in the media, and especially in the cultural supplements of the broadsheets, but also in specific popular genres such as genre fiction or self-help books. As for the scholarly discourse, I will later comment on feminist and gender studies theories and therefore do not wish to here forestall the discussion that will follow below. I would like, though, to mention two particular publications, the first one being You Just Don’t Understand (1991) written by the American linguist Deborah Tannen, a book that has had a vast response and has reached an audience beyond academia. In her book, Tannen discusses at great length the problems and misunderstandings men and women may encounter in everyday discourse. Tannen makes an important point by emphasizing that there exist crucial differences in conversational strategies between men and women and thus clearly distances herself from those theories that underline the sameness between the sexes in order not to jeopardize the attempts at equality. However, acknowledging differences rather than claiming there should not be any at all, in my view, is much more helpful when it comes to tricky situations in everyday life. Therefore, I agree with Tannen, who claims in her preface to that [t]he desire to affirm that women are equal has made some scholars reluctant to show they are different, because differences can be used to justify unequal treatment and opportunity. Much as I understand and am in sympathy with those who wish there were no differences between women and men – only reparable social injustice – my research, others’ research, and my own and others’ experience tell me it simply isn’t so. There are gender differences in ways of speaking, and we need to identify and understand them. (1991: 17)

19 Somebody in their mid-thirties today may have grown up with new wave music on vinyl records and later switched to electro pop on CD, while today, they might download the latest techno sound onto their digital music gadgets such as MP3-players. Thus, the range of music styles as well as storage possibilities are far greater compared to those available to their preceding generation.

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As I have already pointed out, You Just Don’t Understand was highly successful, both within and outside academia, which again shows that gender differences, especially in intimate relationships (as opposed to the more political implications that dominated the feminist discourse of the 1970s and 1980s) were of a wider public interest. The idea that heterosexual relationships had become increasingly complex was taken up by the media and the book-trade, and in conjunction with the masculinity-in-crisis discussion, provided a promising new market segment. The male confessional novels also must be seen within this development, and their promotion, marketing and display in bookshops (their covers share a number of characteristics and hence are easily spotted by the reader who takes a specific interest in this genre) provide an important means of satisfying the need to make sense of everyday misunderstandings between men and women. Another popular book publication that broke the bookselling records in the 1990s is John Gray’s self-help book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships. Originally published in the United States of America in 1992, it very quickly latched on to the British book market. It was translated into more than forty languages and, in that it sold several million copies, it is probably one of the most successful self-help books ever. Gray’s main argument is that men and women are so different that they could actually be perceived as coming from different planets. As Gray writes in the introduction Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus is a manual for loving relationships in the 1990s. It reveals how men and women differ in all areas of their lives. Not only do men and women communicate differently but they think, feel, perceive, react, respond, love, need, and appreciate differently. They almost seem to be from different planets, speaking different languages and needing different nourishment. (Gray 1998: 5)

Like Tannen, Gray gives advice as to how to interpret common misunderstandings such as men’s moments of silence or questions that may be understood as accusations (e.g. ‘Why are you late?’). Whereas Tannen’s book focuses on the different communication strategies of men and women, as a properly trained linguist who takes an interest in gender and language would do, Gray bases his argument on allembracing, fundamental differences between men and women. Gray goes so far as to provide ‘Venusian/Martian Phrase Dictionary’ (1998: 62ff). In short, whereas Tannen may be viewed as a social constructionist, stating that men and women communicate differently be-

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cause they are exposed to different learning strategies during their socialisation, Gray is more of an essentialist who firmly levels gender differences on biological determinism. In how far his methodology is grounded in serious scholarly research is doubtful, and he has often been accused of inaccuracy and lack of professionalism. I do share these doubts, but that should not be the point here because despite all its alleged faults, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus has been read by millions of men and women who made it their aim to improve their relationships, and the book has thus to be accredited a certain social relevance. The popularity of the book furthermore shows how the problems of intimate, heterosexual relationships were discussed in terms of linguistic difference and misunderstandings at the time. It is my contention that there can be observed a close interrelationship between the crisis of masculinity, the increasing interest in how men and women communicate and the scholarly and popular books that were published during the 1990s. This interrelationship, or the parallel between the social and the literary as I termed it at the beginning of this chapter, I claim, both mirrors and shapes the structure of feeling that was dominant in the 1990s. By centring gendered communication problems, these publications make visible one particular aspect that is part of what I, in the introduction, called a ubiquitous sense of insecurity that is characteristic of the late modern age in general, and, as I want to suggest, of the 1990s in particular. Apart from departing from an exclusively heteronormative premise, these kinds of self-help books, then, clearly neglect the phenomenon of the proliferation of lifestyles and gender scripts. The suggestion that all (heterosexual) men and women act and communicate according to their sex reveals the essentialist assumption that there is little room for deviation. Furthermore, and rather worryingly, this ties in with the belief that the crisis of masculinity can exclusively be put down to men’s insecurity as to how to react to women’s expectations. Men’s troubles were more varied than that which I hope to illustrate in Part II when I discuss my readings of the male confessional novel. So far, by giving a short overview of the period referring both to the socio-cultural, political as well as literary landscape, I have tried to establish how the 1990s were a decade of anxieties and uncertainties, mainly due to an increasing choice of lifestyles. With regard to these changes, I would like to remind the reader of the cultural scripts I set out to explain in the introduction and that will be the focus of the next section, i.e. the New Man and the New Lad. Before I comment on the crisis of masculinity, however, I will show how these uncertainties may be approached in theoretical terms by working towards a concept of identity based on the notion of performativity.

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The study of identity has gained in popularity over the last two decades and therefore it is a rather difficult if not impossible undertaking to draw up a conclusive understanding or conceptualisation of it. It is furthermore impossible to detach identity from the discussion of other, related, concepts such as class, gender and ethnicity. Since this book is trying to come to terms with the notion of masculinity, the focus will always specifically be put on gender. Identity, alongside other concepts such as subjectivity, power, discourse20, and of course masculinity, has been called into question ever since the birth of poststructuralism and its attack on essentialism. There are no longer any stable or uniform identities since they are constantly negotiated and articulated and therefore unfixed, unstable and fluid. “Identity is always a temporary and unstable effect of relations which define identities by marking differences” (Grossberg 1996: 89). Identities are not unified but fragmented ‘wholes’, created by hybridity and syncretism rather than by essentialism. However, to know who one is still seems to be just as essential as having enough to eat and a roof over one’s head and is thus in need of some sort of ontological justification. Or to put it simply, despite the fact that we have to accept that there is no such thing as an autonomous subject possessing a unified identity, the desire to pin ourselves down to at least some fixed identity traits has been remarkably persistent. It seems that when discussing identity in general, we face the same problem we struggle with when we try to talk about masculinities. As I have already pointed out in the introduction, despite the fact that we might subscribe to an anti-essentialist conception 20 I have used the term ‘discourse’ several times, and I would like to clar-

ify what I understand by it. It is not easy to find a clear-cut definition of discourse. It has a wide array of applications and has been studied in a almost every field of the human and social sciences. Discourse can be understood as a synonym to conversation, or even more simply, as a synonym to speech. These conceptions, however, are too narrow to work towards a wider concept applicable to literary texts. Therefore, I would like to settle for the following definition. Discourse is a form of communication, an attempt to make sense, to negotiate and to place ourselves in a wider network of social relations. Discourses, in this sense, are negotiations. For a good introduction to the concept of discourse, see Mills (2004). Mill’s conceptualisation of discourse underscores my general argument, claiming that “for the discussion of the construction […] of discourses of femininity and masculinity, it is possible to discuss literary texts alongside other texts, such as works of history or autobiography, and even such texts as cookery books, advice manual and so on, in order to reveal the similarities these texts display across generic boundaries. Discourse is therefore useful in that it can allow us to analyse similarities across a range of texts as the product of a particular set of power/knowledge relations” (Mills 2004: 20f).

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of masculinities and thus actually refrain from using the term in the singular, we still cannot do away with the fact that there circulate certain stereotypes and masculine traits with which many of us seem to agree when asked to summarize typical masculine behaviour. This being the case, it has been claimed that men are more aggressive than women, prefer the public to the private domain, and are interested in sports and fast cars rather than in fine arts and country gardens.21 These stereotypes are drawn upon by the cultural industries (most prominently in film and advertising), which contribute to what can be defined as ‘the myth of masculinity’.22 “In films, television programmes, advertising, newspapers, popular songs and novels, in narratives and images that press in from every side, men are invited to recognize themselves in the masculine myth” (Easthope 1986: 166). These images not only reproduce the patriarchal structures of society, they also render masculinity invisible in the sense that men and masculinity are passed off as normal and universal (Doty 1993: 35). In that respect, the notion of identity is crucial because as Easthope contends, the cultural representation of masculinity relies on the justified assumption that men recognize themselves in the images provided by the cultural industries. Therefore it is essential to establish a matrix according to which identity may be defined before we consider the notion of crisis any further. Chris Barker makes the following, useful distinction between subjectivity and identity, claiming that subjectivity is “the condition of being a person and the processes by which we become a person; that is, how we are constituted as subjects and how we experience ourselves” (2006: 219). Identity, conversely, is divided into self-identity which refers to the verbal conceptions we hold about ourselves and our emotional identification with those self-conceptions, and social identity which refers to the expectations and opinions that others have of us (ibid.). The distinction between self-identity and social identity is an important one because how we construct and perceive ourselves may differ immensely from how others perceive us. Furthermore, as will become clear in Part II, the clash between self-identity and social identity is the very site where the crisis of masculinity in the male confessional novel is being created. The crisis establishes itself when we do not think that we can live up to other people’s expectations, or more importantly, if we do not know what these expectations consist of.

21 For a discussion of the distinction between an essentialist and constructionist understanding of sexuality, see Harding (1998: 8f). 22 Roland Barthes’ work on cultural mythologies has been most influential in semiotics, structuralist and poststructuralist theory, cf. Barthes (1972 and 1977).

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In my own conceptualisation of identity I am most indebted to Anthony Giddens who takes self-identity as one of the most essential problem sites of a modern way of life. Since identity has always to do with representation, I will confine my analysis to what Chris Barker terms self-identity. In Modernity and Self-Identity, Anthony Giddens claims: Each of us not only ‘has’, but lives a biography reflexively organised in terms of flows of social and psychological information about possible ways of life. Modernity is a post-traditional order, in which the question, ‘How shall I live?’ has to be answered in day-to-day decisions about how to behave, what to wear and what to eat – and many other things – as well as interpreted within the temporal unfolding of self-identity. (1991: 14)

In such an anti-essential understanding of identity, it is assumed that identity is created in a process that can only ever come to a provisional conclusion and is thus subject to constant re-articulation. Given that we are constantly preoccupied with designing our lives in such a manner, I would like to suggest that we understand identity work as a textual one in the double sense that we first have to rely on signifying systems to construct our identity, and secondly, that over time it changes according to the textual fabric we weave. Therefore, identity can be viewed as a narrative, and as Charlotte Linde (1993) has argued, it may take on a narrative or story-like form when we try to create our life-stories. What is clear from the above is that whenever we talk about identity, we are dealing with a paradox because identity in an antiessentialist, postmodern understanding can never be fixed but is fluid and unstable. Yet, in order to talk about identity in the first place, we need something to pin it down. Or put differently, how can we talk about identity if there is not at least a part of it which is identical with itself? Part of the paradox may be made sense of if we consider the social dimension of identity; the ‘I’ can only be formed in difference to ‘others’ whereby it is always different from itself. This ties in with what Zygmunt Bauman means by saying that “[t]he idea of ‘identity’ was born out of the crisis of belonging and out of the effort triggered to bridge the gap between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’ and to lift reality to the standards set by the idea – to remake the reality in the likeness of the idea” (2004: 20, original emphasis). We might ask ourselves how the ‘idea of identity’ came about because it seems a rather philosophical stance to take and since we are here concerned with social structures and everyday performances, we have to make the attempt to configure this notion in more practical terms. My position with regard to this problem is likewise indebted to

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the sociology of Anthony Giddens (1990, 1991) and to that of Pierre Bourdieu (1987, 1993) in one sense and to hermeneutical interpretation theory in another. Giddens and Bourdieu both claim, though in somewhat different terms, that there is an intricate relationship between structure and action in the sense that action is both constrained but also enabled by social structures; they provide both a matrix according to which social action may be shaped, but they also tend to limit the possibilities of different ways such action may be carried out. It is of course important to note that these social structures are never fixed to the extent that they may not have to undergo changes, i.e. their stability is always of a temporary nature even though certain structures may be rather persistent. Combining this view with the horizon of expectations based on the hermeneutical approach of Robert Jauss (1982) and originally derived from Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology, we might claim that the reproduction of social structures and reiteration of social actions create social expectations according to which we are supposed to act in a specific way given a specific situation. To come back to the above mentioned distinction between identity and self-identity made by Barker, it has to be maintained that there may arise an inconsistency between one’s selfidentity and one’s social identity which takes up on Bauman’s distinction between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’. In order to illustrate what consequences this inconsistency between different identity structures might have I would like to come back to the example based on the New Man-script I have put forward in the introduction. Being a father, if the person in question subscribes to the New Man-model in some way or another, entails sharing the nurturing and domestic duties to which, in the past, exclusively women had to attend to. Therefore, his self-identity may overlap with this idea of new domestic arrangements. If however, our man is employed in a trade that does not allow part-time hours and he is in addition so unlucky as to live in a country that does not belong to those that have elaborated schemes that favour this new division of labour (in the professional rather than the domestic sense) among the sexes such as for example Sweden, Norway or the Netherlands, he might find it rather difficult to harmonise his fatherly duties with those of a professional. He then would have a problem on several levels because the expectations he faces being a father on the one hand and a professional on the other are derived from two different social structures he more or less has to accept in his circumstances. The inescapable conclusion is that our man in question is not only confronted with the problem of taking on two roles which, to some extent, are irreconcilable, but is also forced to juggle (at least) two cultural scripts that together form his social identities.

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In his essay “Who Needs Identity”, talking about the paradoxical nature of identity, Stuart Hall elaborates on another type of paradox under which the concept of identity has suffered during the past decade. On the one hand, there has been “a veritable discursive explosion” around the concept of identity, on the other it has become subject to searching critique (Hall 1996: 1). Hall also critically comments on the poststructuralist/deconstructive attack on identity, i.e. on the fact due to its anti-essential character and multiple sources on the one hand and to its fragmented character on the other hand it has somehow lost part of its importance with regard to cultural analysis. However, as Hall points out correctly, as long as one does not abolish the notion of politics and agency from the agenda, there is always something remaining ‘essential’ about identity (ibid: 2). Hall makes a vital point here. As much as constructed, multiple and unfixed identities play their role in contemporary postmodern society, they must not come under erasure because the discourse of power never will. Let me explain this a bit further because the double nature of identity, i.e. its increasingly anti-essential theoretical foundation and the necessity not to give up the possibility of an integrational identity politics including agency, is an important one since it actually is grounded, again, in a paradox. We cannot contest that our world consists of signifying practices whose meanings are never quite fixed. The insights of structuralist and poststructuralist language study have shown that we live in a language-dominated maze we cannot quite make sense of, but which we still tend to call ‘reality’. Reality is, however, saturated by texts, or put even more radically, is nothing but text. Furthermore, meaning is always unstable and provisional; there is never a precise meaning of a phenomenon or social fact, nor is there one meaning that just refers to one specific social fact – there is always a surplus, a supplement as Derrida would put it.23 We must conclude that meaning is never quite sufficient but, paradoxically, at the same time always a little excessive. Now without falling into the trap of epistemological positivism, I think it safe to claim that the aim of a unified identity politics need not be given up. It is not the aim as such that is at the centre of attention here but rather the way by which the aim is considered to be an impossible possibility. This is, in my view, the necessary link one has to make in order to invigorate the often apolitical assumptions gathered from poststructuralism. Signifying practices provide the raw material for identity construction which are structured according to institutions and discourses to which not everyone is granted access to the same degree. It is therefore important to retain a certain responsibility towards identity politics which cannot

23 Cf. “… That Dangerous Supplement …” in Attridge (1992).

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be achieved by constantly referring to the unreliability of subjectivity and identity. Evidently, Hall tries to repoliticize identity in terms of agency. His interventionist approach is followed up by Lawrence Grossberg, who, similarly, asserts that the Derridean approach to conceptualise identity as difference in the sense that it can only ever be defined in negative opposition to what it is not, understands identity as an entirely linguistic construction (1996: 90). “While this model certainly suggests that the identity of one term cannot be explored or challenged without a simultaneous investigation of the second term, this is rarely the case in practice”(ibid). Both Hall and Grossberg are concerned that despite the attempt at breaking down boundaries, inequality will persist and that the potential of agency may get lost in a conceptualisation of identity which is exclusively understood in textual terms.24 Grossberg puts forward a convincing solution to the problem by substituting difference with otherness (1996: 93). The advantage that results from this substitution is that it “assumes that difference is itself an (sic) historically produced economy, imposed in modern structures of power, on the real. Difference as much as identity is an effect of power” (94). What seems just a minor shifting of emphasis is in fact a major step towards re-introducing the political into the discourse of difference; it is an attempt to show that there is a reason why the ‘other’ is ‘different’, and that this difference has not been established on the basis of an ‘essential’ difference between identities, but on the basis of unequal power distribution. As already mentioned above, identity can refer to cultural or national identity in general, but it can also be used to designate class, gender or race. Identity is always explained against what it is not, i.e. masculine is termed against feminine, white against black, normal against deviant etc. As Derrida has shown, in most of these pairs that have established themselves in the discourse of cultural analysis, the former always takes preference over the latter. Without wanting to dispute this claim, I wish to draw attention to the following consideration. If in the course of the poststructuralist intervention of destabilizing such established concepts and dichotomies the formerly disadvantaged second part of such pairs has acquired a more important role, against the background of the claim that identities are never fixed and are only of transitory, provisional stability, how then can the claim 24 This is a typical cultural studies preoccupation and poses similar prob-

lems to the one I tried to articulate in my preface with regard to text and context. As much as one may sympathize with poststructuralist theory, for a cultural studies representative poststructuralism often equals endangering the political intention and intervention cultural studies has always been devoted to.

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that one part is favoured over the other make sense in the first place? This question is not meant to doubt the fact that the favouring of one term over the other has been the case in all sorts of discourses but it aims to show the limits of deconstructive criticism and to highlight the necessity of a theoretical thrust that goes beyond rigid textual analysis. As mentioned above, what is of interest here is this surplus, the Derridean supplement.25 Signifying practices do not have material analogies; there are no clear-cut referents to which language refers. Narrative structures are nevertheless exploited to make out such reference points albeit provisional and unstable though they might be. This must not be lightly dismissed because the claim that reality is constructed ultimately refers to agency, which is in fact human agency. In order to lend credence to this argument, I will later draw on the writings of the representatives of cultural studies because in my view, it is within this particular project that the impossible possibility of human agency has been dealt with most adequately.26 I now want to look at the relationship between sexuality, gender and agency, and in that respect, Judith Butler’s seminal work Gender 25 Cf. Derrida (1992a). 26 Ever since the project of cultural studies started to influence academic practice in the early 1960s, it has been understood to challenge traditional approaches in history, sociology, and most importantly, those in the English departments. Or as Grant Farred would have it: “Through its impact on an assortment of disciplines, cultural studies(-inflected) courses have been taught in various language departments, the discipline of history, and other social sciences. From this amorphous and liminal site cultural studies has, over the past four decades, been able to impact and shape crucial debates about and within the “humanist curriculum” (Farred 2002: 78). But according to Farred, “cultural studies is now located at a crucial historical conjuncture (2002: 79), especially because while still challenging the safeguards of traditional literary study and criticism, cultural studies itself is constantly being challenged by its alleged “chief opponent”, since “[…] cultural studies and the study of literature are frequently depicted as polarized academic practices: one reads Literature (capitalization in original) or one studies contemporary cultural practices” (Farred 2002: 91). This division does not seem to be a natural one but is grounded in petty-minded, unreflected academic practice. Andrew Milner explains this division as follows: “Where English literature had tended towards an often politically conservative cultural elitism [cf. F.R. Leavis, ao] cultural studies has often displayed an equivalent commitment to various kinds of political radicalism” (Milner 2005: 17). This might be one reason why literary and cultural studies still seem to be considered as two separate spheres: Doing research according to a particular credo is ultimately a political decision, and often a personal attitude collides with the general political tenor in a specific university department. Therefore, the process of introducing a new and outspoken politically committed approach to literature and culture may be more difficult than some of the more radical exponents of cultural studies have anticipated.

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Trouble (1990) is probably the most influential book of the 1990s. Its focus is on the performative nature of gender, and it therefore fundamentally questions the biological essentialism of sex. Gender roles are socially constructed, learnt and adopted, and therefore cannot be pinned down to any innate characteristics based on biological sex.27 Butler criticizes the way “a culturally specific epistemic a priori establishes the naturalness of sex” (2007: 177). She draws on Michel Foucault’s genealogical method, arguing that in our culture, sexuality is seen as a fundamental constituent of identity, i.e. a boy, for example, learns how to act out his alleged masculine gender based on the fact that he is a representative of the male sex.28 Butler claims that sexuality and gender are not essentials but performances and therefore due to alteration.29 With her theory, she attempts at denaturalising sex and gender in order to emphasize their unstable and unfixed character on

27 “That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and so constitutes the “integrity” of the subject. […] The displacement of a political and discursive origin of gender identity onto a psychological “core” precludes an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject and its fabricated notions the ineffable interiority of its sex or of its true identity” (2007: 186). 28 Foucault’s work is usually conceived of as being attributable to two distinct phases, marking a transition from archaeology (cf. 1989 [1961] and 1981 [1969]) to genealogy (cf. Foucault 1994 [1975] and 1983 [1976] on the one hand and from structuralism to poststructuralism on the other. For a good introduction, see Mills (2003). 29 Butler’s theory has often been misunderstood in the sense that the notion of ‘performance’ has been taken at face-value. Even though the term is related to drama theory, it should not be confounded with the idea of ‘acting’. Gender performativity is more than the acting out a specific gender role based on biological sex (this is exactly what Butler contests as she deconstructs the belief that gender is based on the dichotomy male/female. In the social sciences, more radical thinkers have asserted that gender is an ideological construction in the sense that “[a]t any given moment, gender will reflect the material interests of those who have power and those who have not” (Brittain 2003: 52), and that gender enactment, or ‘doing gender’ as it is often called, “involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities […]” (West and Zimmerman 1987: 126). Micropolitics is a very important point often neglected in social scientific treatises on gender. As Nancy Chodorow correctly concludes in Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities, “[to] understand femininity and masculinity and the various forms of sexuality requires that we understand how any particular woman or man creates her or his own cultural and personal gender and sexuality” (1994: 92).

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the one hand and in order to free ‘deviant’ gender roles such as gays and lesbians from their marginalized existence on the other. Judith Butler is indebted to the poststructuralist understanding of texts and therefore views the body as a surface for inscription. The body thus becomes a cultural sign and is part of the signifying process which constitutes culture. Butler contends: Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions – and the punishments that attend on agreeing to believe in them; the construction ‘compels’ our belief in its necessity and naturalness. The historical possibilities materialized through various corporeal styles are nothing other than those punitively regulated cultural fictions alternately embodied and deflected under duress. (2007: 188)

If we adopt Butler’s theory in its most radical form, we have to accept that notions such as ‘masculinity’ never acquire a fixed meaning, nor does the term refer to something that can be ultimately defined. Masculinity thus becomes a signifier that refuses to refer to a signified. Hence, masculinity is constantly being cited in performances. These performances are never quite the same and therefore, masculinity may be taken on completely new and different articulations, or to put it differently, masculinity is being queered. Furthermore, as Loxely points out correctly, if we depart from the assumptions that performatives are citations “then the derivative is already at work in the original” (2007: 75). Hence gender identities like male heterosexuality are not only destabilized in textual or other performances, but they have never existed in a stable form in the first place. Viewed from this perspective, masculinity, or femininity for that matter, cannot be understood as mutually exclusive, clear-cut opposites. Rather, masculinity and femininity get contaminated and must thus be viewed on a spectrum of possible gender performances. The two ends of the spectrum, however, are nothing more than appropriations or ideal types that do not exist as such. Butler takes the performative nature of gender roles from Jacques Derrida’s writings on the performativity of speech acts.30 Derrida himself draws on Austin’s study, emphasizing the fact that Austin cannot solve the problem that it is almost impossible to differentiate performatives from referential speech acts. According to Derrida, this problem can be put down to the speech acts citational or repetitive nature. Every speech act makes sense only by virtue of its citing previous uses of a term. Therefore, every speech act is a repetition, using old words 30 Cf. Derrida, Jacques. Signature, Event, Context (1988).

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and structures in a new context. The performative nature of a speech act can now be understood in the sense that through its citation of previous speech acts, a specific speech act alters – within limits, of course – the meaning of a word or phrase.31 The citational character of performatives is most crucial to the construction of identity. As we are going to concern ourselves with narrative fiction, the writing of identities is at the centre of attention here. Jacques Derrida offers an interesting insight into the relationship between writing and identity. Identity is always formed in countless ways, and we should ask ourselves how the illusion of unity or univocity is constructed and projected from a particular structure in writing. Quite generally speaking, identities are being constructed because texts are read. Or as Julian Wolfreys puts it commenting on Derrida, words are always readable in absence of the writer: “The possibility of their being read and repeated is already installed in them as graphic marks (italics in original), and this possibility is not a condition of the presence of either an author or an audience” (Wolfreys 1998: 61). Because identity is present in the absence (of the author), it is always different from itself, i.e. split and doubled at the same time. The possibility of being re-read, i.e. of repetition is therefore a vital constituent of the process of identity construction even though the process is taking place in the absence of the initial force. Identity construction, therefore, is always a matter of difference and deferral, or in the parlance of deconstruction, différance. There is another possible type of iterability that is not only marked in the trace, the graphic marks on the page in the sense that one and the same thing (even though it is different from itself) may be re-read, but a repetition of words in the more familiar sense, i.e. that the same thing is said or written twice or even more times. This intentional repetition has its source outside but with immediate effect on the text. Identities are formed by reflexivity that attempts at coherence. Coherence is not a property of texts but is something that is imposed on the text during the process of interpretation.32 However, the text may imply coherence strategies or coherence patterns which may or may not 31 In How to do things with words (1962), Austin claims that a performative utterance may be parasitic or abnormal in the case where it is made in a specific context such as acted out on the stage. Austin tries to make a clear distinction between what he calls felicitous and infelicitous speech acts. Derrida on the other hand claims that communication would not be possible without the possibility of ‘non-serious’ citation for all language is marked by citationality and general iterability: “I take things up here from the perspective of positive possibility and not simply as instances of failure or infelicity: would performative utterance be possible if a citational doubling [doublure] did not come to split and dissociate from itself the pure singularity of the event?” (1988: 17). 32 Cf. Fairclough, Norman (1992: 134).

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be picked up on. One such strategy is the repetition of things that may be important with regard to identity construction. Identity is a performance, and like a stage performance, texts are repeated but never in the same way – there is always a mark of the previous performance while at the same time a deviation from it. The relationship between repetition and difference is what might be called ‘deconstruction’. “Deconstruction materializes because of repetition, deviation, distortion […] through imitation, citation, contortion, parody. Deconstruction does not work according to clear-cut rules, but according to a series of differences (cf. Culler 1994: 258). This claim we have to bear in mind with regard to the textual analysis that follows in the second part because the particular genre of the male confessional novel is also subject to deviation from rules, i.e. the performative act to reiterate while deviating at the same time. With regard to the claim made above that identity construction takes on a narrative or story-like form, I would like to come back to Derrida’s critique of Austin’s speech act theory because in Derrida’s reading, Austin’s dilemma as to how to distinguish serious from nonserious speech acts is not a problematic aspect but a constitutional one. If the law of citation, or iterability as Derrida calls it, is applicable as a principle to all human communication, then it does not really matter whether the speech acts in question are serious or non-serious. This is of particular interest here because we are going to concern ourselves with fictional speech acts, i.e. speech acts that are non-serious by definition. But since fictional speech acts are citations, of either serious or other fictional speech acts, we do not need to differentiate them in any way from non-fictional speech acts.33 In the following, I am going to focus on the narrative structure of identity constructions, since regardless of the nature of confessional texts, i.e. factual or fictional, they are equally concerned with plausibility and coherence.

33 Such an approach of course raises the question of the legitimacy of discussing fictional events for social analysis. Apart from my contention that Williams’s structure of feeling exactly tries to do that, i.e. to relate the concerns of writers of a specific generation to the social structures they lived and worked in, I would also like to refer to the fact that fiction is not distinct from ‘real’ events in the sense that they are both constituted through social action. Furthermore, in creating fictional works, writers draw on their personal experiences made in ‘real’ life. In short, there is an intricate relationship between fact and fiction, a position that is also maintained by Robert Escarpit, who claims that “literature is composed of works which place the imaginary within structures that correspond to the social structures of a historical situation” (1977: 8, my translation).

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LAD TROUBLE AND NARRATION

Narratives have always played an important role in identity formation. Already long before the Gutenberg era, oral narratives contributed to the formation and, through memory, to the maintenance of the selfimage of peoples (Cobley 2002: 38). Even though the grand narratives, such as the more or less homogeneously constructed national body of narratives have been fundamentally challenged by postmodern phenomena such as eclecticism and the rejection of authenticity, narratives still have a function. It is true that such narratives have long ceased to circulate within a defined territory; thanks to the technology of reproduction and the almost limitless spreading over time and place, some narratives have acquired a more or less global significance. On the other hand, precisely because of the possibility of overstepping once clearly defined margins, the desire to write local history, for example in terms of ethnicity and gender, has become vitally important. Therefore, local, regional or even national aspects of everyday cultural experience and practice mediated through narrative fiction have not ceased to provide interesting material for cultural analysis. According to Stuart Hall, “[p]recisely because identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse, we need to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies” (Hall 1996: 4). These enunciative strategies have to be understood in the context of what Stuart Hall calls ‘articulation’. I want again to draw the attention to the double meaning of the word, i.e. expressing versus joining. In this sense, articulation is always a ‘double articulation’, i.e. articulating (expressing) articulated (joined) parts. Therefore, the unity of a discourse actually represents the articulation of various and different elements (Hall 2000: 65). As Korte and Müller observe, “[c]ultural and personal identities are always constructs and the results of negotiations which are intended to create some kind of coherence despite inherent fragmentariness, discontinuity and difference” (1998:15). What is in question here is the search for unity despite the diversity contemporary global culture is marked by. In this connection, it is important to note that the development between the mid 1950s and 1990s was characterized by a shift from social class to cultural identity. In other words, the premise from which cultural analysis can be undertaken has changed, but the object of study can still be put into a specific political framework which might help to account for what Raymond Williams has famously called “the structure of feeling of a specific generation”. If Lyotard’s (1984) claim holds true, we have seen the end of the grand narratives, but narratives have not ceased to be important since they express a multitude of voices. What we therefore need, according to

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Korte and Müller, are flexible identity concepts (1998:16). In this respect, Steve Connor makes a vital point when he claims that [n]arrative both extends and consolidates the sense of individual and collective identity and interrupts and transforms such identity. Narrative is one of the most important ways in which cultures name themselves and give themselves definition and extension in space and time, naming and defining the forms in which individual members of those cultures may be said to belong to them. (Connor 1996:133)

Connor argues that whereas narrative might once have had the function “to call its audiences into the position of the subject of history, narrative in the post-war world has been much more concerned with investigating the conditions of possibility under which history may be narratable at all” (ibid.). What Connor overlooks, though, is the significant contribution of those subjects involved in the processes of production and reception. Or put differently, carrying out contemporary cultural analysis drawing on narrative fiction, one might ask oneself the question under which circumstances social actors may be making their own history under circumstances they themselves have chosen.34 Such a conception, of course, influences, i.e. widens but also restricts the ways in which cultural analysis can be done. On the one hand, literary study cannot be carried out without taking into consideration the framework within which literature is produced and consumed. Literature is part of what we call culture, but it cannot be captured in terms of essentialism and aesthetic transcendence as some defenders of the humanist tradition would have it. In the following we are going to see how a reconciliation between postmodern fragmentation and dissolution and the never-abating human wish to “belong”, i.e. to form and maintain identity, may be achieved by reconsidering Raymond Williams’s concept of the structure of feeling.

34 By social actors I understand anybody involved in either the production or reception of texts, i.e. authors, publishers, readers, film producers, audiences etc. The term “social” refers to the embeddedness but also to the determinant nature of the social and socio-economic circumstances with regard to the cultural production. I therefore understand cultural production as a predominantly material practice.

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LAD TROUBLE STRUCTURE OF FEELING

The structure of feeling, along with the triad of the residual, dominant, and emergent,35 and culture as a whole way of life, has become one of Williams’s most characteristic concepts.36 “It embodies the interconnective approach adopted by Williams throughout all of his work, creating a base from which he can explore various areas and issues, and to which he can continually return.” (Elridge and Elridge 1994: 112). It is however, probably the most contested concept as well. The structure of feeling is, to some extent at least, responsible for the fact that Williams’s concept of cultural materialism has been subjected to severe criticism.37 There are undoubtedly certain ambiguities that cannot

35 Cf. Marxism and Literature, chapter II.8. 36 Williams’s work is not easy to be accounted for, and his books do not provide us with a homogenous body of writing. On the contrary, Williams’s thinking and writing is marked by what Robert Christgau describes as a tension between “articulated experience” and “general conclusions” (Christgau 1985: 3). However, his insistence on culture as ‘a whole way of life’ earned him the credit of having laid the theoretical framework for the project of cultural studies. Furthermore, he developed the theory and practice of cultural materialism, an approach which influenced both literary criticism and cultural theory. His writing is marked by the same topics throughout his career, which not exclusively but to a certain extent can be put down to the fact that he understood academic life as thoroughly political. According to Terry Eagleton, Williams’s unique repertoire consisted in “an ability to sustain both a commitment to class struggle and a celebration of difference and plurality” (Eagleton 1989: 31). On the other hand, Nicholas Garnham claims that “[…] no coherent theory or method of cultural analysis lies waiting simply to be abstracted from his work” (Garnham 1988: 123). Maybe Garnham is correct in referring to the missing coherence. Francis Mulhern comes to a similar conclusion, saying that “[...] Williams’s work exhibits a fundamental continuity, yet not a fundamental coherence” (Mulhern 2000:84). Mulhern refers to the alleged break in Williams’s work which he puts down to the fact that “Williams’s theoretical discourse is bivocal, implicating ‘culture’ in two distinct roles (ibid.). This ‘bivocal’ implication of culture has to do with the negotiation of different academic and political cultures: the culture Williams was raised in (i.e. Leavisism), the culture he tried to oppose rigidly but yet sympathetically (post-war Marxism) and the cultural theory he himself was developing from Culture and Society, The Long Revolution over Literature and Marxism to Towards 2000 and The Politics of Modernism. However, if one appreciates his insistence on culture as a whole way of life, it is, despite all its inductiveness and complexities, possible to trace a red thread through Williams’s work. This, in my opinion, is particularly true in the case of Marxism and Literature, one of Williams’s most powerful books in which he managed to establish a stringent and coherent cultural theory. 37 This is also the general tenor in a more recent German publication by Moritz Bassler (2003).

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be negated.38 However, Williams’s body of work is also marked by consistency and self-reflexivity. Holding this premise, I believe the concept of structure of feeling may be “rediscovered” for cultural analysis because I understand the structure of feeling to contain a genuinely deconstructive gesture. Williams first used “structure of feeling” in Preface to Film (1954), and originally introduced it to make a link between dramatic conventions and written notations (O’Connor 1989: 84; Higgins 1999: 39). Williams considers drama as a material practice which involves issues of writing as notation or script: [I]t seems clear that the dramatic conventions of any given period are fundamentally related to the structure of feeling in that period. I use the phrase structure of feeling because it seems to me more accurate, in this context, than ideas or general life. All the products of a community in a given period are, we now commonly believe, essentially related, although in practice, in detail, this is not always easy to see. (Preface to Film 1954, quoted in Higgins 1999: 40)

According to Higgins, Williams ‘weakens’ his argument of the validity of the structure of feeling in Politics and Letters (1979), referring to the probability of reconstructing the material life, the social organization and the dominant ideas in the study of a given period, because in his view, the tentativeness “belittles rather than endorses orthodox Marxist analysis”. In Andrew Milner’s view, however, Higgins “seems to be mistaken to insist that his first use in 1954 is intended as a conscious alternative and direct challenge to Marxism.” Milner favours the view that […] Williams was developing his own distinctive line of thinking, in creative tension with both Marxism and Leavisism. Structure of feeling is one of a series of related concepts – discourse, ideology, world vision are obvious alternatives – used in literary and cultural studies to denote the patterned ‘articulation’ of different texts and sign-systems. (2002: 71)

What is of particular interest is the flexible conjunction of two realms that are constituents of the texts and sign-systems; the objective structure and the subjective feeling. The structure of feeling is thus sup38 Terry Eagleton for example refers to the ‘quasi-oxymoronic’ nature of ‘the structure of feeling because it “[…] captures the sense that culture is at once definite and impalpable. […] ‘Structure of feeling’, with its bold yoking of the objective and the affective, is a way of trying to negotiate the doubleness of culture, as at once material reality and lived experience” (2000: 36).

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posed to help conceptualise personal emotions and experiences that are shaped in thought and consciousness, and take a social form in observable texts and practices (Brooker 2003: 239). In Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1968), Williams defines structure of feeling as “a shared and fully organized but not usually conscious way of responding to the world at a particular time” (Paananen 2000: 219). As O’Connor observes, in Williams’s early work, the notion of ‘structure of feeling’ is used in the sense of a general hermeneutic, which invites us to read a general history into particular scripts (O’Connor 1989: 85). I agree with both Milner and O’Connor and tend to view Williams’s concept in terms of a general analytical tool to account for articulated conventions, both material and emotive, which may be described as the specific and significant way of conveying meaning of a particular group, formation, or as Williams would also say, generation, and thus places emphasis, inter alia, on the historical process. In Marxism and Literature (1977), Williams stakes out that […] in authentic historical analysis it is necessary at every point to recognize the complex interrelations between movements and tendencies both within and beyond a specific and effective dominance. It is necessary to examine how these relate to the whole cultural process rather than only to the selected and abstracted dominant system. (1977: 121)

What Williams means is that cultural analysis only makes sense if the past is viewed against the background of the present and vice versa as he understands movements and tendencies in terms of (pre-)emergence, thus only fully recognizable when analysed retrospectively. This is the very foundation of his method. In Culture and Society (1958), he analyses the culture of 1780-1950 from the point of view of somebody living in the 1950s. By drawing on literary works and literary critiques, he tries to account for the structure of feeling of certain generations, showing how dominant, residual and emergent cultural patters are being articulated in different cultural texts and contexts. As Paul Jones correctly points out in a recent edition on Williams’s sociology of culture, Williams’s methodology is related to the sociological method of ‘verstehen’, which Dilthey defined as a “sympathetic understanding or intuitive grasp of human social and cultural forms – while at the same time insisting that all such studies must be historical” (Dilthey in Jones 2006: 130).39 Both the structure of feeling 39 Max Weber’s sociological approach is based on the method of ‘verstehen’: “Soziologie soll heissen […]: eine Wissenschaft, welche soziales Handeln deutend verstehen und dadurch in seinem Ablauf und sei-

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and the practical consciousness can be understood as ways to conduct cultural analysis according to the rules of ‘verstehende Soziologie’.40 In Marxism and Literature, Williams bemoans the fact that cultural analysis is always on the basis of finished products which ultimately favours the “formed wholes” over the “forming and formative processes” (1977: 129). However, these formed wholes – by which Williams understands all kind of texts can be made into active “readings”, i.e. creative reading processes, and thus be made relevant for the present. Williams calls this “practical consciousness”, a term derived from Marx and Engels in The German Ideology (1938 [1845]).41 Practical consciousness can be summarised as the human need to communicate and to make sense of human communication. In a way, practical consciousness can be understood as the desire to take part in textual interaction – something that we do as readers – and to render nen Wirkungen ursächlich erklären will“ (1984: 19). In a nutshell, what Weber maintains in his definition is that social acting is to be understood as a form of human behaviour which substantially (‘sinn-haft’) refers to the behaviour of other social actors. cf. also Weber (1980). 40 At the time, Williams did not understand himself to be a sociologist – only later when he noticed the similarity between his approach and those of sociologists such as Weber, did he start to use the term ‘sociology of culture’. This is not a shortcoming on his part, but has to be seen against the background of the institutionalisation process of sociology in Britain. In contrast to Germany and France, sociology acquired academic recognition relatively late, cf. Anderson (1981) and Lepenies (2000). As for the relationship between cultural studies and the sociology of culture, cf. Winter (1999c). 41 The use of practical consciousness earned Williams a lot of criticism. It is, however, much more than a theoretical concept. As always with Williams, his concepts are not the result of analytical enquiry only, but of political commitment as well. Therefore, practical consciousness is not just to be discovered, but to be applied as well. Method and object of study are congruent to a certain degree, a fact which is not often appreciated, let alone understood, by representatives of the positivistempiricist tradition. It is partial, but in its partiality no less scholarly. Williams’s coinage, according to Mick Wallis, is a critique of orthodox Marxist cultural analysis (Wallis 1993: 129), and maintains that there should be no separation between the aesthetic and the psychological. Unlike Higgins, who claims that the concept of structure of feeling should be understood in the sense that Williams first used in Preface to Film, Wallis sees the usefulness of the concept in Williams’s later deployment, as “an analytic procedure for actual written works” (ibid.). According to Wallis, the concept is apt to examine “new creative possibilities” because it is ascribed to a generation, and emerges out of a particular intellectual struggle at a particular juncture (137ff.). It is essential that these “new creative” possibilities find their justified way into the enterprise of cultural analysis. Therefore, we must ask ourselves how literary and cultural studies should be perceived in the future, not only in terms of research but also with regard to its institutionalization within academia and university curricula.

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this interaction meaningful. In short, what is at stake here is the notion of intertextuality. It goes without saying that traditional empiricism cannot be drawn upon in order to examine “practical consciousness”. However, it may be analysed by a combination of different kinds of textual analysis, i.e. primary literary works, the way these works produce secondary texts (critiques, film adaptations etc.), and the discourses which are nourished by the primary and secondary texts.42 As Antony Easthope has pointed out, “[l]iterature exists not as an essence, an entity, a thing, but as a process, a function” (Easthope 1991: 53). Letting Easthope’s contention resound in our minds, I would now like to discuss the notion of masculinity, which I take, just like literature, to be a process rather than an essence.

MASCULINITIES

AND THEIR CRISES

In the following, I am going to try to establish a working concept of masculinity.43 This is called for in order to smooth the path to my discussion of the troubled masculine identities we encounter in the male confessional novel. Even though the term masculinity circulates generously in contemporary discourse, to define it accurately it is by no means a straightforward business. Against the background of what is called “the crisis of masculinity”, the term has acquired a quasi omnipresent status, both in everyday discourse and the media on the one hand, and in scholarly discourse on the other. Whatever their background or intention, what all these texts seem to share is some kind of ingrained wish to find a formulation according to which masculinity can be pinned down. There is, as I have pointed out before, always a discrepancy between a certain common-sense circulation of a term or concept, and an analytically established term or concept that has been adopted in scholarly discourse.44 I take this discrepancy seriously because it is essential to the structure of feeling. The structure of feeling of a specific 42 Fiske has extensively commented on reader productivity, a term which he uses to replace consumption in order to emphasize the active part ‘consumers’ can play when it comes to the use and recycling of popular culture material (cf. Fiske 1991a 142ff.) 43 Needless to say masculinity in the singular is not the thing I have in mind. Rather I am attempting to establish what can be understood by what is sometimes called postmodern masculinities. 44 It is the latter, i.e. the concept that dominates the scholarly discourse, which is mostly given priority in the discussion of concepts, and it is this discrepancy that has mostly been neglected by deconstructionist criticism.

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generation, in our case the generation of young men in their late twenties to mid-thirties in the 1990s, may be analysed from different perspectives. As I hope to show by pitching my interpretation of the male confessional against a number of reader reviews in Part II, the discrepancy between common-sense and theoretical discourse must be taken into consideration since the textual analysis informed by literary theory may yield a rather different interpretation from that conducted by an ‘ordinary’ reader who seeks out popular fiction for entertainment and, in certain cases, for advice rather than the preoccupation of painstaking analysis. John MacInnes, for example, maintains that hegemonic masculinity may be recognized by a list of typical features.45 He also, however, points out that there is little resemblance between such lists of features and empirical reality (MacInnes 1998: 15). We therefore should ask ourselves how it is possible that there is something like a catalogue of typical male features most people seem to acknowledge but that at the same time, there is also a big clash between those features and empirical reality. MacInnes tries to explain this discrepancy by drawing on the relationship between sexual genesis and social construction (1998: 21ff), arguing that […] masculinity, along with the complementary concepts of femininity and gender, can only be understood as ideological mechanisms that are the product of a very specific set of historical circumstances: an era in which men and women attempt to reconcile two quite contradictory views about the significance of their biological sex. (1998: 24)

What conclusion can we draw from this insight? First we must assume that without a relatively stable concept of femininity and gender, masculinity would not present a worthy subject matter to look into. It is quite safe to claim that one lesson that feminism has taught us is that just like women, men are not naturally ‘like this or that’. I agree with Reichardt and Sielke who claim that “[m]anhood […] has ceased to refer to a universal, though unmarked and concealed state of being” (1998: 564). I would, however, be more cautious when claiming that “masculinity [is not] a supposedly stable and homogeneous entity identical with power and patriarchal dominance” (ibid). It is of course true that the distribution of power is today different from fifty years ago. It remains a fact, however, that power is still unequally distributed between men and women. 45 Hegemonic masculinity is a term coined by R. Connell who is one of the main exponents of masculinity studies, cf. Connell (1987, 1995 and 2003).

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Secondly, it can also be taken for granted that the notion of masculinity has only acquired popularity because of its feminine opposite so to speak. Without the work produced by feminism and gender studies, we would not preoccupy ourselves with concepts of masculinity. It is therefore necessary to supply at least a cursory overview of what has been going on in the feminist/gender debate during the past couple of decades with regard to masculinity.46 The waves of feminism(s) triggered a threatening reaction amongst those men who felt challenged by women’s liberation, and led to the creation of a number of counter-movements established in response to the feminist movement, such as the Men’s Rights Movement or the Mythopoetic Movement.47 Feminism has sought “gender justice” (Connell 1995) and has put men and masculinities in a critical spotlight which resulted in revealing men’s privileged status as well as their most ingrained fears that are responsible for the persisting patriarchal structures and the oppressiveness of traditional masculinities. As Lynne Segal puts it rather bluntly: For that oppressiveness is precisely men’s wretched fear of not being maleenough, which is identical with their fear of ‘femininity’ – and hence of weakness, dependence, intimacy and closeness. At a personal level, most of the crimes of men against women – and other men – are an aspect of men’s deep fear of, and hence hostility towards, femininity, in societies which tolerate or excuse many forms of violence. (1990: 317)

46 Whereas feminism has probably been the most influential movement on the notion of masculinity, both in theoretical as well as political terms, we must not forget that different version of new sexual movements, including the gay movement or queer politics are likewise responsible for the fact that masculinities have been debated critically over the last couple of decades. 47 On the homepage of the British Men’s Movement (www.ukmm.org.uk) we are asked the following questions: “Aware of the attack against men’s rights by the feminist lobby and successive governments? Sick and tired of being lied to, manipulated and shamed over gender issues by the media and government? Want to know why this has happened? And who is responsible? WE HAVE THE ANSWERS HERE. ”The site also contains a photograph of a woman, wearing a black top on which it says: “GOALS OF A BITCH: To Dominate, Control and Destroy a Man’s Finances, Mental Health, Self-Esteem and any Hope for Happiness.” The Mythopoetic Movement was brought into existence with the publication of Robert Bly’s Iron John (1992) which advises men to learn from the past and to rely on their innate manliness. Bly’s book was attacked for its essentialism and biological determinism by Susan Faludi’s Backlash (1992).

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Segal wrote an agenda for the 1990s, and it is interesting to have a closer look at it almost twenty years later because with regard to her conclusion, i.e. that even though there have been notable changes, the majority of men have difficulty in adopting a pro-feminist attitude, at least when it comes to the fears mentioned. As far as men were able to adjust to the changing gender relationships and division of labour, they may have learnt to be more in touch with their feelings and, according to Segal, have thus had the chance to experience the best of both worlds, which for women, is only rarely possible (1990: 319). The sociology of masculinity

In the light of these observations, it does not come as a surprise that most counter-movements are of a rather conservative or even reactionary nature. There are a few exceptions though, one of which is the sociology of masculinity, the one project which I consider to be the most useful since it adopts the lessons learnt from feminism without taking on a reactionary attitude and thus helps to theorize both masculinity and femininity from an analytical point of view without losing sight of empirical reality.48 The sociology of masculinity as a field of sociological research started in the second half of the 20th century in the United States of America.49 Since then, there has been a huge increase in publications, most notably in the 1990s. The representatives of the sociology of masculinity take for granted that feminist theories have had the most important impact on theory, scholarship within academia and on female subjectivities in general. Thus, feminism was the single most powerful political discourse of the 20th century. It is also acknowledged that in terms of sustaining unequal material advantage, opportunity, status and privilege, men have much to lose with the rise of feminism. However, as Whitehead and Barrett, two exponents of the sociology of masculinity argue, men have a lot to gain in terms of achieving emotional well-being, empathy with others, quality of relationships, reflexivity, and balance in their lives. On the other hand, the achievements of feminism cannot possibly be overrated because despite the fact that the situation of women has improved, they arguably still carry the burden of multiple roles, still receive lower wages, and 48 It would be wrong to assume that feminism has generally been conceived as an attack on male integrity. As Michael Kaufman rightly points out that there is a “growing number of men who are supportive of feminism and women’s liberation” (Kaufman 1994: 153). For an exemplary way of integrating the insights of feminism into social theory, cf. Agger (1993). 49 Cf. Carrigan et al (1987).

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suffer discrimination in terms of job opportunities and stepping up the career-ladder. Therefore, it is argued that as long as this situation remains unchanged, “there can never be a ‘post-feminist’ era’” (Whitehead and Barrett 2001: 5). Notably, most changes have come through science and technology, economic transformation and greater political pressure. But none of the changes have been brought about by the fact that men have changed. As Segal maintains, if men did in fact endeavour to change, the notion of masculinity as we know it today would not exist anymore (1990: 319). In short, despite the fact that the situation of women has been considerably improved and that some men have adopted a pro-feminist attitude, the majority of heterosexual couples still live their lives based on the traditional division of labour. Besides the myth that we are in a post-feminist era, there exists the myth that men are in crisis. The common theme within this debate is that the displays of manhood considered appropriate to the 1950s, are socially stigmatised and debased fifty years on. Many men still yearn to perform and validate their masculinity through ‘conquering the universe’, but the aggressive, dominant, emotionally repressed behaviour that such yearnings engender are increasingly seen as (self)-destructive, if not derisible. Various views are put forward as to why such a comprehensive shift in gender perspectives has come about, but most writers in this area draw on three key social markers for evidence. They assume that men are being reduced to this confused, dysfunctional and insecure state through a combination of, firstly, rampant, soulless consumerism; secondly, women’s (feminism’s) successful assault on male bastions of privilege; and thirdly, more widespread social and cultural disapproval of traditional displays of masculinity. Such ideas have a popular appeal in that they appear to provide an ‘answer’ to the complex changes that have occurred between women and men and to many men’s apparent inability to accommodate women’s new-found confidence. (Whitehead and Barrett 2003: 6)

Masculinities have always been subject to fashion, and it can be argued that perceived notions of how males should perform their gender have never been more subject to media and popular interpretation than they are in this global, post-modern age. Yet most studies highlight, despite the evident multiplicity of masculine expression, the traditional masculinities and associated values that still prevail in most cultural settings. Given the clash between the modern, theoretical insights into gender identities and the traditional views that still dominate the popular discourse, masculinity – as well as its alleged crisis – could be conceived of as a myth. Even so, those who are affected by it probably do not see it as such wherefore the phenomenon is socially relevant.

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It is interesting to consider whether the renaissance of laddish behaviour in the 1990s can a) be understood as an expression of ‘masculinity in crisis’ and b) whether this ‘crisis of masculinity’ is in any form different from precedent crises, i.e. can this ‘new’ celebration of masculinity be viewed as a reply to or even a backlash on feminism? As Whitehead observes correctly “it should be noted that in all these radicalised expressions of masculinity, as in others, there is invariably some element of approving female gaze. In this respect, forms of femininity can be seen to collude in the reification of masculinities, reminding us that the conditions of gendered ontological quest are not confined to men” (2002: 220). Let me come back to the above mentioned blurring of gender behaviours and the masculine-feminine spectrum I drew attention to. In the popular film of the 1990s, this troubling of gender identity was often an issue; The Full Monty (1997) is a good example to illustrate this. In one memorable sequence of the film, Gary, one of the main protagonists, witnesses through the keyhole of a toilet door at a man’s club how a woman is urinating while she is standing. As Farrell observes accurately, “[b]oth the invasion of the masculine space of the Working Man’s Club and the appropriation of a masculine bodily performance by a woman generates extreme anxiety for the men” (2003: 120). This shows that men in crisis are not only challenged by a general feeling of insecurity in terms of what it means to be a ‘proper’ man in a post-feminist age, but they are also confronted with women transgressing their gendered space, exhibiting typical male behaviour. As Gary concludes in The Full Monty: “They’re turning into us; […] in a few years, men won’t exist, kept in zoos or something” (ibid). The example of the woman appropriating male behaviour may be read in two different ways. Either she does indeed have the intention to act like a man because she simply prefers to do so in that given situation, i.e. she thinks it is simpler to use the toilet in a masculine fashion, or she is aware of the subversive potential that is attached to her behaviour and thus ironises the way men typically behave. The first case would support Whitehead and Barrett’s claim that masculine behaviour often takes place under the approving ‘female gaze’. In the second instance, the gaze might well be the man’s again because the urinating woman could be fully aware of the fact that she is being observed and hence tries to shock the male looker-on. Whatever the case may be, the fact remains that typical gender roles, once exclusively ascribed to either femininity or masculinity, have been increasingly subverted. Another example is the already mentioned new market for men’s clothes, health and beauty, usually associated with the New Men Movement. This direct preoccupation with the male body and masculinity in men’s magazines is unique and thus crucial in the construction of masculinity and masculine identity.

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The display of well-groomed male bodies again implies an approving gaze. Since the addressees of this particular market segment are predominantly male, it has sometimes been claimed that men’s magazines further homoeroticism by seducing men to look at other, goodlooking men. Consequently, the same claim has been used to explain the backlash to New Man in the form of New Lad (Benwell 2003: 156).50 On balance, the reason for the crisis of masculinity may be likewise put down to feminism and the women’s liberation movement, and the arenas where masculinity is focalized and gazed at as the marked gender, such as men’s magazines. Men have become aware of the fact that how they dress, act and comport themselves does not go unnoticed, either by women or men. The gay community especially has been perceived – maybe stereotypically – as paying a lot of attention to fashion issues, and in order to score highly, one is well-advised to make an effort when it comes to questions of appearance.

Crisis versus discourse

Let us now come back to the paradox of there being no clear-cut script for gender identity, including masculinity on the one hand and the need to essentialize gender behaviour on the other. It is quite safe, in my view, to read the ongoing struggle between the New Man and the New Lad-movement exactly along these lines. Neither of them provides a homogenous way of designing men and masculinity, with the qualification that maybe the New Lad-script may be slightly more restricted to a unifying model for masculinity. Benwell draws attention to the fact that, especially in men’s magazines, there has always been a visible, “perpetual oscillation between two forms of masculinity: traditional, heroic masculinity and ironic, fallible and anti-heroic masculinity” (2003: 157). Even though there is a slight tendency to associate the former with New Laddism and the latter with the New Men Movement, I would argue against such a conceptualisation. Rather, the crisis of masculinity is fuelled by the multiple masculinity scripts that are on offer, their treatment in the different media segments such as men’s magazines (or popular male fiction) and the transgression of heteronormative masculine behaviour by men and women alike. Therefore, it is questionable whether the two masculine gender scripts that were played out against each other during the 1990s are sufficient to make sense of the confusion, uncertainty and inadequacy articulated

50 Interestingly, Tim Edwards uses the image of the narcissist versus the one of the playboy to articulate the tension between the New Man and the New Lad as it has become visible in the men’s magazines of the 1980s and 1990s respectively (2003: 141).

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in the male confessional novel. Similarly, it is doubtful whether the crisis of masculinity is any way helpful other than regarding it as a specific manifestation of the general uncertainty in terms of gender identity by which men and women were equally affected in the 1990s, and as for that matter, probably still are. So it would appear that we have to take a different approach to make sense of the crisis phenomenon wherefore I suggest replacing the term ‘masculinity crisis’ by ‘emergent discourses of masculinity’. As we will see when discussing my analysis of the male confessional novel in Part II, the uncertainty that marks the narratives takes on various forms, exceeding the simple distinction between New Man and New Lad. Identities are complex and multi-layered, and gender is always performed in conjunction with other identity markers, including class and ethnicity. Furthermore, these discourses of masculinity – which are mostly conceived of as heterosexual – do not occur in isolation but are influenced by and produced in concurrence with other gender discourses, such as feminine or alternative masculine discourses (e.g. gay, queer, transgender etc.). Secondly, it is significant that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between separate discourses, i.e. it would be naïve to suppose that they operate in terms of clear-cut boundaries. It thus follows that despite the common assumption that men and women are assigned to separate spheres (cf. Gerson and Peiss 1985), the discourses that originate from these realms not only cross boundaries, but to a large extent blur them as well. Against the background of the above, we should refrain from using masculinity in the singular and be aware of the fact that there is no unified concept of masculinity but rather a plurality of masculinities, i.e. masculinities that are constantly being articulated and negotiated in discourse. To conceptualise masculinities as discursive and anti-essential (as opposed to prediscursive and essential) has the advantage that it furthers a discussion without taking the risk of falling back into the biologically determined dichotomy male/female. It thus becomes possible to explore masculinity as an ensemble of constantly changing discursive practices and performances while also understanding it as a relatively stable political category (Whitehead 2002: 210). In the following chapter, I will concentrate on the relationship between gender and genre in conjunction with the tradition of confessional writing and the Bildungsroman (novel of education), which I understand as important precursors to the male confessional novel.

CONFESSIONAL WRITING: T H E (R E )C O N S T R U C T I O N O F A L I T E R A R Y G E N R E GENUS

AND ITS APPLICATION:

THE PROBLEM OF GENRE

In the first part of this chapter, I am going to focus on the notion of genre. Specifically, I am offering a definition that reflects its complex implications. The Latin word genus refers to both gender and genre, and bearing in mind that my object of analysis has been categorised as ‘typically male’ in one sense and as a typical representative of popular fiction in another, I consider it indispensable to base my study on the interrelationship between gender and genre.1 I will then give a brief overview of how ‘male literature’ has been conceived in literary criticism before turning to the tradition of the Bildungsroman and confessional writing. I will claim that the male confessional novel can be conceptualised as a late modern type of Bildungsroman. By drawing on the idea of the ‘flawed self’ and Christian ethos of to ‘better thyself’ I will illustrate how in the male confessional novel the flawed self has rid itself of the imperative to mend its ways. As a consequence, it seeks to excuse its faults rather than mend them. Accordingly, the late modern male confessional novel can be read as an apology for inadequacy. By way of introduction I would like to draw attention to a remark by John Frow, who asserts that “[t]hrough the use of genres we learn who we are, and encounter the limits of our world” (Frow 2006: 144). Frow’s observation implies the double meaning of genus because we construct our identity by both gender and generic preferences. In other words, we may prefer autobiographies and distinctly feminine or masculine clothing as opposed to having a soft spot for detective novels and unisex garments. Additionally, we tend to make sense of the world by categorising its phenomena and by drawing up taxonomies. 1

In feminist literary theory, the homology between gender and genre has often been discussed with regard to the genre of female autobiography (cf. Gygax 1998: 3).

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From a slightly different perspective, Kress and Threadgold maintain that we rely on genre theories because “we need certain theoretical categories to describe [...] the interface between the socio-cultural world and textual form” (Kress and Threadgold 1988: 216). As critical semioticians, they depart from the assumption that texts, their producers and their recipients likewise create and are created by the social and the cultural (ibid.). In contrast to Frow, Kress and Threadgold clearly distinguish between the textual and the socio-cultural, thus establishing an analogy between the two and hence they imply that the socio-cultural context shapes texts, and texts reflect on the sociocultural contexts they are produced in. Such a conceptualisation of genre resonates with its sociological background, emphasizing modern differentiation theory. Put more simply, the more advanced and differentiated a society, the greater the number of existing and conflicting genres. This is particularly true in the media saturated society in which live today. From a media studies perspective, Thornham and Purvis claim that “[g]enres are one of the ways in which texts are made available to readers, viewers and listeners; they are one of the ways in which meanings are packaged and classified […]” (2005: 44). Whereas I agree with what is put forward here, and Thornham and Purvis go on to elaborate on their claim, I would like to maintain that the meanings are also ‘unwrapped’ according to genres, i.e. generic expectations. Genres are functional – they help to pack and unpack texts according to certain characteristics on which text producers and consumers of a given society seem to agree. To sum up, albeit rather different in their intention and scope, what all three definitions seem to have in common is the idea of convention. Writers, producers as well as readers, viewers, and listeners must, to a large extent at least, agree on what is understood by a particular genre. This conventional nature of genre is grounded in a social as well as economic principle. Publishing houses and media producers sell their products within generic boundaries. Readers and consumers choose the formats relying on the same boundaries. Genres help to facilitate the process of selection in the maze of cultural texts available to a (post)modern consumer society. Even though this may all sound very straightforward, it calls for some qualification. Consumers do not always comply with generic conventions; they cannot be forced to appreciate a specific genre because of its specific characteristics and thus might apply their own principles to decipher a soap opera or a detective novel, defying the producers’ generic implications. Michel de Certeau (1988) and John Fiske (1991a/b) have shown how media consumers can act as textual poachers, reading texts according to their own tactics and thus ‘rewriting’ the texts to meet their own personal needs. De Certeau under-

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stands this sort of subversive reading as a special skill, an art or a ruse even, applied by the weak to outdo the powerful (1988: 24).2 The second idea the approaches discussed above seem to share is the one of classification. Despite their differences in terms of their academic background and the scholarly readership they address, what all the approaches adhere to is a firm belief in categorisation and limitation, i.e. a reduction of complexity.3 We need genres in order to reduce the complexity of our environment. Accordingly, we not only reduce what is difficult to categorise but also what might enrich our lives. To put it more simply, what does not fit is excluded. However, we must be aware that what is not included does not just go away: it lingers in the margins and is likely to challenge the established generic boundaries and contaminate the definition of what supposedly lies safely within these boundaries. Bearing this in mind, I would qualify Frow’s claim by contending that in as far as the limits of our world are concerned, we establish our own boundaries and are therefore responsible for their existence as well as for what has been excluded.4 Consequently, I consider it necessary to look beyond the boundaries that supposedly demarcate genres because categories, and hence genres, can only ever be defined in relation to what they are not. Generic attribution does not follow clear-cut rules and is marked by inconsistency.5 In that respect, it is worthwhile turning to Jacques Derrida’s notion of genre since it helps conceptualise the limits Frow is referring to. Furthermore, Derrida’s understanding of genre and its related term gender, makes visible the impossibility of genre closure.6 2 3 4

5 6

A similar approach has been applied by Janice Radway (1987 and 1997) and Mary Gillespie (1995). The reduction of complexity has extensively been discussed by Niklas Luhmann (1984, 1991a, 1991b, 1997). I want again to emphasize the fact that the observation with regard to generic boundaries and the process of exclusion they entail, is applicable to both aspects genus implies. In other words, whether we talk of the categorisation of cultural texts or gender identities, if the formula according to which we categorise cannot be used without reservation, we probably refrain from calling a book a typical example of science fiction or gender behaviour as typically feminine or masculine. Cf. Dubrow (1982: 110). It is important to note, however, that the popular fiction market, and indeed any cultural industry that addresses a mass audience, works because genre closure is endorsed. By clearly attributing works of fiction to a particular, clearly-defined genre such as crime fiction, science fiction or romance, the popular fiction market keeps alive the illusion that categorisation makes life less complex, even if it just means easing the problem of choosing a book when visiting a bookstore. As Lacey correctly observes, texts would not circulate if it were not for an institution that produces the texts and therefore mediates between the artist and the audience (Lacey 2000: 133). This institutionalised mediation, we

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In The Law of Genre Derrida reminds us of the common origin of ‘genre’ and ‘gender’ as well as of the commonly assumed boundaries between different genres. As soon as the word “genre” is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind: “Do,” “Do not” says “genre,” the word “genre,” the figure, the voice, or the law of genre. And this can be said of genre in all genres, be it a question of a generic or a general determination of what one calls “nature” of physis (for example, a biological genre in the sense of gender, or the human genre, a genre of all that is in general), or be it a question of a typology designated as nonnatural and depending on laws or orders which were once held to be opposed to physis according to those values associated with technè, thesis, nomos (for example, an artistic, poetic, or literary genre). (Derrida 1980: 56; emphases in original)

The question that arises, if we accept Derrida’s claim, relates to how we can draw up a non-generic approach to the terms gender and genre. Because as soon as we try to pin them down, we rely on a typology that necessarily operates with generic attributions by defining its object of analysis in opposition to what it is not. This means we highlight boundaries and limits and therefore, whether we want it or not, as Derrida says, interdictions as well. As already pointed out, gender and genre both go back to the Latin term ‘genus’ that designates ‘a class of things which have common characteristics and which can be divided into subordinate kinds’.7 This division, or assignation, is not as straightforward as we might like to think because the law of genre “is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy” (Derrida 1980: 59). Therefore, genre escapes the genericity that it founds; in order to establish something, i.e. a principle, the principle itself has to be exceeded. At first glance this seems to contradict Lyotard’s claim that by trying to create or uphold genre boundaries, we suppress or exclude aspects that we believe do not belong to a certain genre. However, by doing this, we create abysses between genres. In short, what does not belong, is hors-genre so to speak, and by creating boundaries, i.e. generic heterogeneity, we draw attention to the relationship between

7

have to remind ourselves, works on the basis of a social contract, and in order to draw up a contract, the parties need to agree on what the subject matter is. This, at least to a great extent, is achieved by agreeing on the genre of a text. The New Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

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genres (Lyotard 1988: 128).8 Both Derrida’s and Lyotard’s approach to the problem of genre form a classic deconstructionist argument, claiming that in order to classify something, it needs to be excessive to demarcate its boundaries to other classifieds. Yet it is precisely this excess that makes it impossible to be classified at all. Therefore, Derrida concludes, one cannot not mix genres because each and every one of them is marked by contamination. Drawing on Genette, Derrida comments on the naturalization of genres whereby they became legitimised. “Suddenly, this naturalization makes these arch-genres into ideal or natural types which they neither are nor can be: there are no arch-genres that can totally escape historicity while preserving a generic definition” (1980: 62; emphasis in original).9 Being aware of the impossibility to generically classify without exceeding and contaminating genre, one might ask why the concept of genre has been such a persistent one. Therefore, a little digression into genre theory is needed here. Genre has formerly been used to distinguish between the main literary genres poetry, drama, and prose (cf. below). With the increasing interest in genre fiction such as crime fiction, science fiction or romantic fiction in the 20th century, genre was adopted into the realm of popular culture. Because of its transposition from the literary to the popular, genre was most of all associated with the less artistic and has therefore been frowned upon by literary scholars and critics. However, in the contemporary, late modern era, the term genre has lost some of its negative charge and may as well be applied to the avant-garde as to the more popular cultural field, including popular literature, film and television (cf. Duff 2000: 2). Instead of either insisting that there is a difference between popular and high culture in terms of aesthetic value and appreciation or simply abandoning the difference altogether, the re-appreciation of the term genre helps to fill a gap that has been responsible for much scholarly aggravation.

8

9

This assertion ties in with another concept used both by Derrida and Lyotard, which I will draw upon in Part II. The impossibility of completely excluding what is foreign or hors-genre, a space of hospitality is created in which the foreign may – at least temporarily – be accommodated. The relationship between genre, belonging and hospitality, as I will claim, is an important issue in the male confessional novel once one looks beyond the surface of what the novels imply in terms of generic characteristics. I am rather dubious of the analogy between ‘ideal or natural types’ because in my view they are rather different from each other. In Weberian terminology, ‘ideal type’ (Idealtypus) is a construct with which to compare abstract sense relations to empirical ones (cf. Weber 1984: 38). Therefore, ideal types are abstract constructs that should defy naturalization.

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In the following I am going to sketch how the term ‘genre’ has changed from a rather rigid (neo)classical understanding to a far more flexible, modern concept, and how it may be a useful tool to analyse contemporary popular literature in conjunction with socio-cultural phenomena and tendencies. In doing so, I am drawing on approaches not only from literary studies but also from sociology and linguistics. To put it differently, I am aiming at a concept of genre which probably approaches what has come to be called social semiotics.10 Despite the widespread use and abuse of the term genre, either of the two following definitions seems to have survived. According to the classical, Aristotelian, definition there are three generic classes, namely the lyrical, the epic, and the dramatic. During the institutionalisation of literary studies as an academic field, the epic was sacrificed in favour of the narrative or the novel, so we often find the trichotomy poetry, drama, prose narrative on the curricula of higher education institutions and universities. According to Williams, the new genre theory (as opposed to the classical, Aristotelian tradition that distinguished between the epic, lyric and dramatic) ranges from different types of novel (including genres and sub-genres), to journalism, detective stories and science fiction (Williams 1977: 181). Even though Williams is not completely satisfied with the range of possible genres to be included, he makes the point that “this kind of empiricism” represents the combination of three types of classification: by literary form, by subject-matter, and by intended readership (182). He also insists that “[f]or any adequate social theory, the question is defined by the recognition of two facts: first, that there are clear social and historical relations between particular literary forms and the societies and periods in which they were originated or practised; second, that there are undoubted continuities of literary forms through and beyond the societies and periods to which they have such relations. In genre theory, everything depends on the character and process of such continuities.” (182f)

Williams’s last point about the correlation between generic forms and societies and periods, in my view, is still a promising point of departure in the analysis of genre because it helps to shed light on the interrelated processes between the societal structure including its raw materials and the production, distribution and reception of literature and culture. Such a conception also emphasizes a fact that is often neglected in the analysis of literature, namely that it is mainly produced according to the laws of the market. The book market does not consist of the so-called belles lettres only; quite the contrary is the case. Pub10 Cf. Hodge and Kress (1988).

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lishing houses could not survive if they focused on ‘high literature’ only and did not also include popular bestsellers, cookery books, books on gardening and antiques etc., in their portfolios. As I have already pointed out, ‘genre’ used to be looked upon suspiciously, especially in 18th and 19th century. In the 20th century however, phenomena such as ‘genre fiction’ and ‘genre cinema’ have come to be considered worthy of study. This change has basically to do with two facts. Firstly, against the background of mass production, clear-cut generic attribution makes cultural goods more marketable wherefore it has become a prerogative to grant success on the free market for symbolic goods. On the cultural market, popular artefacts acquire some kind of a paradigmatic status for the mass production and distribution of new products of the same type, which are variations of the ‘prototype’. Thus relatively stable patterns for the production and reception of cultural artefacts emerge during specific historical phases whose aesthetic value does not rely on the uniqueness of the product but on the variation of the popular pattern. Secondly, due to the increasing specialization and diversification of cultural capital, genre has become associated with ‘expertise’. In other words to be knowledgeable in one particular genre, ranging from the 19th-century novel, pulp fiction to horror films, being a fan of a particular genre may be regarded as some kind of cultural capital.11 Gelder terms this development the accumulation of generic knowledge, which not only makes the genre aficionado stand out as an expert in opposition to an undistinguished popular culture addict, but it also makes a clear distinction between the mass cultural versus the subcultural, i.e. between the cultural and the industrial (Gelder 2004: 82ff). Drawing on Bourdieu, Gelder claims that such knowledge acquires the status of symbolic capital which involves peer recognition and prestige. Since such knowledge is often distributed in specialised magazines that are circulated outside the university but are nevertheless written by experts claiming a semi-scholarly status, Gelder concludes that “[c]ultural capital gives the genre magazines […] a para-academic identity” (2004: 91f). This furthermore confirms the fact that the once clear-cut difference between high and popular culture on the one hand and that between specific genres on the other has increasingly been blurred. 11 Rainer Winter’s study of horror film fandom is such a case in point. Winter argues that the excessive consumption of horror films can be understood as a creative and highly specialized form of media acquisition. The horror fan is not depicted as an admirer of senseless horror and violence, but as an expert who applies specialised skills to the analysis of horror films, thus appropriating the material according to his or her own creative potential. Therefore, the raw material of such horror films is turned into distinguished knowledge and expertise and thus attains the status of highly specialised cultural capital (cf. Winter 1995).

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This process probably started as early as the 1960s but since the 1980s it has become a manifest phenomenon related to the media explosion. Furthermore, media formats have been blurred as well, and ‘hybrid genres’ such as ‘infotainment’ or ‘reality show’ have furthered the dissolution of established genres and the production of new genres at the same time. To sum up, we are faced with different levels of blurred genres. Even though the book market promotes books according to clear-cut genres to which they allegedly belong, fiction often defies distinct generic boundaries. It is my hypothesis that the male confessional novel is such a blurred genre that works on the basis of variation on a prototypical formula. Furthermore, as I put forward in the preceding chapter, the new discourses of masculinity that transgress, mix and blur established ones such as the New Man-discourse or the New Laddiscourse, the performative nature of masculinity at the same time creates and breaks down genre boundaries. Since genre in my research context refers to both a certain type of narrative fiction and to masculinity as well, I am now going to elaborate on the notion of literary masculinity. In anticipation of my analysis of the male confessional novel that will follow in Part II, I again want to underline the importance of the relatedness between gender and genre with regard to the problem of identity construction and identity crisis as elaborated on in the previous chapter. To summarize, the search for identity is both reflected in gender and genre, or put more simply, boundaries are being searched for in terms of both masculinities and texts.

FROM

GENDER TO GENRE: MALE-AUTHORED BOOKS

–

TOW ARDS UNE ÉCRITURE MASCULINE?

Literary masculinity occupies a rather ambiguous place in literary criticism. Most canonized works are male-authored, and therefore masculinity is as taken for granted as it is ubiquitous. Yet masculinity as a generic différend has only very recently become a research subject. Peter Middleton summarizes this paradox rather nicely, saying that “[m]en haven written plenty about themselves as men; little of it consciously” (Middleton 1992:2).12 One might argue that history as

12 This holds most certainly true regarding the canon, written and constructed by the white, Western, heterosexual man. We should not forget, however, that apart from a wide range of literature that does not usually count as part of the canon, even within the literary establishment we might make out voices that do not subscribe to the norm. Classical literature for example is full of narrated homoerotic experi-

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well as literary history is man-made and male-centred, and only since the feminist movement, or rather in response to the feminist movement, have men emphasized the necessity to consciously write about and reflect on themselves. As David Rosen remarks in the preface to The Changing Fictions of Masculinity, from a feminist perspective male-authored fiction has often been discussed as a history of tyranny (1993: xii). 13 In his study which stretches from Beowulf to Son and Lovers, Rosen explores the territory of literary masculinity, questioning what these works tell us about men. He summarises the problem which in his view has dominated literary criticism on male-authored books for a long time, claiming that “[t]he male view, defined as difference, has to a great extent remained trapped in its past, its relationship to the difference of feminist construction and deconstruction – the hero, the victimizer, the killer. But it is time for men also to begin decentring old gender ideas about themselves” (ibid). Berthold Schoene-Harwood makes a similar point claiming that men lack the adequate means to articulate male emotional complexity which results in a paradox: men are deprived by the same discourse mechanisms that empower them (2000: ix).14 Schoene-Harwood’s book is one of the few publications that concerns itself with narrative masculinity up to the New Man.15 Additionally, Schoene-Harwood also includes a chapter on Neil Bartlett’s Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, thus incorporating a gay male ence, and even in the writing of Lord Byron we can find traces of homoeroticism and bisexual undertones (cf. Louise Crompton 1985). 13 Funnily enough, even those writers who have been accused of chauvinism or misogyny have demonstrated that they are able to explore female emotions rather than male ones. A good example is D.H. Lawrence (cf. Horlacher 2006: 580). 14 As I will argue when discussing the male confessional novel in Part II, the male protagonists, without exception, are in search of change. They have reached a dead end in their lives, and some change or another is required. Given the high level of self-reflexivity by which the male confessional novel is marked, the protagonists are, to a great degree, aware of their problematic situation. However, as I will show by drawing on Derrida’s concept of aporia, it will become evident how the male anti-heroes deconstruct the very foundation they have created to make the change happen. By creating a situation that would enable them to escape their predicament, they destroy it immediately after giving birth to it. In other words, the discourse mechanisms in the male confessional novel create a paradox, too; they at the same time create and destroy the possibility of change. 15 It is important, however, to note that Schoene-Harwood does not conceive of the New Man in the same way that the media has, i.e. he does not preoccupy himself with the New Man-script as explained in the introduction, but conceptualises it as a new form of literary masculinity that is influenced by feminist thought and hence rearti-culates heterosexual relationships from a gender studies informed perspective.

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perspective and accounting for a variety of masculine discourses. In Schoene-Harwood’s study, the term New Man complies with anything that is different from traditional, patriarchal masculinity. With regard to the first conception of the New Man I suggest that despite the qualification made above, he nevertheless shares some of the concerns that are also attached to the New Man-script as I see it at work in the male confessional novel, namely the reconstruction of a gendered male identity challenged by feminism. Therefore, the self-consciousness of the writing male, masculine identity as well as the writerly selfreflexivity on being male and performing masculinity plays a major part in the fiction covered by Schoene-Harwood as well as in the more popular examples of the male confessional novel my analysis draws on. What makes Schoene-Harwood’s book rather exceptional is his bringing together what might be considered as some sort of canon of masculine fiction. He succeeds in tracing, and at the same time, challenging, the norms of patriarchal masculinity. As the author states, Writing Men intends to contour a genealogy of progressive masculine devolution from patriarchal man’s incarceration within the monolith of traditional Bildung (emphasis in original) to his present emancipatory re-authentication as a potential carrier of a pluralist diversity of post-patriarchal masculinities. (2000: xii)

He shares the belief of authors such as Whitehead (2002) or Kimmel (2005) that masculinity must be reconstructed and pluralized (xi). By emphasising the processes of coming to terms with gendered, masculine identities, and in so doing, on the performativity of gendered identity, he comes very close to Jonathan Rutherford’s dictum that “[m]ale subjectivities are always ‘in the midst of taking place’” (1996: 5). By taking us on a journey from Frankenstein to A Clockwork Orange and from Look Back in Anger to Ian Bank’s The Wasp Factory, Schoene-Harwood makes a plausible claim that there has been a considerable shift regarding the way both maleness and masculinity have been conceptualised. He traces this shift from the promotion of male freedom, legitimising female domestic confinement, usually associated with the traditional image of the hero as embodied by Dr. Frankenstein, over the anti-heroic experience of Jimmy Porter as a prototypical representative of the Angry Young Men generation, caught between ‘two opposed traditions’ (2000: 77), to the ‘ironic unwrapping’ of masculinity in The Wasp Factory (ibid: 104).16 According to 16 As already pointed out in chapter 1, there is a strong resemblance between the cynical young men of the 1990s and the Angry Young Men of

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Schoene-Harwood, “Banks employs gender parody to reveal the imitative artifice of normative standards that compel individuals to fashion themselves in compliance with an imperative ideal that does not originate in biological nature is in itself a derivative of social conditioning” (ibid). Such social conditioning, in my view, is crucial to the process of self-fashioning, for it effectively reflects the tension between what I termed social identity and self-identity in the previous chapter. Even though there is always room for deviance and subversion, a fact that I consider most important when it comes to assessing reception politics, the dominant ideology within a specific community at a specific point of time – whether we like to admit it or not – always promotes preferred ways of reading17 and hence of performing (masculine) identities. Another expert on male-authored literature, Ben Knights (1999), also agrees with Rosen and Schoene-Harwood when he draws attention to the fact that masculinities have been caught up in a ‘constant struggle with countervailing tendencies, one aspect of this struggle being “a deep suspicion of introspection, conventionally associated with dreaminess, passivity and hence with feminisation” (1991: 1). To suggest that men need to learn how to talk about themselves; they need a language that enables them to express what they feel. The problem, Knights argues, is that male voices have been taken for granted for too long, a fact that paradoxically has made them invisible (ibid.). In order to become visible, and take an active part in the gender debate, men the 1950s. What the analogy usually yields is the fact that there has been a shift from anger to cynicism, i.e. from active (political) dissatisfaction to defeatism and celebration of the self. In other words, Jimmy Porter (Look Back in Anger), Joe Lampton (Room at the Top) and Arthur Seaton (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) differ from heroes such as Rob (High Fidelity) and Frankie Blue (White City Blue) in as far as their attitude to their problems is concerned. Whereas the Angry Young Men tried to oppose or subvert the social order, the cynical young men of the 1990s are too concerned with themselves, which prevents them from situating their position into a wider social context. They strive in their individualism, and their achievement grounds more in the successful self-celebration and excusing their personal faults than in defeating the given social structure and the unequal power relations it entails. 17 By reading I refer to the term in the broadest sense possible, i.e. including all signifying practices that attempt to decipher cultural texts. The term ‘preferred reading’ is borrowed from Stuart Hall’s article “Encoding/Decoding” (1979) where he claims that there exist basically three ways of reading; the preferred, the oppositional and the negotiated reading. Hall attributes these different ways of reading, or different decoding strategies, to specific social classes. David Morley has qualified this straightforward allocation by demonstrating that an oppositional reading can be achieved by representatives of different classes, such as art students and trade union workers (cf. Morley 1980).

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must become “resisting readers of those texts addressed to them as men and as representatives of supposedly universal principles” (Knights 1999: 10, my emphasis).18 Much work that can be subsumed under the term ‘Men’s Studies’ has concerned itself with equipping men with the language of emotion. Therefore, contrary to what the representatives of the Men’s Movement claim, i.e. that men have lost their power in the course of the feminist movement, men have a lot to gain in terms of achieving emotional well-being, empathy with others, quality of relationships, reflexivity, and balance in their lives.19 To sum up, men have to learn that they too have a gender. This view has relentlessly been pressed by those working within the field of the sociology of masculinity, as the following excerpt illustrates: For the sake of this and future generations it can only be good that men recognize they have a gender, rather than perceive gender to be about women and, thus, peripheral to how they experience the world. In this respect, men are central to the gender transformations that characterize the late twentieth century and continue into the twenty-first. However, as feminists have long argued, the historical centrality of malestream writing, philosophy and political practices has served to make men invisible, particularly to themselves. (Whitehead and Barrett 2001: 3)

18 Knights makes a vital point in this respect, arguing that heterosexual maleness assumes an imaginary community just as the term nation should be understood as an imaginary community. Such communities are marked by a wish to get rid of impure elements (1999: 5). This claim is very interesting in relation to what I discussed in chapter 1, i.e. my elaboration on the literary landscape of the 1990s. As became clear, the ‘genre’ of historical metafiction was very dominant in the 1990s because of a distinct need to come to terms with the past. As, for example, the fiction by Julian Barnes shows, this is done with a certain irony. Making fun of the institution ‘nation’ with all it stands for may be viewed as a decisive deconstructive strategy in the novel of the 1990s. As I pointed out, these novels more often than not employ certain characteristics associated with realism, and I again would like to draw attention to my argument which runs through this book and which comprises my belief that the male confessional novel’s popularity during the 1990s may not least be explained in terms of the lack of realism in a large sector of 1990s fiction. 19 It is important that Men’s Studies and The Men’s Movement are not confused. Whereas Men’s Studies is used as an umbrella term to designate the – mainly social scientific –work that has been done on the notion of masculinity and whose representatives are often pro-feminist, The Men’s Movement is a reactionary, anti-feminist campaign.

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Making oneself visible has a lot to do with telling stories. As narratives not only create and highlight but also hide and make invisible, masculinities are in need of a specific discursive formation.20 Knights rightly claims that narratives not only are blueprints for future stories, but also scripts for social encounters (1999: 16f). Since there exist countless different narratives that may be imitated in communicative encounters, Knights’ claim falls into line with Whitehead and Barrett maintaining that “masculinity is an unstable sign because the multiplicity allows scope for freedom and choice” (ibid: 19). What Knights furthermore contends, and what I consider to be most interesting if we bear in mind Hall’s and Morley’s reception theory based on different types of reading, is that readers need “to negotiate the real self with the implied self.”21 This applies to all kinds of text, regardless of their aesthetic or generic attribution. It does not matter whether we read Shakespeare, Nick Hornby or watch Eastenders – in order to make sense of the text presented to us; we place ourselves within the social fabric created by the text. Or as Knights says, “reading is one mode in which we test out discourses”. What I particularly appreciate about Knights’ claim is the fact that he departs from the premise that the reader or viewer is an autonomous subject, i.e. one theoretically subjected to and challenged by the dominant reading, but by placing great emphasis on the intentional nature in terms of social experiment, it at the same time becomes clear that readers and viewers impose their own agenda onto the text.22 It is crucial to acknowledge, however, that, as Knights says, “there is no such thing as a text in itself” (1999: 20). Texts are products of material and social practices, including institutions of education and distribution, but also expectations of 20 In this respect, Nünning and Nünning’s claim that there is a close correlation between narrating gender (‘erzählendes Geschlecht’) and narrated gender (‘erzähltes Geschlecht’). This sort of differentiating between story-oriented and discourse-oriented theory of narration creates a systematic framework in order to analyse the different constituents of narrative texts (2006: 34f). Since narrative forms can never be perceived as ideal types, independent of the historical context, such a conceptualisation of gendered narratives underscores my claim that the reason the male confessional novel emerged in the 1990s and had established itself as a dominant genre by the mid/late 1990s must be seen within the intertextual context involving the rearticulation of gender behaviour and the negotiating of cultural scripts such as the New Man and the New Lad. The concept of discursive formation was coined by Michel Foucault in his earlier ‘archaeological’ work and designates the rules according to which areas of knowledge are constituted (cf. Foucault 1972 and, for a good introduction to Foucault and discourse, Fairclough 1992). 21 Cf. Hall (1979) and Morley (1980). 22 Reference is here again made to Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1988).

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genre and reading. Reading is a way of using and performing cultural scripts, including gender identity. At this point I would like to come back to my claim that the analysis of the male confessional novel implies a double quest as it draws attention to fact that men are in search of their gender and texts in search of their genre. The multiplicity of voices, i.e. of cultural scripts and discourses that enable and constrain genre and gender, makes the drawing of clear-cut boundaries impossible. As I have pointed out in the previous chapter, this book aims at clarifying the necessity for an anti-essentialist notion of gender in general and masculinity in particular. Therefore, I believe Rosen is right in insisting that categories such as ‘male’, ‘masculine’ and ‘men’ are rather fluid, i.e. that despite the fact that gender differences exist, the collective ‘men’ is neither singular nor simple (Rosen: 1993: xii). Such a perspective forces us to understand manhood and masculinity as too diverse to allow singularity. With regard to what I have established above in terms of genre – the same applies to gender too because according to Rosen, it is not the aesthetic appreciation that should be at the centre of our attention, but the gaps, the silences and the contradictions that mark gendered/generic narratives. He is interested in “the spilled, the leftover, the discarded, the unsuitable” (1993: xviii), i.e. in narratives’ overflow. Literature is both capable of consolidating as well as destabilizing common social assumptions, norms and values. In order to give an example to illustrate this I would like to refer to the conduct books that were very popular, especially during the 17th and 18th centuries. The male confessional novel, in my view, is a merger between a (post)modern form of conduct book and a new form of Bildungsroman and therefore contradicts Franco Moretti (2000), who claimed that at the beginning of the 20th century, the form of the Bildungsroman was exhausted. It is the tradition of the Bildungsroman to which I will turn now.23 23 I would like to stress, though, that I use the comparison of the 17th/18th century conduct book and the male confessional novel only in the sense that they both purport to have a didactic function. Conduct books were popular form to instruct young people, especially young women. During the Renaissance, conduct books were designed to maintain the status quo, that is the social hierarchy. As England moved from a hierarchical society to one with a thriving middle class, social mobility became a feasible possibility. Women in particular had the opportunity to make a match with somebody of higher rank than themselves and therefore improve their social status. Conduct books were vital to give women an appropriate sense of how they should behave, think, feel, and respond in a new sphere of social interaction. However, what the books addressed between the lines was the need to curb women, to keep them from becoming too mobile, too aware of their capacities and abilities. Hence, the books were gestures of warning and approbation, texts to keep women controlled and subdued. In the modern confes-

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MALE CO NFESSIO NAL NOVEL AS A LAT E MO DERN

TYPE OF

BILDUNGSROMAN

In order to understand the similarities and differences between the traditional Bildungsroman and the late modern Bildungsroman, we first have to establish what is usually understood by the term (E: educational novel; novel of formation) by briefly looking at its, mostly German, origins.24 Bildungsroman designates a type of fictional narrative that dates back to the late 18th century. A typical Bildungsroman traces the formation years of its adolescent protagonist from childhood up to the onset of a professional or creative vocation. The generic term Bildungsroman, on the one hand, stands for a literary innovation in as far as became evident that in contrast to earlier narrative forms, a new type of novel had been established. On the other hand, by virtue of in-depth comparative analysis, it became evident that a group of ‘new’ novels exhibited a number of shared characteristics in terms of form and content. (Gutjahr 2007: 7)

The emergence and establishment of the Bildungsroman as a genre occurred simultaneously with a specific educational ideal such as represented for example by Schiller in Aesthetic Education (Jeffers: 2005: 2). According to Bakhtin, the Bildungsroman is ‘the image of man in the process of becoming’ (quoted in Jeffers: ibid). This is a very compelling claim, especially since today, formation or education is a lifelong process, unlikely to ever come to an end. However, in the 18th century, the process character of the training was restricted to the formative years, i.e. its ultimate goal was a mature and complete human being. As I will show later, this idea is inextricably linked to the sional novel, I see a similar message to men, suggesting that if they postpone commitment for too long, their female partners will lose patience. As for the similarity between the male confessional novel and the traditional Bildungsroman in this specific respect, I understand the process of maturation as a means to improve the shortcomings that is responsible for the implied warning. 24 In German, the Bildungsroman is usually subdivided into three subcategories, the Entwicklungsroman (novel of development), the Erziehungsroman (novel of formation) and the Künstlerroman (artist’s novel). In English, Bildungsroman is used in its broadest sense, i.e. as a synonym for the novel of youth or apprenticeship (cf. Buckley1975: 13). Jeffers translates Bildungsroman as novel of self-cultivation, which I think in some cases is the best possible translation when it comes to define the male confessional novel of the 1990s. Against the background of the hedonistic turn that foregrounds self-fashioning, the term self-cultivation seems to anticipate, already in its traditional understanding, the cultural changes that took place in the late 20th century. I will come back to this term in Part II.

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notion of confession, not least because the religious purpose of confession is to purify oneself of one’s sins. But let us come back to the development of the Bildungsroman. Even though with regard to its origins and its early developments, the concept of Bildungsroman is specific to German literature, today, it is applied to novels written in other languages too, mainly in French and English.25 The English terms ‘novel of formation’ or ‘educational novel’ point to the fact that the main protagonist typically undergoes a process of maturation – or a phase of initiation, which is important because “[a] successful initiation leads to group solidarity and a warm sense of belonging; a successful adolescence adds to these a profound sense of self – of one's personality (Moretti: 2000: 106). The tradition of the English Bildungsroman dates back to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (cf. Kroll 1994) and comprises novels such as Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Elliot’s Mill on the Floss and Dickens’s David Copperfield and Great Expectations. The Bildungsroman is about the maturation process of a protagonist who in virulent confrontation with social norms and the natural environment aims at finding an adequate, socially accepted lifestyle that is also in compliance with his talents and desires” (Gutjahr 2007: 8; my translation).26 The founding father of the Bildungsroman is the German Romantic writer Goethe. With Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795), he created a work that laid the foundation of the generic typology to which most of the later educational novels, in some way or another, refer back.27 German professor Karl von Morgenstern claimed that Goethe’s book might be viewed as the arche text of the genre (Gutjahr 2007: 17). In Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in the typical fashion of the Bildungsroman, the hero un25 As Horlacher points out, the canon of American literature is also saturated with examples of the Bildungsroman (2006:30). Reference is here made to the novels of Hemingway, Faulkner and Dos Passes. As for the English tradition, the idea of Bildung was translated into ‘Culture’ by people such as Carlyle and Arnold, Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot (cf. Jeffers 2005: 4). 26 Im Bildungsroman geht es somit um die Reifung eines Protagonisten, der in spannungsvoller Auseinandersetzung mit sozialen Ordnungen und der natürlichen Umwelt das Ziel verfolgt, eine seinen Neigungen und Wünschen angemessene und zugleich gesellschaftlich kompatible Lebensform zu finden (Gutjahr 2007: 8). 27 Apart from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Karl Philip Moriz’ Anton Reiser (1997 [1786]) is often considered an important novel that contributed to the generic institutionalisation of the Bildungsroman. Moritz’ novel is noteworthy in that respect because as Michael Minder puts it, “[t]he assumption that experience contains its own redemptive coherence is the idea on which Anton Reiser is based” (1997: 82). This ties in with the claim made by the social semioticians that coherence is vital to establish a plausible and consistent lifestory and sense of the self.

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dergoes a journey of self-realization during which he acquires emotional, aesthetic and artistic knowledge and appreciation, and ultimately, his self-identity. The story centres upon Wilhelm's attempt to escape what he views as an empty bourgeois life. Disillusioned after a failed attempt at acting, he starts frequenting the members of the secret Tower Society, consisting of a number of learned and sophisticated noblemen who guide him towards his true vocation. As Thomas Jeffers observes, Wilhelm Meister resolves the conflict between the individual’s ego and the community’s requirements for compromise in paradigmatic fashion. Wilhelm realizes he has got to fit in, that is, in a mature ‘can’t-beat-‘em-join ‘em’ accommodation, he internalises the community’s norms by getting married, that classic comedic symbol for the self-writing social contract. (Jeffers 2005: 51)

As always in a Bildungsroman, Wilhelm’s self is flawed. Towards the end of the novel, Jarno, Wilhelm’s educator, comments on his (Jarno’s) poor skills to teach those who err, saying that he always feels compelled to cry out to someone who is about to make a mistake. He fell out with a curate, another member of the secret society, who claims that “an error can only be mended by erring” (Goethe 1982 [1795]: 577).28 It is exactly this idea of learning through one’s mistakes, i.e. to become a better and enlightened person that forms the very basis on which the generic characteristics of the Bildungsroman rest. Such a philosophy is unmistakably and self-evidently grounded in the Christian doctrine of to ‘better thyself’. Hence it does not come as a surprise that when, against the backdrop of the Enlightenment, subjectivity was granted a more important place in the 18th century, educational matters were no longer primarily seen within a religious context but were adopted into the discourses of anthropology, pedagogy and aesthetics (Gutjahr 2007: 9). However, the doctrine of ‘bettering thyself’ is usually undermined in the typical Bildungsroman, as it is at odds with the hero’s narcissism. The young protagonist, often an aspiring artist, is likely to be in love with his own complexity, the reflection of which serves as a metafictional and self-referential device to strengthen the reader’s consent (Knights 1999: 61f). The protagonist makes himself vulnerable by exposing his flawed self and does not present himself as a strong character with whom a reader would like to identify. In order to keep the reader’s interest, he needs to win his sympathy. 28

“Darüber habe ich nun immer meine Not mit dem Abbé, der behauptet, der Irrtum könne nur durch das Irren geheilt werden.”

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This is also the case with late modern Bildungsroman. It does, however, differ to some extent because in the traditional Bildungsroman, the reader could at least to some extent rely on the authority of the creator of the novel, i.e. the author. Without explicitly referring to this distinction between the two versions of the genre, Knights makes an interesting observation with regard to the authorial male figure by drawing on Barthes’ distinction between work and text. Barthes associates work with the father, the patriarchal authority behind a work. By shifting the emphasis from work to text, “we read without the guarantee of the father” (Knights 1999: 71). He further argues that the shift from work to text has radical gender implications, especially by asking ourselves how the self-referential dynamics of male literary production may shape but also be subverted by the dynamics of reading. In other words, do we ‘trust’ the narrator in a text after the death of the author? In this respect we can make out a crucial distinction between the traditional Bildungsroman à la Goethe and Dickens and the male confessional novel. The former is assessed against a 18th/19th century patriarchal society where male authority (in both senses of the word) was unlikely to be questioned, and female agency more often than not was suppressed, and therefore, the self-referential and confessional dynamics evolved around the Christian motif to better oneself. In contrast, the latter clearly uses the device of self-reflection against the backdrop of feminism and consequently, against what women expect of men in terms of changed gender relations. This brings us to the most significant difference, and it would be impossible to exaggerate its importance: the late modern confessional narrative has an addressee, which is not constituted as a moral instance ultimately pointing at God, but as the community of emancipated women who do not want to tolerate patriarchal structures and men who ascribe to them. The flawed self in the male confessional novel is thus conceived as a historically specific male inadequacy against the background of the changing mores of the late 19th century.29 According to Knights, D.H. Lawrence is an interesting example when it comes to defining texts as typically male, operating within and reproducing patriarchal structures. Even though Lawrence is usually considered to be “one of the most ‘phallic’ of 20th century authors” (1999: 88), we have to admit that he also engages “in a critical account of masculinity which inevitably raises questions about the na29

This is particularly interesting with regard to the readership of the male confessional novel. As my analysis of reader reviews has yielded, there is a large number of female readers who assess the male confessional novel in the light of what they expect of men and the extent to which they (men) fail to live up to their expectations. I will comment on this phenomenon in more detail in Part II.

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ture of male being and of male power” (1999: 89). Furthermore, Lawrence makes visible the vulnerability to which men can be subjected, a topic that has traditionally been negated. In this respect, the male autonomous space is being challenged if not invaded, and therefore, [m]uch masculine narrative can be seen as an attempt both to define the arena of domesticity as an enclosed and claustrophobic space organised under the sign of the woman, and, having done so, to propose escape routes into another domain where being and action could be more authentic. (Knights 1999: 90)

With respect to the male confessional novel, this is an intriguing claim because there, too, we cannot but witness such ‘proposed escape routes’. As I argue when discussing the novel by John O’Farrell The Best a Man Can Get, the text very much suggests the need for the creation of separate gendered spaces. The main protagonist of the novel lives a double life, having a wife and children in North London while sharing a flat with three other men in South London. His flatmates have no idea he is married with children, and his wife believes that when he is away from home it is because he has to work late nights in his studio. The motif of flight or the desire of male freedom is being thematized within a framework of contemporary gender relations. What makes this example rather striking if we assess it against the background of the traditional Künstlerroman, is that the hero of The Best a Man Can Get may be described as some kind of late modern ‘artist’. He is a jingle writer by profession, which means that his job involves creativity, even though this creativity may be rather different from a 19th century painter or novelist. But as I have pointed out, in the light of the blurring of boundaries between high and popular culture and the increasing expertise in the field of the latter which forms part of what we call cultural capital, the fact that many of the ‘heroes’ of the confessional novel work in the media industry can be read as a late modern re-invention of the artist protagonist of the 19th century Bildungsroman, and of course in true postmodern fashion, as a parody on the traditional form of the Künstlerroman. There are two characteristics of the traditional Bildungsroman that have survived and decidedly characterize both the storyline and the rhetoric of the male confessional novel of the 1990s, namely the desire to fit in and the notion of the flawed self. It is against the backdrop of these two characteristics, taking them together as what I call below the problem of inadequacy, that I will discuss my reading of the novels by Nick Hornby, David Baddiel, and Tim Lott et al. Even though social and communal norms and requirements have considerably changed since the 18th century, and the anti-hero of the 1990s male confessional novel does not necessarily have to get mar-

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ried in order to fit in (even though that might be the case in some circumstances) he nevertheless feels compelled to play along or join in. The problem the late modern protagonist faces as opposed to the young protagonist of the 18th/19th century, though, is that he does not really know what his community’s requirements are. Fitting in, in the late 20th century, is not as straightforward as it used to be, and is probably one of the most pressing problems subsumed by the crisis of identity and the crisis of masculinity I discussed in the previous chapter. This also highlights the idea of ‘the flawed self’, which has survived into the 20th and 21st centuries. The case of the publications of thousands of self-help books serves to illustrate this phenomenon. We might reasonably assume that the need for self-improvement and the desire for self-fulfilment is inherent to humanity. There can be no doubt that there is a close relationship to Weber’s claim, namely that there is an intricate, if not inherent, relationship between Protestant ethics and capitalism, because to better oneself holds a double meaning. First, in a more religious sense, it means to become a ‘better’ person, ethically and morally. A second, related issue in the light of capitalism is of course the wish to better oneself in terms of personal wealth and welfare. It is within the framework of this development that I want to understand the popularity of the Bildungsroman, both in the traditional and the post-traditional or new form. With regard to the male confessional novel, the ‘post’ or ‘new’ results from the fact that the increasing importance of lifestyle magazines and self-help books have helped to shape the ‘genre’ which becomes evident not only in the literary mode in which most novels are written but also in the fact that many of the protagonists as well as their creators are working in the media or media related professions. We can draw two conclusions from these observations. First, the high degree of late modern intertextuality unquestionably has a huge influence on generic fiction (and vice versa), and secondly, the artist of the 18th and 19th century Künstlerroman has been replaced by the media expert. What has remained the same, though, is that, like the artist protagonist of the traditional Bildungsroman, the 21st-century media expert has to grow up at some point. To round off this section on the Bildungsroman and the tradition of confessional writing, I would like to summarise the most important characteristics I have extricated from the comparison between the Bildungsroman tradition and the male confessional novel. This is particularly essential because up to date, there has only been little exploration of popular confessional narratives. I base my analysis on the premise that the male confessional novel is a specific articulation of male insecurity that was expressed through the intertextual array of academic, journalistic and novelistic publications during the 1990s.

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The male confessional novel has to be viewed in conjunction with the media explosion on the one hand and the shift in what is nowadays considered to be highly valued professional positions on the other hand. In that respect, the modern artist is not so very different from the postmodern media buff. What has changed is the aesthetic appreciation. Whereas in modernism, art and literature were considered to have the potential for social critique in terms of form and content, in postmodernism social critique is eclectic and blurred because its form, mass media dispersion, shapes its content.30 My interpretation of the novels rests on an anti-essentialist understanding of gender identity and masculinity and thus forms part of a wider debate that argues against gender normativity and instead pleads for a performative conceptualization of gender. In that sense, I would again like to emphasize that masculinity does not exist in the singular but manifests itself as discursive formations, which I have earlier called ‘emergent discourses of masculinity’.

THE

CONFESSIONAL MODE

I now turn to discuss the notion of confession because even though confession is often associated with the Bildungsroman, it has its own history, dating back much further than the Bildungsroman. Before I focus on this tradition, though, I will anticipate some points with regard to contemporary confessional writing. The male confessional novel, like its counterpart genre, the female confessional novel, has often been discussed dismissively by literary critics. The gender-related confessional mode apparently is not considered to be suitable to fit the category ‘literary’. Books dealing with topics such as history, myth, and cultural hybridity have been far more favourably received than those which thematize what we might call the gender-induced struggle for identity.31 There seems to be a big discrepancy between successful novels in terms of literary fame and in terms of commercial success. Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s

30

31

Here I want to refer to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1973) in which he claims that the ‘work’ has lost its aura because it can be easily reproduced. The pop art by Andy Warhol is probably a good case to illustrate Benjamin’s concern. On the other hand, one might also claim that the notion of ‘aura’ has to be understood differently, and that in fact certain artworks have more of an aura than they used to have before the age of reproduction. Cf. Mengham and Tew (2003).

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Diary is such a case in point.32 While it enjoyed great popularity among a wide spectrum of readership, the book has often been accused of, as Leah Guenther puts it, “reinforcing conventional gender roles while pretending to challenge them” (Guenther 2006: 84). Guenther however reads Bridget Jones as a feminist confessional. She even claims that in her novel, Fielding thematizes what has come to be called ‘post-feminism’ by commenting on the criticism of second and third wave feminism. This argument is thought-provoking because Guenther’s understanding of the contemporary confessional novel refutes the claim often made by the advocates of the Kulturpessimismus-thesis that ‘popular’ fiction is not capable of formulating social criticism. Secondly, it shows that the articulation of alleged typical gender discourse should not necessarily be seen as a dismissal of gender-related critique but rather as a challenge to it.33 In my view, the same is true in the case of the male confessional novel. The genre not so much attacks feminism as it tries to come to terms with it. Furthermore, as was my claim in chapter 1, it is not only feminism that challenges masculinity and has plunged it into crisis but other, alternative forms of masculinity such as gay, bi- or transsexual masculinities. In the next section, I would like to discuss the concept of ‘confessional narrative’ from the perspective of its history and developments since the times of Rousseau’s Confessions. The confession narrative usually referred to as the first of its genre (as well as the first autobiography) is the one by St. Augustine (around 300 AD) in which he relates his youthful sins, such as indulging in sexual pleasures and astrology, and how at the age of thirty he decides to become a better human being by converting to Christianity. In his Confessions, St. Augustine perceives his life as a restless search for truth without which he cannot find peace. The problem he faces is marked by an aporia: how can one experience the truth about oneself as a human being by conceptualising the constitutive conditions of the conditio humana on the basis of self-knowledge (Schöpf 1994: 162)?34 Another book that played a substantial role in the establishment of the confessional narrative is The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s autobiography is actually the first confessional text that discusses worldly matters – all his precedents followed in the 32 33 34

There is an extensive homepage devoted to Bridget Jones’s Diary, cf. http://bridgetarchive.altervista.org. Cf. my criticism on Imelda Whehelan’s account of New Laddism below. This is a classic deconstructive moment of undecidability, and as will become clear in my analysis in Part II, the male confessional novel struggles with the very same problem.

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tradition of St. Augustine’s religious confession. When he was composing his autobiography, Rousseau believed it to be a book without many imitators. He has long been proved wrong because since the 18th century, the confessional mode has become an established genre with quite a few influential representatives, the most famous probably being Thomas De Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater).35 But the novels by Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë may also be counted among the great English confessional novels. But what exactly is it that constitutes the confessional mode in narrative fiction? According to Les Smith, confession in the novel is achieved in three steps, the first of which is self-scrutiny in the shape of a self-account. The protagonist usually provides some shortcomings on which he hinges the problems he is currently facing. This may involve the inability to have taken a different choice at a certain point in his life. The second step follows in a shift from the self to a transcendental being “in hopes that justification will come from outside” (1996: 33f). The protagonist becomes aware of the fact that he cannot resolve his problems without ‘the other’. The latter may be another person or circumstances that ultimately turn his fate. By becoming aware of the fact that ‘the other’ is needed, the protagonist, or the self, at the same time realises the limits of self-expression. In essence, we might conclude from this observation that all fiction becomes confessional to some degree (ibid: 37). This claim follows in recognition of two aspects characteristic to the novel. First, most narratives are, to some degree at least, some kind of life stories; at least this holds true for first person narratives. Secondly, since the self is constituted through language whose limits we are aware of in the light of poststructuralist thought, self-expression is possible only to the degree language is able to signify. As it never quite refers to what it is meant to refer to, i.e. because of différance, language at the same time enables and constrains self-expression. In contrast to the early confes35

At the beginning of his narrative, Thomas De Quincey speculates why he has become addicted to opium: “[…] Was it gradually, tentatively, mistrustingly, as one goes down a shelving beach into a deepening sea, and with a knowledge from the first of the dangers lying on that path; half-courting those dangers, in fact, whilst seeming to defy them? Or was it, secondly, in pure ignorance of such dangers, under the misleadings of mercenary fraud? Since oftentimes lozenges, for the relief of pulmonary affections, found their efficacy upon the opium which they contain […] and under such treacherous disguises multitudes are seduced into a dependency which they had not foreseen upon a drug which they had not known” (1994 [1856]: 15). As I have pointed out in chapter 1, the confessional mode often displays a playful tension between accusation and apology. In other words, De Quincey’s self-reflection on his sinful self does not differ all that much from the self-reflection conducted by the male confessor in the 1990s.

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sional narrative, the contemporary confessional novel thematizes this problem by applying the meta-narrative device of self-reflexivity.36 This already partly answers the question of what might be ‘new’ about the contemporary confessional genre. Or put differently: to what extent do books such as Bridget Jones’s Diary or High Fidelity or Time for Bed or A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius differ from, say, David Copperfield or Jane Eyre? Jo Gill elaborates on the claim about the meta-narrative gesture the contemporary confessional novel is characterised by. According to Gill, the most striking difference is what she calls double-reflexivity. Confessional narratives are always marked by a specific form of selfreflexivity. However, whereas in the earlier confessional narratives such as Rousseau’s the self-consciousness is ‘about the nature and limitations of his chosen form’, in Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius for example self-consciousness as such is reflected (Gill 2006: 8). In other words, the late modern confessor reflects on reflection. Furthermore, whereas in the 19th century confessional novel such as David Copperfield, the narrator reflects on what had happened retrospectively, i.e. in the past, the late modern confessional narrator, more often than not, reflects on what is going on in the present and how his reflecting on the present might shape and influence the future. This kind of self-consciousness on a meta-narrative level is characteristic of postmodern writing. However, as I claimed in the introduction, the male confessional novels of the 1990s are marked by a return to realism.37 How can we now work towards a matrix that ac36 One question that has not been raised so far and which on all account deserves mentioning even though this is not the place for an in-depth discussion is of course why we need confessional narratives in the first place. As Victor Seidler convincingly argues, “[w]ithin a rationalist tradition we are made to feel that we have to have ‘reasons’ for our feelings, for otherwise they become ‘irrational’ (1994: 59; emphases in original). This, in fact, ties in with Weber’s account of the relationship between protestant ethics and the emergence of capitalism, which, inevitably, is also based on the doctrine of rationalism. Since men have traditionally been associated with rationality rather than emotions, it is they who suffer most from being compelled to have reasons for their feelings. Therefore, a typical masculine trait has been the denial of needs (ibid: 57). 37 This ‘revival’ of realism can be explained in terms of the dominant position which metanarrative fiction held in the ‘literary’ segment of the publishing market during the 1990s (cf. chapter 1) and the increasing sales numbers of books by popular authors in the traditional sense. According to Clive Bloom, “by the 1990s, Stephen King, John Grisham or Catherine Cookson had become brands themselves. As such, it is no surprise that by the 1990s bestsellers were sold as any other products in supermarkets, where female purchasers spent 80 per cent of their book purchasing on impulse buying of a famous named ‘author’ brand” (Bloom 2002: 75).

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commodates both claims, i.e. that we are dealing with a typical late modern self-consciousness on the one hand and a return to realism on the other? It is important to note in this respect that we cannot simply argue in terms of form and content, but have to distinguish on the side of form between style and style-consciousness as well. Whereas the style appears to have certain traits of a genre that date back to at least the 18th century (the male confessional mode) we now have to deal with a self-consciousness of style that is not only novel – or emergent in Williamsonian terminology – but could be described as typically late modern. Here I would like to refer back to what I tried to work out in the previous chapter, namely the way in which identity construction is an unstable, unfixed and life-long process. If we take this claim seriously and apply it to the self-reflexive mode of late modern confessional writing, the double level of reflexivity makes sense because identity is not only under construction (or deconstruction for that matter) but it is likewise (and at the same time) subject to self-reflection. To sum up, there is always something outside identity, i.e. it is not quite identical with itself; it is deferred or supplemented. Furthermore, this double reflexivity is a result of the uncertainty I discussed in greater detail in chapter 1. With regard to relationships that are less fixed than they used to be in earlier times, Zygmunt Bauman makes the following observations: Most of us, most of the time, are in two minds about that novelty of ‘bondfree living’ – of relationships ‘with no strings attached’. We covet and fear them at the same time. We wouldn’t go back, but we feel ill at ease where we are now. We are unsure how to make the relationships we desire; worse still, we are not sure what kind of relationships we desire. (2004: 62)

This consideration takes up the phenomenon of the crisis of identity as well as the crisis of masculinity, and again, we are reminded that the problematic issues of ‘who we are’ and ‘who we want to be with’ are inextricably linked with each other and call for instances of decidability. Thus, being at odds with one’s gender identity likewise means being at odds with one’s relationships. As this problem will frequently come to the fore in my analysis of the novels in Part II, I will move on to propose a number of similarities and differences between traditional confessional narratives (including the Bildungsroman) and the late modern confessional novel. As will become clear, the themes have remained rather stable while Considering both of these trends, middlebrow fiction such as the male confessional novel seems to have been the perfect genre to cover the gap that has been opened by the publishing and reading tendencies during the 1990s.

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the form in which these themes are discussed has undergone various changes. Whereas Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, Egger’s A Breaking Work of Staggering Genius und Hornby’s Fever Pitch might be considered to be the prototypical works of the genre, the representatives of the male confessional novel included in my corpus display a different sort of self-consciousness and self-reflexivity. Before I comment on the differences though, let me first point out an important similarity. There is a striking correspondence between the traditional English Bildungsroman of the 19th century and the late modern confessional novel. Almost with no exception all the protagonists from David Copperfield to Rob Fleming, live and suffer in London, and therefore I venture to suggest that the urban experience is very characteristic to the tradition of the Bildungsroman/confessional writing up to today. What is different though is that the heroes of the traditional Bildungsroman (e.g. Oliver Twist) seek their fortune in London i.e. leave their hometown which is often a rural one and travel to London in order to establish themselves, the late modern antiheroes have grown up in London and take its chances and problems for granted. The 19thcentury protagonists’ maturation process is presented as a series of travels or a pilgrimage in the fashion of the Christian pilgrimage, the late modern protagonists do not travel at all; they stay put and wait for their situation to change. Another difference concerns the depiction of melting pot London. Whereas it still stands for hopes and dreams, in the 19th century the contrast between what the protagonist had and what he wanted to achieve was one between poverty and wealth, whereas today it is one between being average and being successful. What the protagonists of all types and times share is their search for romance and a fulfilling relationship. The crucial difference between the 19th century protagonist and the late modern confessor is that the former usually engages in a couple of unsatisfying or unhappy relationships that often do not work because of class differences, but finds true love at the end. The latter, conversely, is either fixed on somebody he cannot have or is with Ms Right without realising it. Consequently, the late modern Bildungsroman often denies a clear-cut closure in terms of romance and tends to end on an ambiguous note, i.e. the reader must form his or her own conclusion as to whether the ‘hero’ of the book will or will not stay in his relationship and whether it is a happy one or not. What all the confessional narratives such as Rousseau’s, Fielding’s, Eggers’ as well as the novels I am going to discuss later do have in common though, and which is the sine qua non of the confessional mode, is the reflections on the ‘flawed self’. Whereas St. Augustine’s, Rousseau’s, and de Quincey’s books comment on their flawed selves

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and their redemption from a position of hindsight, the confessors of the contemporary novel do so from inside the process of improving themselves, i.e. by means of introspection and self-commentary, they are trying to come to terms with what they believe are their flaws which pose a hindrance to find what they seek, i.e. a fulfilling love life and a successful career. This difference of time when the confessors confront themselves with their flawed selves is partly connected to the fact that in earlier confessional writing – including the 19th century novels by Charles Dickens or Gustave Flaubert – the narratives start at an early point in the life of the protagonists. David Copperfield is a little boy at the beginning of the novel; Oliver Twist has only just been born.38 The protagonists of the late modern confessional novel, in contrast, are in their late twenties or early thirties when they are introduced to the reader. Consequently, whereas we follow all levels of socialization, formation and education (or the lack thereof) in the traditional confessional novel, we are bereaved of this sort of witnessing in the male confessional novel of the 1990s. The narrators may occasionally fill in the missing information about how they grew up and what vices they had in their teens by short reminiscences. However, these observations or flashbacks have the function of self-reflection rather than providing adequate information for the reader. The reason for this difference, in my view, is twofold. First it has to do with the changed notion of realism. Whereas the novels of the 19th century were written at the peak of social realism, the male confessional novels must be viewed against the backdrop of late modern identity crisis and postmodern relativity. As I have shown in chapter 1, the literary landscape of the 1990s was saturated by historiographic metafiction and the like, against which the male confessional had to pitch itself both in terms of being taken seriously and hence display certain common features with these books, and in terms of juxtaposition, i.e. by satisfying the need for realism that the other novels did not want to do. Secondly, whereas many representatives of the English Bildungsroman have an orphan as a main protagonist, in the late modern confessional novel we often deal with a protagonist whose parents are still alive but with whom he has a problematic relationship, or to put it differently, he is not orphaned but alienated. Despite the difference, it is 38

It has to be noted though that Frédéric Moreau, the main protagonist of L’éducation sentimentale (is in his early twenties and shares a few more traits with the protagonists of the male confessional novel. He is confused, falls in and out of love, and cannot make up his mind what kind of profession to pursue. The main difference, however, is that he comes from a distinctly bourgeois background associated with artistic romanticism – Moreau compares himself with Goethe’s Werther – whereas the social context in the male confessional novel is predominantly middle-class.

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important to note, however, that both family backgrounds lend themselves to evoke pity and sympathy in the reader. In the case of the traditional Bildungsroman, this is achieved by implying that the protagonist’s predicament was induced by fate; with the 1990s protagonist, it is the social circumstances that have had a negative influence on his maturation process. Therefore, both types of confessional narrative, as Knights claims, try to strengthen the reader’s consent. Thirdly, in the classic Bildungsroman we witness how the protagonist is in search of himself, undergoes complications and has to learn a few lessons, in the late modern Bildungsroman we can never be quite sure whether the protagonist really wants to find his place. In most cases he is not really happy with where he is and with what he has got, but whether he truly wants to change the circumstances he is in we can never really be sure of because he constantly makes change impossible. Fourth, this is probably the place where it is necessary to mention the genre of autobiography that sometimes comes to mind when talking about either the Bildungsroman or the male confessional novel. The subject matter of confessional narratives strongly implies autobiographical traits. In terms of style and language, this trend is accentuated by the fact that with almost no exception, confessional narratives are written in the first person singular.39 Furthermore, two of the

39

There are a few exceptions, though; Hornby’s About a Boy and Baddiel’s second novel, Whatever Love Means, both published in 1999, are written in the third person singular. The reason why this is the case is that both novels feature two main protagonists. The following excerpt from Whatever Love Means illustrates how the specific features of the male confessional novel also work as a third person narrative: “[l]ooks like a scene from a film set in New England, […] [He] thought often about New England. He had never been, but he liked the idea of it – the idea of a new England, a fresh crisp, new England, fresh and crisp as the snow that he always imagined lined the streets there, as opposed to Old England, or rather, Modern England, New and Nearly New England […]”(142). What is interesting in the extract quoted is that to Joe, the term New England does not only refer to the U.S. state but becomes the metaphor of something yet to happen. The England he lives in is not what it used to be but has not quite become what it should be, hence “Nearly New England”. This can be read as a clear indicator of a culture in transition. British culture is pictured as a strange mix between old norms and rules, including a nostalgia for the ‘good old times’ and a (post)modern culture that has not quite found its place on the global cultural scale yet. As we have seen above, the novel is full of selfreferences in terms of narrative etc. With regard to what has just been spelt out about culture in transition, the following excerpt might give an even better insight into the necessity of being in tune with cultural changes. Emma’s mother’s Alzheimer disease becomes the epitome of cultural deficiency:

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most prominent examples of early confessional narratives, Rousseau’s Confessions and De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater are indeed, at least to a great extent, autobiographies. The educational novels of the 18th and 19th century often suggest autobiographical traits, despite being ficticious. Gulliver’s Travels or Oliver Twist may serve as two examples to illustrate this. In the case of the male confessional novel, the autobiography ‘suspicion’ is furthered by the fact that the genre can actually be traced back to Nick Hornby’s first book Fever Pitch, which, unlike his later works, is an autobiography. Because of the huge success of Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby was commissioned by his publisher to write a second book which should be similar to Fever Pitch with regard to its subject matter but different in the sense that it should be a ‘proper’ novel. Hornby consented and

“‘That’s one of the most terrible things about Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t quite (italics in original) wipe out the memory. It’d be better in a way if it did. When Mum asks me what’s for lunch for the hundredth time, it’s not just that she’s forgotten what’s for lunch – it’s also that she has a tiny memory – like a trace – of wanting to know what’s for lunch.’ Vic nodded and looked sympathetic, but didn’t quite know how to respond; he wasn’t even sure if he was meant to. Alzheimer’s was not one of the diseases he used to fantasise about; it had zero cool, because it wiped out the possibility, always there with the other terminals, of grim wit. In fact, it wiped out wit. What is wit without quick recall, especially in our ultra-referential culture? You were fine enough being a bit Alzheimery in Dr Johnson’s day, he thought, when all you had to do was make the odd epigram about Life. But these days, Vic knew, that wasn’t enough: you need to be able to name-check, to bounce-refer your wit across the pop culture spectrum from Evil Knievel to Barbapapa, and if the names are hidden behind the dry stone wall of nonmemory, then the timing’s gone, the moment’s lost” (111). As the New England, or rather new England reference shows in terms of transitional stages and cultural memory, the case of Alzheimer’s disease makes a similar point. It does something to the memory, it affects it and partly destroys it, but not quite. At any stage a particular Alzheimer’s patient finds himself/herself, his/her memory doesn’t function the way it should, but it is still there, a remainder, a trace, of what a memory should be capable of. Therefore, it also refers to itself, the memory as memory, i.e. even if it does not work properly, it is still there and reminds itself and the person concerned what a memory should do. This in-between state of personal memory is not totally different from cultural memory. In order to enter a new era, it should efface the traces of the old culture, old structures and norms prevent it from becoming into a new, fresh and crisp cultural repository, the new still overlapped by the old. In Derrida’s terminology, one might say that the new is grafted onto the old. Therefore, any memory, personal or cultural, is always in transition. Moreover, the parallelism between British culture and Alzheimer’s disease also refers to the fact that contemporary culture might not be quite healthy or sane.

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consequently produced what turned out to become the founding text of the male confessional genre, the most popular of all male confessional novels, High Fidelity (1995). Secondly, as is the case with quite a number of authors of the male confessional novel, they share the profession with their main male protagonist (such as Mike Gayle’s hero in Dinner For Two (2002) in which Dave, the main protagonist, starts to work as an agony uncle, a job that has been partly pursued by his creator as well). This analogy, of course, enhances the chance that autobiographical traits might be attributed to the confessional novels of the 1990s. The differences between past and present confessional narratives also show us how the Christian notion of bettering oneself has been changing over the last three centuries. I am not talking about typical Christian morals here. What I do have in mind though is the idea of compliance and fitting in which can be understood as a consequence of Protestant moral ethics. Reference is here again made, inter alia, to Max Weber’s Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Weber argues that there is a direct causality between Protestant Christianity and the growth of capitalism. Protestant sects such as Calvinism, Pietism or Methodism preach asceticism, i.e. to concentrate on professional profit in order to merit a better life once one has served one’s earthly duty. Weber also shows how the importance of religion decreased according to the increasing success of capitalism. He concludes that the former religiously motivated rational way of life had been replaced by a specific type of bourgeois professional ethics, i.e. the individual act of faith had been replaced by a mechanical orientation towards a bourgeois way of life (Weber 1988: 203) Even though the Weberian approach cannot be applied without serious reservation anymore because the Christian belief is not as dominant as it used to be, it continues to shape how we conduct our lives in the North-Western hemisphere; protestant ethics is a residual cultural force, as Williams would probably term it. It has been formed in the past and has been superseded by more dominant cultural forces such as late capitalism without a distinct inherent protestant ethics, but it is still viable in the social fabric and the cultural forms according to which we live and work. However, living according to protestant ethics is still a lifestyle choice, one among many others as I have pointed out earlier. Even though late modern lifestyles proliferate and cannot be pinned down to clearly demarcated categories, there is the possibility to class them on the level of norm orientation. Against the background of the outlined transition from protestant ethics to a bourgeois way of life, and bearing in mind the transformations that have taken place with regard to gender relations, the following may be concluded. Today, the status of the man as the breadwinner has come under attack. However, that does not mean that

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it is no longer desirable for a man to have a successful career. Getting a career, today, is not exclusively a question of earning good money anymore but rather a question of achieving a comfortable lifestyle, in materialistic and idealistic terms. Furthermore, for a man, getting a career does no longer necessarily exclude taking an active part in child rearing. Therefore, what is at stake, and what has been dealt with in the male confessional novel since the mid-1990s is men’s trouble in balancing outer-directed norms and values with inner-directed norms and values on the one hand, and searching for a lifestyle that can accommodate both their public and private lives on the other. The pressure of fitting in is a relic of Christian dogmatism, and even though we might not always remember where it comes from, just as we do not always remember why we celebrate Christmas or Easter, we are still somehow caught up in the ethics and mores of the Christian religion. To sum up, the term ‘confessional novel’ has had a long history and our obsession with it has different causes, part of which are explicable in the light of the above said. Additionally, what has become increasingly more important with regard to our preference for confessional narratives is of course the media-induced obsession with spying on people’s private lives. TV programmes such as Through the Keyhole40 or Big Brother reflect on and shape our preference for witnessing other people’s ups and downs. With regard to our subject matter, the male confessional novel, the notion of the ordinary and everyday that we all know from our own lives and that can be observed in other people’s too, extends to the realm of fiction. There is however, a strong autobiographical tone, not so much in terms of the authors of the books in question (with the exception of Fever Pitch and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius which are declared autobiographies) but in terms of their narrative techniques.

THE PROBLEM

OF INADEQUACY

As I have already pointed out, one of the most salient topics in the male confessional novel is the notion of inadequacy. This is not a new 40

Through the Keyhole is a panel game that has been aired since 1983, first by Yorkshire Television, later by ITV and Sky, today by BBC 2. The show is presented by Sir David Frost, who in each show has three celebrities on his panel. The viewers are given a video tour of somebody’s house and they must guess whose of the celebrities it is. The show plays with moments of embarrassment because the video has been produced in secret and the people targeted by Frost have not had the possibility to rearrange their home to make it look presentable on TV.

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phenomenon, but has been haunting confessional writing since St. Augustine’s Confessions. What has changed, though, is the understanding of its implications. In short, confessional writing has undergone a shift from the religious to the secular. The late modern flawed self does no longer strive at turning into a humble servant of God, rather concerning itself with questions of how to fit with the demands of a highly differentiated society, including the ever increasing importance of personal relationships. Since hedonism and individualism have replaced the mores and values of community, fitting in poses a serious problem. To put it differently, the late modern subject must fit in with a rather ill-defined notion of community. The guidelines as to how to behave appropriately are not handed down from generation to generation anymore, nor are they to be consulted in conduct books. The codes of adequate behaviour are dispersed, being discussed on internet forums and in lifestyle magazines. However, as is often the case in such glossy magazines, we are told what we should look like rather than how we should behave. Inadequacy of course lends itself very well to be analysed in the confessional mode. The most characteristic topic in confessional narratives has always been the analysis of either what one should have done or why one did not do the right thing when one was younger. As far as maleness and masculinity are concerned, inadequacy has often been commented on in relation to the alleged crisis of masculinity. This is also where the technique of self-consciousness and selfreflexivity become visible. In a very informative and at the same time entertaining publication, Robert Twigger summarizes the predicament contemporary male human beings face as follows: Maybe it isn’t just a lack of male-being activities that makes men want to ‘prove’ themselves. Maybe we have a ‘need’ to prove ourselves, and one purpose of a primitive rite of passage was to deal with this once and for all. After a really difficult and dangerous rite of passage you need never have to prove yourself ever again. Maybe it was a cure for the otherwise everpresent annoyance of male-proving activity. (2002: 51)

In how far this is an innate need for a rite of passage that supposedly makes a man out of a boy is useful and the lack of it is responsible for the masculinity crisis, I do not venture to judge. From a scholarly perspective, though, I find it rather problematic to hinge the malaise of masculinity on the principle of the rite of passage. However, the fact remains that such rites of passage have occupied a rather important place throughout literary history, from the medieval Everyman figure up to the protagonists in Lord of the Flies. What is interesting, though,

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is Twigger’s speculation on why modern rites of passage, such as for a writer to get his first book published or a mountaineer to make his first ascent of some peak (104) lack the genuine, masculine challenge that apparently triggers the process of maturation. He concludes that [a] modern rite of passage only works if you choose it, and not everyone will. The act of choosing makes it meaningful, and this is necessary since, however tough it is, if you think an ROP (rite of passage, ao) is meaningless then it will be. (Twigger 2002: 105)

What Twigger’s claim encapsulates is that late modern life is, to a great extent, a matter of choice.41 This ties in with what I have called the proliferation of lifestyles. To pursue a meaningful life, today, all boils down to constructing one’s identity according to a lifestyle that does fit. Since such choices are often gender neutral as it were, traditional masculinity has been bereaved of its gender-specific rite of passage, at least in as far as such a ritual involves a singular act of physical trial or courage. This ‘lack’, as has often been claimed, resulted in a revival of laddish behaviour. On the other hand, though, one could argue that there is still a rite of passage to be undergone – one which manifests itself in making the right choice at the right moment. In short, there has also been a shift from the physical to the emotional. As I have already mentioned, the New Lad-movement has often been understood as a re-articulation of male assertiveness and male aggression and hence as a backlash on feminism. In social pedagogy, such overly masculine behaviour has been explained by referring to the problem of male underachievement in secondary schools. Carolyn Jackson for example argues that ‘laddishness’ as assertive masculine behaviour acts as a self-worth protection strategy (2002: 37).42 We can therefore conclude that laddishness serves as a strategy to cover up inadequacy. It goes without saying that this inadequacy is rather specific, but it may have an incisive influence on how the male adult experiences inadequacy after adolescence and in different contexts. Imelda Whelehan sees a connection between ladlit, self-reflexivity and inadequacy, claiming that

41

42

This claim does, of course, only apply to industrialised countries. It would be rather presumptuous to allege the same for the developing countries where choice does not really come into people’s lives because they are too busy struggling to survive. Jackson bases her argument on empirical data which proved that in England, girls’ performances at GCSE outdo those of the boys. The data in question was gathered between 1995 and 1998 and is therefore relevant with regard to the timeframe in which the male confessional novels were written.

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Nick Hornby and lit-lads of his ilk who have established their careers to some extent on their portrayal of masculinity as inadequacy, suggest that ‘parodic self-reflexivity’ is an indicator of the changes in attitudes to masculine behaviour. It is moot to consider whether there was ever a time when the construction of masculinity was a simple matter, but it is certainly modish to present it as an obsessional state, the obsessions substituting for emotional fluency. (Whelehan 2000: 130)

While agreeing with Whelehan, I think we have to consider a further level of self-reflexivity though. Whelehan is certainly right in claiming that the self-reflexivity displayed in ladlit books are marked by a certain degree of parody. However, the parody does not only stem from the obsession that is supposed to stand in for the lacking emotional fluency. Moreover, I consider it more pertinent to talk about irony instead of parody. According to Linda Hutcheon, “[p]arody is one of the major forms of modern-self-reflexivity; it is a form of inter-art discourse” (1985: 2). However, referring to Jackson Bate, she also claims that “[p]arody is one mode of coming to terms with the texts of that ‘rich and intimidating legacy of the past’” (1985: 4). The past here, as I understand it, likewise refers to specific literary works as well as to literary genres. I do not think, however, that this coming to terms with the past in terms of either literary genres or specific literary works is at the centre of attention when studying the male confessional novel of the 1990s. On a meta-narrative level perhaps, one might claim that there are certain instances of parodying the confessional genre in the tradition of Rousseau or de Quincey. However what, in my opinion, forms the nucleus of the contemporary male confessional genre is irony. Irony, as a concept, has a wider social implication than parody in as far as it makes use of commonly agreed social norms and values and applies them in a context that seems to question the very same norms and values.43 As 43

From a theoretical point of view irony suggests a firm system of values that can be questioned whereas parody imitates and defamiliarizes established forms such as the tradition of the Bildungsroman. In that sense, the rhetoric of the male confessional novel seems to make use of a mix of irony and parody. Yet I favour irony in this context. In a popular understanding, at which the male confessional novel is addressed, irony is often understood as self-irony that is a generic characteristic of middlebrow fiction in general and of the male confessional novel in particular and designates a rhetoric device which is used to expose or confess embarrassing personal inadequacies in order to cause laughter. In a British context, embarrassment is key concept because “[t]o the socially challenged English, almost any social situation is potentially highly embarrassing, so we have a particularly rich source of comic material to play with” (Fox 2004: 217).

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Whelehan’s thesis in Overloaded. Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism suggests, the insights and achievements of second-wave feminism are in danger of becoming trivialized in the wake of what is called post-feminism. She concludes her study on a rather cynical note, stating that “feminism’s success has been announced rather prematurely, and what we seem to witness at the level of popular culture is, on the one hand, a flourishing of nostalgia for the ‘old order’ of babes, breasts and uncomplicated relationships, and on the other a sense of powerlessness that as, taken individually, such images are ‘harmless’ or trivial, so there is no clear platform for critique” (2000: 178f). Throughout her book, Whelehan claims that the anti-feminist depiction of women in both glossy women’s as well as men’s magazines amounts to tongue in cheek treatments that put the burden of proof on the recipient of the message (cf. 69). Whelehan also sees this postmodern, so-called humorous play with traditional gender roles as a specific use, or abuse of irony, because irony “provides the perfect opportunity for linguistic ambiguity, since you can be seen to project a particular point of view only to claim distance from, or even opposition to it” (2000: 67). The difficulty with this view is that it bases the principle of the problem on a false premise. Whelehan departs from the view that the ideological assumption underlying the use of irony, i.e. to play down the anti-feminist depiction to which glossy magazines seem to subscribe, naturalizes the misogynist attitude it supports. As much as I sympathize with Whelehan’s criticism, it must be acknowledged that irony is a textual strategy that can only ever be successful if the reader decides to adopt the reading suggested by the text. As we have learnt from ethnographic research in the field of cultural studies, this may not be the case. Readers may decide to differ, i.e. adopt an anti-hegemonic or even subversive reading (cf. Hall, de Certeau). To further support my argument, I want to come back to the case of the male confessional novel. The widespread tone adopted in the male confessional novel, i.e. the display of and reflection on inadequacy, as argued above, seems to be or a more ironic than parodic gesture. The irony has two functions. First it serves to draw attention to how men, i.e. the male protagonists are men in crisis trying to come to terms with male identity constructions hovering somewhere between New Man and New Lad, and secondly, to prove that despite the fact that they may not have the qualities that contemporary culture and gender role theories want them to acquire they still have some redemptive qualities and are, to some extent at least, adorable and desirable. The latter two attributes are hidden behind their capacity to reflect on their inadequacies on the one hand and on their boyish obsessions on the other hand. To summarize, the late modern confessors try

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to excuse themselves, which turns the late confessional novel into an apology for inadequacy. Furthermore, the obsession with inadequacy apart from not fitting in with contemporary gender roles, is also directed at another problem area. The anti-heroes of the male confessional novel are not only dissatisfied with their personal relationships but likewise with their professional positions. Therefore, the irony played out in terms of quite fitting the picture of an emotional articulate male human being bears a different marker of disquietude when it comes to career choices or rather, missed chances. Contrary to their relationships with women where the protagonists more often than not feel at a loss when it comes to deciphering female desires, they are very aware of the fact why they have missed out on the rat race and why and where things started to go wrong. Irony there is a means of negative selfdeprecation, i.e. playing down their own professional failures. They would never go as far as to admit to obvious failures with regard to the relationships with women, though. Therefore, irony seems to lend itself far better than parody to thematizing inadequacy and its personal and professional consequences. Confessional writing, as a means of coming to terms with both increasingly different and complex identity constructions and a social critique of contemporary culture that fits a market niche in the booktrade cannot do without irony. Irony helps to draw attention to a certain kind of malaise without depicting too bleak a picture. If the latter were the case, nobody would bother to buy a male confessional novel. Whereas parody is a means to thematize problem areas in what we have come to term canonical literature, irony is the tone to adopt to criticise if one targets popular or middlebrow culture. In the next chapter I am going to concern myself with the notions of popular culture and popular fiction. Specifically, I will focus on the importance of the study of popular culture and then show, as has never been done before, that popular culture lends itself rather well to a deconstructive analysis.

CULTURAL STUDIES AND POPULAR CULTURE: S T R U G G L I N G W IT H A P R O B L E M C H I L D In this chapter, I set out to explore the notion of popular culture in order to establish what particular understanding of popular culture underpins my own study. I shall concentrate on some problematic issues that have complicated the acceptance of popular culture as a worthy field of research and also, how cultural studies as an interdisciplinary project struggled to integrate the study of popular culture into its agenda of political interventionism. Secondly, I will discuss the most important aspects of popular culture essential to my research. By drawing on the work of John Fiske, I will show that his insights into popular culture can help us read Derridean deconstruction sociologically, and thus re-politicize deconstruction. By way of introduction, I would like again to draw attention to the premise on which this project rests, namely the social consequences the cultural turn in the guise of post-structuralism and feminism brought about and that have to be understood in the light of the postmodern politics of difference. I have exemplified how structuralism and post-structuralism have challenged the ways in which we make use of signifying practices with regard to identity construction processes, and how the absence of origin has resulted in a radical questioning of both an epistemological and ontological nature. In addition, I have addressed the alleged blurring of generic boundaries that the postmodern turn has brought about. I have summarised the impact of the women’s liberation movement on cultural theory in terms of feminist approaches to culture and the conceptualization of gender and in a next stance, masculinity. These two cultural changes have eroded the ground in which both gender and generic constructions were thought to be safely rooted in the past. From the viewpoint that combines questions of gender and the sociology of literature, in the UK of the 1990s, the articulation of both gender and genre insecurity became visible in the literary landscape and, as my thesis runs, were articulated in the male confessional novel, searching for both a place within the book market that at that at the time was dominated by histo-

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riographic fiction, and in the gender debate, where the cultural scripts of New Man and New Lad were played out against each other. Bearing these premises in mind, I will first critically comment on the alleged erosion of the dichotomy high versus popular culture. In so doing, I will address a further problematic issue, namely why cultural studies, despite its success and worldwide institutionalisation, has had tremendous difficulty justifying the study of popular culture, both theoretically and methodologically. Even though cultural studies has produced a great many important works on popular culture, it still has, in my view, put too much effort into apologizing for popular culture deserving scholarly attention. In a second step I will try to establish the relationship between iterability and genre expectations that middlebrow fiction entails. Particular emphasis will there be placed on the relationship between the formulaic and the everyday. I will then elaborate on my thesis that popular and middlebrow fiction can be subject to a deconstructive reading, thus refuting the thesis that deconstruction is only ever at work in highbrow fiction.

HIGH

CULTURE VERSUS LOW CULTURE:

SUBVERTING A DICHOTOMY

The cultural turn induced by structuralist and poststructuralist thinking informed a great deal of postmodern cultural theory that questions binary relations as well as the tenability of master narratives (cf. Lyotard 1986). Whereas in structuralist theory meaning was explained in terms how signs differ from each other, i.e. ‘man’ is significant because it is different from ‘woman’, poststructuralism and postmodernism try to deconstruct this oppositional relation. In the realm of culture and its aesthetic, moral and economic implications, popular (or mass) culture used to be understood as the opposite of high or elite culture. Postmodern fiction for instance does not differentiate between art and craft or between the original and the copy anymore; by focusing on irony and pastiche rather than seriousness and authenticity and by drawing attention to its own constructedness, it exploits and redefines generic conventions. However, despite the widespread acknowledgement of the blurring of once clearly demarcated boundaries, the modern ghost of authenticity and artistic distinction has never been exorcised and therefore still haunts literary and cultural theory to a considerable extent.1 Cultural studies, which also draws on poststructuralist and deconstructionist theory, on the other hand, by way of integrating ap1

The same is true with regard to the modern quest for truth and knowledge.

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proaches from sociology and mass communication theory, has mainly focussed on analysing media texts and their reception and grossly neglected the study of literature, ‘high’ or ‘low’.2 I will come back to that omission in more detail later. Against the postmodern dictum that the boundaries between high and popular culture have been eroded, justifying the usefulness of analysing popular fiction should somehow be redundant. If the cultural turn is as all-encompassing as is often claimed, the term culture as well as the analysis thereof should comprise all aspects of culture. In theory the consequences of the cultural turn been accepted to a large extent; in practice that has not been the case. While a lot of especially deconstructionist research has been carried out on works that – without making it explicit – are still assumed to hold a firm place in the more favoured region of the cultural spectrum, the popular novel has not had a great deal of scholarly attention.3 The reason there is still a lot of disagreement with regard to the high/lowbrow divide, in my view, is twofold. Whereas the first problem is rooted in epistemology and scientific theory, the second is primarily a political one, i.e. a question of power. To explain the epistemological problem, for the time being, it must suffice to say that the term culture is very difficult to define and has therefore produced countless, at times rather fuzzy definitions. In an attempt to define popular culture, Stuart Hall laments: “I have almost as many problems with ‘popular’ as I have with ‘culture’. When you put the two together the difficulties can be pretty horrendous” (Hall 1994: 455). Consequently, Raymond Williams was clearly correct when he declared culture to be one of the most difficult words in the English language.4 He offered four definitions of culture, them being: an individual habit of mind; a state of intellectual development of a whole society; the arts; and the whole way of life of a group of people (cf. 1958: xviii; 1988: 87ff.).5 Alternatively, the first definition very often is understood as 2 3 4

5

One of the few exceptions is the work by Janice Radway (cf. 1987, 1992 and 1997). For a short but good example of a deconstructive reading of a popular text see Belsey’s “Deconstructing the text: Sherlock Holmes” (1990). Raymond Williams defines culture as “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language“(1988: 87). I prefer the term ‘concept’ instead of ‘word’ – since despite the usefulness of an etymological analysis à la Williams, culture is beyond the analysis of the relationship between the signifier and the signified. Culture has become a metaphor which, more often than not, includes countless other difficult concepts such as minorities, ethnicities, and alternative life-styles etc., which very often are critical and somewhat delicate issues on the cultural as well as political agenda. Williams furthermore insists that we have to distinguish between three different levels of culture: “There is the lived culture of a particular time and place, only fully accessible to those living in that time and

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culture in the sense of education, breeding and taste, the second as civilization. The third, narrower definition refers to the cultural products civilization brings about, i.e. artefacts such as monuments, paintings and books etc. The fourth and probably most creative of Williams’s definitions designates the way people on the one hand experience and on the other shape culture. It is the third and fourth definitions which, in my view, are responsible for the high culture versus low culture debate that has dominated literary and cultural studies for the last five decades at least. Specifically, what has been vigorously debated is the question whether culture is to be understood in terms of the aesthetic, represented by the fine arts such as literature, paintings and sculpture, architecture, music etc. or in terms as a whole way of life, that is in a broader, anthropological sense as the expressed culture of a specific time or generation.6 If we align ourselves with social constructivism, it then follows that culture is not a given reality but a social construction made up by signifying practices. These signifying practices include everything textual, from everyday communication to the specific interpretation of a book. It goes without saying that such a conception of culture comprises canonized artefacts, i.e. high culture as well as the popular arts. Terry Eagleton draws on Raymond Williams’s fourfold definition of culture when maintaining: “Culture can be loosely summarized as the complex of values, customs, beliefs and practices which constitute the way of life of a specific group” (Eagleton 2000: 34).7 Eagleton’s

6

7

place. There is the recorded culture, of every kind, from art to the most everyday facts: the culture of a period. There is also, as the factor connecting lived culture and period cultures, the culture of the selective tradition” (1961: 49). Stuart Hall sees some difficulties with the anthropological conceptualisation of culture because a) it is descriptive, and b) because for analytic reasons, not everything that people ‘do’ can be subsumed under the term culture. He insists on differentiating between “what belongs to the central domain of elite or dominant culture, and the culture of the ‘periphery’” (1994: 461). In my view, John Fiske succeeds in drawing up a concept of popular culture by at the same time treating it as an umbrella term and by emphasizing the different forces that are at play between the centre and the periphery (cf. Fiske 1991a, 1991b). I will comment on Fiske’s achievement further below. It goes without saying that concepts like values, customs, beliefs and practices themselves call for a definition, let alone such as “the way of life” and “specific group”. It is the latter concept which I would like to address first, since the notion of group, being associated with identity and belonging, has been most fundamentally challenged in our postmodern, fragmented and disintegrated world. Whereas in former times, one could contentedly refer to notions like “generation”, “social class” etc. things used to be much easier. Even the concept of “nation” thanks to the erosion of the nation-states has come under attack. But despite the erosion of traditional boundaries, any sort of group

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definition comprises two main aspects of the culture debate, namely beliefs and values which include a certain moral-aesthetic imperative on the one hand and communality and historicity on the other. The judgement, discernment and appreciation of culture bear a close relationship to morality and aesthetics. In a way, this Kantian-like moralaesthetic imperative resonates both in Neoclassicism and Romanticism as well as the Culture and Civilization tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries as represented by Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis.8 Alexander Pope’s criticism of literature and culture for example is saturated by a preference for classical authorial taste that is modelled on Horace’s Art of Poetry, emphasizing the notion of genius which a creative writer or poet must possess. 9 Matthew Arnold took up Pope’s notion of anarchy and Coleridge’s concept of imagination. In Culture and Anarchy (1882) without explicitly referring to popular culture as such, he established a cultural agenda which remained dominant from the 1860s to the 1950s by defining culture as ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’ (cf. Storey 1994: 3). Even though Arnold does not actually mention the term popular culture, it becomes quite clear that he views popular culture in terms of anarchy as antonymous to ‘Culture’. Against the background of the suffrage movement in the 1860s, Arnold feared the uproar of the ‘raw’ and ‘uncivilized’ masses of the working classes. He believed that “[t]he function of culture is to produce a cultured middle class: a class with the necessary cultural authority to be hegemonic. The working class are always to be on the side of ‘anarchy’, always in relation of binary opposition to culture” (ibid: 4). The masses that emerged under the industrialization and urbanization, according to Arnold, would never be in a position to appreciate the finer arts of the middle classes. A much quoted extract from Culture and Anarchy underlines this position without compromise: “The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them. On these inadequate ideas reposes, and must repose, the general practice of the world” (Arnold: 1993: 41). That is as much as saying that whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle; but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.

8 9

made up by human beings still serves a social and cultural purpose. Or put differently, the human need for belonging and having an identity is a global as well as universal one, and even if the matrix in which such feelings of belonging and identities are constituted, i.e. constructed have changed, the fact remains that humans have always been and will always be in need of such constructions. Cf. Arnold 1993 and Leavis 1930 and 1958. Cf. An Essay on Criticism (1711) and The Dunciad (1728).

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Arnold thus concludes that only ‘a highly-instructed few’, and not ‘the scantily-instructed many’, are able to bring about knowledge and truth. He thus establishes a clear sense of an informed minority culture as opposed to the ill-informed majority culture of the undistinguished masses and therefore gives birth to what later the Frankfurt School comes to term mass culture against the background of the emerging mass media. 10 This short excursion into the history of the concept of culture exemplifies how cultural theory is haunted by the need to provide definitions, i.e. to provide a story or a narrative – or put differently, to provide knowledge, and to illustrate how the ‘post’ in poststructuralism and postmodernism is engaged in a lively dialogue with its unprefixed predecessors.11 Zygmunt Bauman summarises this tension effectively: Pretences of knowledge can be doubted in two ways. One can point out that there are events for which the kind of knowledge there is […] does not have a convincing, agreed narrative; events that cannot be made into a

10

11

These Arnoldian hallmarks are later taken up by the English critic F.R. Leavis. Leavis has been considered as the cultural critic of modern times and his concepts have dominated the English education system until the 1960s. His three main works, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, Culture and Environment, and Fiction and the Reading Public, all published in the 1930s which were considered to be the years of a cultural crisis in Britain, have laid the basis for the Leavisite cultural approach. In his writing, Leavis celebrates the golden past where England had a common, unified culture. With the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, this culture was divided into two, the minority culture of those who appreciated art and mass civilisation of those who sought pure entertainment. In this sense, Leavis was the first who put forward a theory of popular culture. Leavis’s minority culture was rooted in Arnold’s culture in terms ‘of the best that has been thought and said’ whereas mass civilisation or popular culture was consumer culture as received through the emerging channels of the mass media such as the cinema, radio, popular fiction and advertising. Like Pope and Arnold, Leavis discovers a threatening anarchy and chaos in the cultural pursuits of the masses. Leavis devoted a great deal of his writings to the alleged decline of literature. He claimed that popular forms of literature were addictive and of distraction and compensation uses only. His wife, Q.D. Leavis shared her husband’s preoccupation and claimed that romantic fiction may result in fantasy and maladjustment of actual life. Her claim is reminiscent of Coleridge’s claim that there is a vital difference between imagination and fancy. Leavisism was the dominant cultural paradigm from the late 1920s until the early 1960s when one of Leavis’s students, Raymond Williams, among others, revised the Leavisite concept of culture as explained above. Cf. Baudrillard (1981), Lyotard (1984), Jameson (1985) and 1991, McHale (1992) and Eagleton (1996).

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story that men of knowledge would recognize as their own. Or one can say that the narrative that knowledge does offer is not the only story that may be told of the events, not even the best story, or at least not the only one able to claim the right to be considered “better tested”. The first kind of doubt is modern; the second postmodern. (1993: 16)

The second reason the dichotomy between high and popular culture or high brow literature and lowbrow fiction has not yet been abandoned is, to put it rather bluntly, because people in powerful positions in either academia or cultural criticism maintain an interest that this does not happen. Despite the manifold attempts of scholars working in the field of cultural studies and critical pedagogy to include popular texts, the curricula of higher education still rely on canonized works of culture. It goes without question that the works of Milton and Shakespeare are included in undergraduate syllabi in English studies, whereas popular contemporary novels such as those by Nick Hornby are only very rarely found on the lists of texts to be studied and analysed.12 This empirical observation somehow suggests the credo that if a text is popular it cannot be ‘good’, is still alive. Only texts of ‘significance’ that are ‘difficult’ and not immediately accessible to the ‘ordinary’ reader are worth studying.13 This compels us to ask ourselves what makes a text significant, or in other words, what makes a work earn the label ‘literary’? What is the intrinsic essence of literature? In The singularity of literature (2005) Derek Attridge tries to save the ‘otherness’ of literature by way of drawing our attention to its impurity and openness.14 According to Attridge, it is the openness of lit12

13

14

An observation that puts this claim into question is made by Ray Browne who comments on the curricula at American universities where apparently popular literature seems to have established itself alongside canonical works (Browne 2005: 15). In the preface to Henry James’s The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw (Penguin Classics edition, 1984), Antony Curtis writes: “The two stories in this volume are perhaps Henry James’s bestknown but, unlike many of those works by major writers singled out by the general public for exceptional popularity, they are among his finest” (James 1984: 1). According to this statement, what is popular cannot be “fine literature”. Or in other words, what is liked by a vast number of people is of inferior quality. Only what is appreciated by a minority is entitled to range among the finer works of art. A statement like this is indeed highly reminiscent of literary critics of the 18th century such as Alexander Pope, or else of conservative minds of the 19th and 20th century like Matthew Arnold or F.R. Leavis. As ‘otherness’ seems to haunt the history of popular culture, both in a positive and negative understanding, we have to be aware of where exactly this ‘otherness’ comes from since in a contemporary understanding, otherness or ‘the other’ is used in the poststructuralist

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erature that makes its study worthwhile because it [literature], has changed over the centuries. It is true that literature over the centuries has proven to have the potential to adapt to the changing requirements in social and aesthetic terms. But such a view at the same time underrates and overestimates the singularity of literature. First, it runs contrary to the Romantic assertion that one of the merits of literature is that it has a transcendental quality, i.e. that its true essence transcends place and time. On the other hand, however, the possibility to change is not characteristic of literature only. Obviously, Attridge’s claim implies that popular literature, as opposed to literature ‘proper’, has not changed because of its formulaic nature. As inspiring as his thinking may be, it still remains a way of legitimising high culture at the cost of other kinds of culture. The reason canonized literature has been able to change lies precisely in the fact it has been elevated to being part of our cultural archive. It has not changed itself, but the ways in which it is analysed have changed. Attridge furthermore claims that ‘proper’ literature is marked by a degree of creativity that may not be found in popular literature. Again, this alleged creativity has been guarded by countless scholars and critics over centuries.15 Another reason the singularity of literature seems so difficult to deconstruct is that its alleged opposite, popular fiction, is mostly conceived in terms of genre. Correspondingly, the authors of popular fiction always stand in relation to the specific genre within which they compose their works of fiction, whereas writers of literature stand on their own (Gelder 2004: 40). In other words, Elizabeth George is conceived of as a crime writer whereas Graham Greene as the author of The Third Man, Brighton Rock etc. I do not deny that the study of the canonized works is useful because the very fact that such a canon has been established – i.e. the fact itself in the Durkheimian sense as a social fact16 – is worth analysing, since the works belonging to the canon have been chosen by particular groups at a particular point of time.17 But Attridge’s attempt to

15 16 17

sense, referring to the Lacanian subject. According to Lacan, the subject is defined against something that is different from itself, the other, towards which it develops desire. Lacan explains this split by what he calls the symbolic order that pre-exists subjects and over which they have only little control (cf. Lacan 1977). This is most probably not the sort of otherness Attridge has in mind. In an English speaking context when talking about literature and otherness, reference is often made to the Culture and Civilisation tradition from as represented by Matthew Arnold and C.S. Lewis. I will address the problem of creativity when discussing the relationship between popular literature and deconstruction. Cf. The Field of Sociology (1972). Specifically, the study of the nature of a canon cannot be sidestepped if one takes Williams’s notion of the structure of feeling seriously. Ac-

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defend literature’s singularity in terms of artistic creativity amounts to robbing it of its social relevance – or as Fiske puts it: The complexities for which poetry and literature are valued are located typically in its use of language and its ability to use the full resources of a language to provide an artistic correlative of the subtle varieties and fine differences of individual sentiment. The valued links are those between people at the level of our essential humanity: It thus denies the social, and in particular avoids the political. (1991a: 120f)

As for Attridge’s claim that literature is marked by openness, otherness and creativity, I want to put forward that these properties may be similarly found in popular literature. As I will show below, John Fiske’s notion of the popular arts emphasizes exactly the open and creative potential that popular culture possesses and thus challenges the widespread claim that popular culture is being consumed by a homogenized and uncritical mass audience. In Fiske’s (1991a/1991b) view, highbrow culture (bourgeois or avant-garde culture as he terms it) does not have the sort of openness and creative potential which is inherent in popular culture. Such a stance challenges the simplistic assumption that impressive sales figures imply unreflected consumption – such a view is not tenable anymore, nor is the idea that viewers and readers of popular culture are hopelessly exposed to the cultural industries. According to Fiske “[p]opular culture is produced by the people out of the products of the cultural industries: it must be understood, therefore, in terms of productivity, not of reception” (1992: 37, my emphasis). The cultural industries provide different products at different periods of time. Therefore, what I am interested in, and what I believe should be at the very heart of any cultural analysis, is the relationship between (material) production, distribution and reception, and I therefore want to insist on the Marxist claim that cultural analysis, subsuming social change as well as cultural production, is always historical.18

18

cording to Williams, the structure of feeling enables us to see the relationship between artistic forms and social concerns on the one hand and between personal emotions and experience that are shaped in thought and consciousness and the social form in observable texts and practises in which such emotions are being articulated on the other (Brooker 2003: 239). Furthermore, the term conjuncture has an interesting double meaning: turning point and concurrence. Historical conjunctures, in Williams’s understanding are responsible for emergent cultural practices, i.e. those practices that are newly formed at a particular point in time, having a great potential to become dominant. As I have claimed elsewhere (2004), social change affects the way in which stories are told and perceived. This is true for any kind of texts; from fiction to paintings to advertisements.

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Cultural products, no matter which place in the cultural spectrum between high and low they occupy, are historical, textual and discursive evidence of a particular generation at a particular time. Culture is produced, circulated and received at a specific historical conjuncture. This is equally true for Shakespeare, Dostojewski, Schiller, Walt Disney and Tarantino.19 Even though cultural studies theoretical and methodological framework is based on the above premise, it has had serious difficulties in justifying its academic study, particularly because the idea of the transcendental character of literature and high art has been surprisingly persistent. Secondly, the interdisciplinary character of cultural studies as well as its insistence on political intervention, has created a great deal of scholarly disagreement. The boundaries between established disciplines such as philosophy, sociology or literary studies are not easily broken down, especially because the rigidity of academia and its representatives have always favoured specialised expertise rather than inter- or transdisciplinarity. There are other reasons, and in a short digression I will comment on the reason popular culture has time and again forced cultural studies into an apologetic position, and then outline three problems areas that in my view have contributed to the said difficulties.

CULTURAL

STUDIES’ PREDICAMENT OR THE

SPECTRES OF

MARXISM

Popular culture has been made responsible for the decline of true, i.e. high culture. Associated with mass production and unsophisticated entertainment, popular culture does not make an attractive object of analysis for the defenders of an aesthetically and morally superior version of culture. From the sociological point of view of cultural studies, however, popular culture gains an altogether different social potential. To put it differently, the study of popular culture has likewise been cultural studies’ trump as well as its Achilles heel. Popular culture has

19

Of course this claim may be easily refuted if one considers their significance in general because it seems obvious that the works of Milton, Shakespeare and Dostojewski have already proved to be of a longstanding cultural value whereas it seems unlikely that the same will happen to Pulp Fiction. On the other hand, at least as far as the importance of the historical conjuncture is concerned, King Lear, Paradise Lost, Notes from the Underground as well as Pulp Fiction are all testimony to a particular cultural intervention at a specific time, be it the dissatisfaction with a feudalist society, with socialist utopianism, with the decline of the epic tradition or with the modernist separation of humour and violence.

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always been and probably will always be not only a site of struggle, but also a site for struggle. Even among cultural studies scholars there does not exist a mutual consent as to the significance of popular culture. Stuart Hall, one of cultural studies’ most prominent representatives, does not seem to harbour a particular liking for popular culture. Being strongly aligned with the Marxist tradition, he believes that popular culture is important because it is, as explained above, the site where everyday struggles between the powerful and the oppressed take place. This is “why popular culture matters. Otherwise to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it” (Hall quoted in Procter: 2004: 11). Given such a condescending view about the object of analysis from one of the most prominent defenders of cultural studies, – not surprisingly – the seriousness with which the significance of popular culture has been advocated is undermined. To conclude, cultural studies scholars have at the same time been proud and ashamed of focusing on high culture’s often despised counterpart. This predicament is usefully summarised by Stefan Herbrechter, who states [f]or some it may still be a question of ‘serious’ academics having to be apologetic about delving into ‘low’ culture and indulging in some form of compromising but ultimately immature and therefore embarrassing ‘pleasure’. For others it might just be even more evidence of (cultural) theory’s or cultural studies’ weakness to take blockbuster culture – produced for quick consumption and short-term profit – too seriously. (2006: 7)

Apart form its politicised subject matter that challenged the theoretical debate that has traditionally been interdisciplinary and, as a logical consequence, eclectic, cultural studies has struggled to put forward a unified and practicable methodology, which is another reason for the eclecticism characteristic not only of cultural studies’ objects of analysis but likewise of its methodological approaches. While some insist on the importance of theory, others bemoan the absent synthesizing attempts aimed at a more or less unified methodology. Secondly, the alleged claim that we have entered the era of post-theory has furthermore increased the plea in favour of theory.20

20

A good overview of cultural studies’ methodologies is to be found in White and Schwoch (2006); with regard to ethnography, see Ang (1996/1997), Denzin (1997) and Winter (2001b). As for the debate on theory and post-theory, I would like to refer to Hall and Birchall (2006). For an introduction to the history and epistemology of cultural studies, see Göttlich (2001); with regard to their reception in Germany, Mikos (1999).

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Political intellectualism versus political commitment

As already pointed out, popular culture has always led a contested academic existence, even in the field of cultural studies that has always promoted popular culture as a worthy field of analysis. It is my contention that this has to do with cultural studies’ Marxist roots. This claim calls for some elaborate explanation since I do not intend to question the necessity and usefulness of the study of ideology21 and the dialectic relation between material production and cultural appropriation – quite the contrary is the case. What the problem of cultural studies has been, though, is its ambiguous attitude towards popular culture an informed Marxist approach necessarily brings about. On the one hand, popular culture is associated with folk culture and working class culture – or in the parlance of modern sociology with those who possess little economic and cultural capital whereby its study and analysis belongs into the domain of Marxist criticism. On the other hand, popular culture has always been brought into connection with lack of cultivation, education and aesthetic appreciation; the Frankfurt School and its followers in the tradition of Kulturkritik may here serve as an example of this unlucky association. The most crucial mistake the Frankfurt School and its representatives such as Adorno and Horkheimer have made, in my view, is that they too readily accepted the term ‘mass culture’ when folk and working-class culture ceased to be the main focus within the field of the popular against the background of the increasing industrialisation and globalisation. Mass production was paralleled with uncritical mass consumption, the cultural industries condemned for their exploitative ideology and the readers and viewers of mass-produced cultural products were shrugged off as superficial and passive consumers. John Fiske links this problem to the failure of left-wing theorists to acknowledge the importance of the everyday and, in its serious and puritanical fashion, that of pleasure (1991b: 162). He accuses the left-wing theorists of exclusively targeting the macrostructure of economic exploitation and social inequality and demeaning the subversive and progressive forces that inhabit the micropolitics of the everyday. Working within the tradition of Western Marxism and by making the study of popular culture its main concern, cultural studies has struggled with being accused of cultural populism. Given the fact that serious intellectual pursuit with its moral implication to make the world a better place by teaching aesthetic appreciation, Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis’s heritage is still haunting cultural theory. The Gramscian-like organic intellectual is supposed to ‘translate’ the intellectual and thus difficult jargon into the vernacular of the ordinary 21

Cf. Althusser (1971) and Eagleton (1991).

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man in the street and is therefore not very likely to read and analyse crime novels.22 Deconstruction and its discontents

Another major neglect that is responsible for the contested place popular culture still occupies in cultural theory and cultural analysis is the problem the tension between the modern and postmodern views of culture have created. Part of the problem may be put down to the fact that post-structuralism in general and deconstructive criticism in particular have concerned themselves with the analysis of works that were created during the modern realm of elite or highbrow culture only and have left the study of popular culture, past or contemporary, to cultural studies.23 This holds true not only for Derrida and his followers at the Yale School such as Geoffrey Hartmann, Paul de Man and J. H. Miller, but also for various works carried out within the field of literary studies conducting deconstructive readings of canonical texts.24 Thus, when deconstructionist and feminist theories were greeted with great enthusiasm in cultural studies departments and centres during the 1990s, the sort of cultural elitism the choice of the texts discussed in deconstructionist and feminist criticism implied was not really questioned. Those cultural studies scholars who thought fa-

22

23

24

According to John Storey, Matthew Arnold is best understood as an organic intellectual (1998: 125). It is important to note that Gramsci conceived the organic intellectual as someone in the service of hegemony. In Gramscian terminology, hegemony is an articulated form of power, but never simply a power that is imposed from above “a process marked by both ‘resistance’ and ‘incorporation’” (Storey 1998: 126). In a way, a similar problem can be made out concerning the attempt to ‘postmodernise’ sociology. As Zygmunt Bauman rightly observes, “sociology was an adjunct of modernity” (2006: 54). Sociological theory is still haunted by the idea of the modern nation state, and, in Zygmunt’s words, “[p]ostmodernity is treated as the tendency of contemporary culture (without qualifications); if its causes are scrutinized at all, they are on the whole sought inside the society (or group of societies) in which postmodern phenomena are situated, with no reference to the unique position of such societies in global arrangements. There is, however, a distinct possibility that the advent of postmodernity in one part of the world is precisely the effect of such a unique position; both of the erosion of the universalistic ambitions that part of the world entertained in the past, and of the still considerable privilege this part enjoys in the world-wide distribution of resources” (ibid: 59; original emphases). Cf. Derrida (1978, 1987 and 1992); Hartmann (1981), J. H. Miller (1987) and Paul de Man (1988). For a most inspiring account of deconstruction and its Yale school representatives see Zima (2002).

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vourably of deconstruction were predominantly those who aligned themselves with cultural theory rather than with cultural studies proper.25 Interestingly, a certain generation who identified with the older version of cultural studies in the tradition of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1960s later distanced themselves from the project for exactly the reasons outlined above. On the other hand, the younger generation of academics who still regard themselves as working within the field of cultural studies have often dismissed deconstruction because of its difficult idiom and alleged apolitical, negative philosophy (cf. Hall 2006: 32f). As a consequence, the sort of deconstruction mostly applied within the academic framework of cultural studies has been a rather crude version of ideological critique. Because of this ambiguous attitude, cultural studies has been forced to justify its study of popular culture time and again. What cannot be bypassed is the tension between the cultural and economic aspects, the former of which from a cultural studies perspective seems more justifiable. A similar and related problem stems from the question regarding the location of the political. Can one do justice to the political commitment of cultural studies by theorizing the discourses of power or is it more advisable – ethical even – to analyse the ways in which such discourses may be subverted?

Whatever happened to the book?

Apart from the question of commitment and the poststructuralists’ neglect to apply their insights to popular culture, a third problem I have already mentioned above and which I want to address in more detail now is the loss of the book to the analysis of cultural practices.26 In its inception phase, cultural studies was very much concerned with literary analysis – after all, it emerged out of English studies. Anthony Easthope (1991) offers a lucid account of how this shift from literary to cultural studies took place. He concludes that whereas in traditional literary studies the subject of literature has to accept a higher authority – the aesthetic and moral authority implied by both art and author – the subject of cultural studies cannot be allocated a clearly defined

25

26

By using the term cultural studies proper, I wish to distance myself from the sort of cultural studies that does not take seriously the creative and even subversive potential of popular culture. In a manner of speaking, this qualification ties in with the above made distinction between cultural theory and cultural studies. Of course I am here playing into the hands of those whom I have just accused of not doing cultural studies proper since they have always underlined the significance of the book albeit in its most literary form only.

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place, it “is positioned as a contradictory and therefore mobile place between ego and ideal ego corresponding to everyday and academic practice” (1991: 175; emphasis in original). When structuralism started to become the dominant paradigm and thus replaced the culturalist phase, literature was robbed of both the author and its unquestioned place within the realm of the ideal. Given the fact that the profane everyday experience had been elevated to a level where it deserved scholarly attention at the cost of the humanist ideal of perfect harmony, the book somehow became lost and research projects were predominantly carried out on media texts. To put it more simply, with the shift of focus from literature to culture which were traditionally understood as separate realms, literature and narrative fiction ceased to be on the list of possible research projects.27 Another reason why cultural studies has replaced literary criticism by cultural analysis has undoubtedly to do with the fact that it has been accused of overemphasizing the social aspect of literature at the expense of its aesthetic value.28 27

28

The genealogy of cultural studies and its formation and institutionalisation within academia followed in three more or less distinct phases. The first phase was marked by the culturalist approach based on the works by Raymond Williams (1958, 1961), Richard Hoggart (1992 [1957]) and E.P. Thompson (1963). Furthermore, as cultural studies emerged out of English studies, its early days’ methodology mainly consisted of close reading practices applied to popular texts. In a second phase, the focus was shifted and expanded to sociological theories and approaches, which served as a preparation for the third phase, the explication with structuralist approaches that swept cultural theory in the 1970s and 1980s. For a good overview of cultural studies’ formation, see Turner (1996) and Milner and Browitt (2002); for a concise and in-depth account Winter (2001a(. From a contemporary point of view, I would suggest viewing cultural studies’ genealogy in five stages, stage four being dominant during the 1990s where the established approaches were supplemented by poststructuralist and feminist theories such as Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Stage five began with the new millennium and it is marked by the wish to a) repoliticise cultural studies, b) to re-evaluate the various methodologies of cultural studies and c) to expand the focus to ethical questions; cf. White and Schwoch (2006) and Hall and Birchall (2006). E. Dean Kolbas, for example, claims that “[t]he sociology of art, new historicism, and cultural studies might offer better alternatives than the appeal to “pure” aesthetics or the institutional neutralization of the canon, but the price these approaches pay for the challenge does not amount to what they bargained for. In the end, one set of ideologies is exchanged for another, each of which leaves the radically, critical, cognitive content of canonical works out of the equation” (Kolbas 2001: 124). This view clearly favours an aesthetic approach to literature and underrates cultural studies’ interventionist potential with regard to power relations and discursive formations that try to secure literature’s privileged status in both the literary establishment and academia.

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As cultural studies made the everyday experience one of its most prominent research areas, it seemed obvious to concentrate on media rather than literary texts. ‘Reading’ became suddenly synonymous with reading television, advertisements or other texts provided by the cultural industries. In a way, the reading experience still appeared to be associated with the extraordinary and aesthetic rather than with the ordinary and everyday. Secondly, and maybe this sounds rather paradoxical in relation to the claim just put forward, reading suggests a private rather than public setting, and given cultural studies’ preoccupation with the impact of the postmodern economy and its marketization strategies, the analysis of a private pastime that is nevertheless understood as existing outside the ordinary, i.e. the everyday, did not make an attractive field of research.29 Likewise, the pursuit of reading novels did not fit the theoretical approaches which mostly included the deconstruction of ideologically laden media texts. If at all, it was the lowbrow texts such as romantic novels that were considered to be typical cultural studies research topics. To sum up, the reading of novels and cultural studies seemed an unlikely match. Conversely, it nevertheless seems strange that the very medium that was responsible for the institutionalisation of close textual analysis had to be sacrificed and thus vanished from the research agenda of cultural studies; our over-textualised culture seems oblivious to its roots. Disparaging the book is a serious omission, especially given the fact that cultural studies insists on the story-like character of narratives, including those of theoretical discourse. I therefore consider it necessary to re-introduce the book into the research agenda of cultural studies, not least because the fictionality of the novel provides the reader with the sort of self-reflection and selfreflectivity without which identity construction in contemporary culture with its multitudinous lifestyle choices would hardly be possible. The study of literature still offers a number of interesting insights that are important for other fields than literary studies. This is the case because story telling is a quasi-existential trait of human beings and hence calls for an inclusion of anthropological and sociological research, for as Nünning & Nünning claim, for “transgeneric, intermedia and interdisciplinary approaches to narrative theory” (2002). Having given a brief overview why popular culture, and for quite different reasons, popular fiction, can still be considered to be a prob29

The dynamics of the act of reading, and the tension between the private and the public or the individual and the communal is a vastly neglected aspect in reception theory as well as the sociology of culture because “[t]he lonely activity of reading – the interaction between a text and an individual – leads us to ignore the strong communal element involved in selecting and experiencing works of literature” (Engler: 1990: 73).

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lem child within cultural studies, I will now comment on the difficulty of delineating popular culture.

WHAT

IS POPULAR CULTURE?

Defining popular culture is a rather complex affair. This is the case because it is at the same time a problem of definition as well as of cultural politics. Within the project of cultural studies, popular culture has often been seen as the site of struggle, as the platform of the culturally and economically less powerful or oppressed. As a site where cultural resistance is acted out and articulated, popular culture has been celebrated in terms of guerrilla warfare tactics. Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque or de Certeau’s of the tactical poacher have been used to justify the subversive potential of popular culture.30 In such a view, popular culture provides the space where the laughter of the less affluent resounds at the expense of the powerful. De Certeau’s poacher roams the woods of popular culture and adapts what he can find to his own agenda. As John Fiske, Paul Willis (1978), Dick Hebdige (1979), Ien Ang (1985, 1990) and others have shown, the products provided by the popular culture industries can be taken out of their context and used in a different way than its producers intended. “Excorporation is the process by which the subordinate make their own culture out of the resources and commodities provided by the dominant system” (Fiske 2002: 112).31 Thus, the products become alienated, the signifier running riot resisting attempts of being reunited with its intended signified. Over the past sixty years or so, there have been countless attempts at coining the definition of popular culture.32 There are rather short 30

31

32

Reference is here made to Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1984 [1940]) where he works towards an understanding of the ambivalent structure of the carnival. The people who partake in the spectacle are both actors and spectators as well as at the same time subjects and objects of laughter. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1988), Michel de Certeau differentiates between strategies and tactics, the former designating the institutionalised places where official power is at work, the latter the spaces created by the individual subjects who subvert those official places by applying ruses, i.e. tactics that allow them to achieve little victories. De Certeau’s work will be discussed in some more detail in the next sub-chapter. Fiske insists that this observation is central to popular culture “for in an industrial society the only resources from which the subordinates can make their own subcultures are those provided by the system that subordinates them” (Fiske 2002: 112). Cf. Hall (1981); Fiske (1991a, 1991b); Storey (1998, 2003); Inglis (2005); Browne (2005); and for popular fiction, Ashley (1989) and Gelder (2004).

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versions, such as ‘popular culture is what is liked by the majority’ or ‘popular culture is the culture of the masses’. But there are also longer and less biased versions such as the one offered by Browne: By the term popular culture, despite many scholar’s and lay people’s efforts to divide and restrict it, we generally mean all aspects of the society we inhabit: the way of life we inherit, practice, and pass on to our descendants; what we do while we are awake and how we do it, the dreams we dream while asleep. It is the world around us: the mass media, the small groups, the individual controls and directors of our life, the entertainments, diversions, heroes, icons, rituals, psychology, religion, irreligion – the total life picture. It is disseminated by the mass media, the small group community, individuals, all means of communication. (Browne 2005: 11, emphasis in original)

Apart from being much longer, this definition also differs in tone. Whereas the short catchy ones are heavily ideologically invested, Browne tries to avoid this problem. By including almost every aspect of everyday life and by employing the inclusive plural pronoun ‘we’, popular culture is designed as something normal, everyday and common – it is our culture, not that of other people. John Storey’s attempt to define popular culture serves as a good example to illustrate the different faces popular culture can take on as well as its inflationary use. Like Attridge, Storey draws attention to ‘otherness’, which is always implicitly part of any definition of popular culture. However, popular culture at the same time also implies absence and presence of otherness, i.e. high culture: [P]opular culture is always defined, implicitly or explicitly, in contrast to other conceptual categories: folk culture, mass culture, dominant culture, working class culture etc. (1998: 1)

Storey traces the meaning of popular culture from its early, preindustrial, pre-urban days when popular culture meant ‘folk culture’ to the degradation of popular culture as mass culture, maintaining that “[t]he culture of the ‘common people’ has always been an object of concern for men and women with social and political power” (Storey 2003: 1). Popular culture as folk culture was an integral part in the institutionalisation of the nation states in the 17th and 18th centuries. This notion of popular culture has now been superseded by a more contemporary definition, with ‘popular’ referring to that part of our culture that is liked by an indistinct mass audience. Storey argues that there are six possible ways of defining popular culture. First, popular culture might be the culture that is widely fa-

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voured; second, it may designate what is left over after we have defined high culture; third it might be understood as mass culture, or fourth as the culture of the ‘people’. Fifth, it has been understood as a site of hegemonic struggle and resistance. And sixth, from a postmodernist point of view, it is a redundant concept because there are no boundaries between high and popular culture anymore (Storey 1998: 7ff). It goes without saying that most of these definitions call for further explanation since we cannot assume that culture of the masses or culture of the people are self-explanatory. These ways of defining popular culture Storey mentions have a history which a serious appraisal of popular culture must not leave out. The different concepts of popular culture emerged during a long-standing debate which dates back to at least the 16th century but was most ardently discussed in the late 19th and early 20th century. What all the above definitions have in common is an implicit reference to the phenomenon of industrialization and urbanization and therefore characterize popular culture in relation to the logic of a capitalist market economy (Storey 1998: 17). There are two aspects in particular I want to address, one concerning economic considerations, the other reception politics. I will do this by drawing on the work of John Fiske, who in my view has presented the most original and valuable conceptualisation of popular culture.

The micropolitics of the popular

John Fiske most decidedly refrains from presenting popular culture as a homogenising cultural field and insists on a politics of reading that rests on the premise that the way texts are used depends on the different social experiences of producers and consumers: Any discussion of popularity must account for opposing forces within it […] In so far as people occupy different social situations from the producers, their interests must necessarily differ from, and often conflict with, the interests of the producers. (Fiske 2006: 538)

This short quote summarises not only the way Fiske defines popular culture but also the tradition within which he places himself. With a mixture of Foucauldian microphysics of power and Gramsci’s (1971) hegemonic struggle, he pays tribute to the culturalist/structuralistMarxist background of cultural studies and clearly follows Stuart Hall’s proposal for an integrational approach, i.e. a merger between culturalist and structuralist perspectives (cf. Hall 1980). He furthermore takes up Williams’s (1958) insistence that audiences cannot simply equalled with the ‘masses’ by emphasizing the different social situations they occupy.

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Fiske’s definition of popular culture departs from the assumption that popular culture cannot be equated with consumption nor can it be explained in terms of the exchange of commodities (1991a: 23). It is not consumed by people, it is produced by them. Such a view clearly challenges the sort of cultural pessimism that contents itself with accusing capitalism for its exploitative force without proposing a conceptual framework of how the system can be challenged from below; the production aspect attributed to consumers clearly resonates the political intention in a socialist sense. Late capitalism is depicted as a system that in its attempt to homogenize creates spaces in which heterogeneity may emerge, or in Fiske’s words: [T]he relationship is always one of conflict or confrontation; the hegemonic forces of homogeneity are always met by the resistances of heterogeneity. (1991b: 8) All the culture industries can do is produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the various formations of the people to use or reject in the ongoing process of producing their popular culture. (1991a: 24)

Popular culture, therefore, contains a major paradox: it could not exist without the capitalist system and the commodities this system supplies, yet subverts rather than affirms the ideology on which the system is based. This paradox, as Easthope, too, has pointed out, has always been at the centre of attention within the project of cultural studies. In Fiske’s specific explication of the creative potential of popular culture it takes on the form of difference. Popular culture contains a moment of difference; in order to become popular any text always has to differ in some way or another from the dominant ideology. Fiske thus overturns the cultural pessimism represented by the Frankfurt School and lends the hegemonic struggle over meaning a Derridean touch.33 As Winter remarks correctly, there is a striking parallel between Fiske’s theory of popular cultural and Derridean deconstruction, but

33

Fiske’s critique of the Frankfurt School is very sophisticated because while he appreciates its general attack on capitalism and its exploitative and determinant structure, Fiske observers “[i]t may justify our righteous distaste for the system, but it offers little hope of progress within it, and only a utopian notion of radical revolution as a means of changing it” (1991a: 105). Furthermore, as Terry Lovell convincingly argues by emphasizing the difference between exchange-value, surplus-value and use-value, Marx himself did not wholly condemn popular culture but accredited it a certain degree of use-value that is relatively independent of the exchange/surplus-value-commodity fetishism-circle (cf. Lovell 1994: 467f.).

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this affinity has mostly gone unnoticed. This is particularly unfortunate because the reading of Derrida from Fiske’s cultural studies point of view makes visible the sociological perspective of deconstruction (cf. Winter 2001a: 164ff.). Derrida’s abstract terminology and singular way of writing have, unfortunately, tended to obfuscate the social and political relevance of his work. By way of detaching the main claim – that the instability of linguistic structures undermines the rationality of any text and defer its meaning – from the abstract framework of philosophical investigation, though, deconstruction gains a more visible, sociological significance. If one departs from the premise that the social struggle is already inscribed in the language as is done by Fiske,34 the contradictions and disruptions are of a social rather than textual nature. In such an understanding, Derrida’s concept of différance refers to the social use of language that creates different interpretations or readings.35 Deconstructive readings search for instabilities of meanings in the margins and the potential for oppositional readings. In Derridean deconstructions those margins are of a philosophical nature, they are positioned 34

35

Fiske draws on Volosinov’s Marxist philosophy of language (cf. also Winter 2001a: 166) who claims that “[t]he verbal consciousness of speakers has, by and large, nothing whatever to do with linguistic form as such or with language as such. […] Words are always filled with content and meaning drawn from behaviour or ideology” (1973: 70). In other words, language is social rather than textual. To further emphasize the sociological relevance of texts, I want to draw attention to what seems to me a typically deconstructionist gesture in Volosinov. He insists that nothing in language can ever be fixed and that an evaluation of meaning is always an act of re-evaluation (ibid.: 105). This claim ties in with Derrida’s notion of the trace (1976). A trace is what is left in the assignment of meaning because meaning is a process of différance – it is at the same time differed and different, i.e. a signifier can only ever be partly brought into relation with an implied signified. Meaning is never achieved, it is always in the process of becoming. This relates to what Volosinov has in mind when he says that meaning making always contains a moment of re-evaluation, and if this is suppressed, it is “divorced from the historical process of Becoming” (1973: 105). Fiske (1989a: 110) also uses the term trace in a similar context, insisting that “[m]eanings ‘out of control’ must contain traces of the control they are escaping if they are to be popular”. What Fiske has in mind here is that the creative potential inherent to popular culture is created on the basis of difference between the capital system that provides commodities and the people who use those commodities as raw material for their own meaning constructions. Difference always contains a trace of the force that tries to erase difference. Différance is Derrida’s own coinage, referring to his claim that nothing can ever be present nor just simply absent, i.e. that there is nothing but traces. As a nomenclature, différance combines the two words ‘to differ’ and ‘to differ’. cf. Derrida (1972a, 1972b).

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in a social context and thus become the site where social antagonisms are articulated by the practice of reading texts subversively. What is of particular significance in Fiske’s conceptualisation of difference is that it grants human agency a more prominent role. Derrida’s dictum “meaning is founded upon a movement of difference” (1978: 3) is reformulated into “meaning is founded upon a social movement of difference” and thus encourages the transition from the philosophical and abstract to the sociological and practical. One of the most productive ways to think popular culture as a sociological concept is to place it within the framework of the everyday experience to which I will turn now.

THE

PROFANE MAKES SECURE:

POPULAR CULTURE AND THE EVERYDAY

As we have seen, Fiske envisages the creative potential of popular culture in relation to the everyday social experiences readers bring to a text. Everyday life is constituted by the practices of popular culture, and is characterized by the creativity of the weak in using the resources provided by a disempowering system while refusing finally to submit to that power. The culture of everyday life is best described through metaphors of struggle or antagonism. […] These antagonisms, these clashes of social interests […] are motivated primarily by pleasure; the pleasure of producing one’s own meanings of social experience and the pleasure of avoiding the social discipline of the power-bloc. (Fiske 1991a: 47)36

It is in his understanding of the everyday where Fiske’s affinity to Michel de Certeau becomes most visible. Like de Certeau (1988), he highlights the interface between texts and everyday experience which is understood as a site of play. It is important to note that ‘play’ has several meanings here, as it first describes the intermingling of different practices used to appropriate the resources supplied and imposed by the power bloc. As both de Certeau and Fiske emphasize, these practices are heterogeneous; they consist of “a multitude of ‘tactics’ articulated in the details of everyday life” (de Certeau 1988: xiv). Secondly, play also refers to the conscious displacement of cultural artefacts into a specific subculture (cf. Willis 1978 and Hebdige 1979). De Certeau places his theory of the creativity of consumers in relation to 36

Fiske is here drawing on Hall’s terminology in Notes on Deconstructing the Popular (1994[1981]).

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Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977) and maintains that the tactical use of consumer goods or any other resources provided by the system turns into a network of antidiscipline of those who are caught in the nets of ‘discipline’ (xivf.). This of course is what Fiske means when he says that people have to rely on the cultural industries to provide the raw material out of which they produce their own meanings; they do not have the power to produce in a first instance, but they do have the power to act upon, to transform and to produce meaning according to their own needs and pleasures. This is especially important in relation to the sometimes rather harsh criticism Fiske has been subjected to.37 Fiske does not claim that the social relations based on inequality can be overturned in favour of the weak nor does he suggest that every kind of popular pleasure must be seen as a kind of resistance. He merely claims that texts, whatever form they might have, are relatively open to semiotic forms of resistance.38 There is a possibility that texts are read against the grain and that they are exploited for meanings their original producers have never intended. Therefore, criticism such as that by Nick Stevenson, who posits that “[t]he problem with this argument is that it is difficult to see how the structures of late capitalism are threatened by this activity (Stevenson 2002: 96), is certainly not justified as it demands a change that is very unlikely to be brought about by any intervention since it aims at a fundamental economic and structural revolution. De Certeau and Fiske are interested in what little changes may be effected through little acts of resistance within the operating capital system. Fiske says that if a certain amount of such acts of resistance occur in the same domain over a longer period of time, maybe a visible change can be brought about. As Ben Agger remarks correctly, social change is brought about in little steps, it begins at home (1992: 4).39 To flesh out the theory of how to accomplish small changes – or little victories if we want to lend them a more political thrust, I want

37 38

39

Cf. McGuigan (1992), Bennett (1998), and Frith (1998). This view comes close to Derrida’s thesis in Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1998) where he claims that meaning is the meaning of a rich textuality, a texture in deed, that consists of thousands of threads, and that extracting a singular meaning would silence the other. Consequently, we have the responsibility not to find the ultimate meaning, but to say ‘yes to the other’. Fiske has often been accused of celebrating the popular, cf. McGuigan (1992) and Bennett (1998). This misunderstanding can often be put down to the fact that people tend to overlook Fiske’s subtle differentiations, such as when he adapts Barthes’s distinction between plaisir and jouissance (cf. Barthes 1975; Fiske 1991a) with regard to which he underlines that both modes of reading can take place either in compliance with the dominant ideology or by rejecting it. See also Winter’s critique (1999b: 42).

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to draw attention to de Certeau’s notion of tactics that is based on the idea that quotidian manipulations (1988: xiv) or ways of operating (1988: xix) can subvert the mechanisms of discipline enforced by the capitalist system. “A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance” (ibid.). By other, de Certeau refers to the force-relationships of political, economic and scientific rationality that have been established to secure systemic power. In contrast to the tactics of the weak, he calls the latter process the strategy of the powerful. Whereas the strategic is institutionalised – it is a victory of space over time – the tactical, dependent on moments when the opportunity to interfere with what de Certeau calls the proper (the strategic) presents itself, is a victory of time over space. The application of tactics is a way of resistance, “a way of using imposed systems” (1988: 18), “an art of the weak” (37). With regard to texts and reading practices, de Certeau contends that tactics make texts habitable, like a rented apartment (1988: xxi); the reader dwells in a place whose foundation he or she has not laid himself but whose building infrastructure he or she can temporarily use to his or her own ends. This ties in with Fiske’s contention that consumer goods are turned into raw materials out of which people produce their own meanings. Consumption is a tactical raid upon the system (Fiske 1991a: 35).40 There is another aspect to which I want to turn now because it forms the premise on which I base my analysis of the male confessional novel against the socio-cultural background of the 1990s. The use of popular culture as an integral part of everyday life can be understood as an attempt to achieve psychological and ontological security in a vastly contingent world. Secondly, the use of popular culture/fiction in terms of retreating to what we already know while seeking a slight variation is at the same time a way of reducing the complexity of the highly rationalized, modern world we live in, as well as a tactic for enriching the everyday which often seems marked by routine rather than excitement. “[D]aily life suggests routine, and routine by definition involves things that are not out of the ordinary” (Inglis 2005: 2). These two needs, the desire for change on the one hand and the desire for stability and security on the other, are two sides of the same coin, and it is my contention that there is some kind of homology between the routine of everyday life and the consumption of popular fiction. Both follow a formula that is at the same time stable and unfixed.

40

In Reading the Popular (1991b), Fiske has exemplified how official, public places such as a shopping mall or a beach can be reappropriated and ‘raided tactically’.

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As Fred Inglis, drawing on Husserlian phenomenology, argues, our life-world which is ‘the always taken-for-granted’ is full of habits and routines that make the world relatively predictable and understandable and hence grant a certain degree of psychological security (Inglis 2005: 11). Furthermore, to a large degree, life-worlds are shared wherefore they are full of expectations. When I am queuing at the bakery, I respect that those who have arrived before me are being served before I get the shop assistant’s attention, but I likewise expect to be served when I have come to the front of a queue, and will become angry if somebody else is served before me. These customs that are based on a shared stock of normative behavioural patterns seem natural to us, and only if we step back and consciously observe and analyse them, we might occasionally find them odd rather than normal. It is precisely because these customs and everyday activities are taken for granted that they are considered to be ordinary and normal. Yet they may reveal some sort of unintentional humour, “a humour that only reveals itself when you stand back and look at things with an attitude that has broken with the taken-for-grantedness of the lifeworld” (Inglis 2005: 15). To conclude, habitual behaviour and everyday routines may appear funny (in both senses of the word) if their normalcy is being questioned. In real life situations this may be achieved by observing what usually escapes one’s attention because it seems too trivial, too normal; in narrative fiction this may be done by self-reflexivity. In order to flesh out the thesis that there is a homology between generic everyday behaviour and popular fiction, I will again turn to the notion of genre.

POPULAR

FICTION AND GENRE:

THE FACE AND ITS BROW S

If we take a look at academic publications that concern themselves with popular fiction, the list of genres are more or less identical most of the time. Such lists usually comprise crime fiction, romance, fantasy, science fiction, and sometimes western. Popular fiction is highly generic because “[t]he entire field of popular fiction is written for, marketed and consumed generically; it provides the primary logic for popular fiction’s means of production, formal and industrial identification and critical evaluation” (Gelder 2004: 40). Gelder’s claim boils down to the following: popular fiction is popular because it operates within clearly demarcated generic boundaries according to clearly defined generic formulae. This observation may imply that genre fiction is repetitive rather than innovative. Of course, there is something rather unimaginative about the tenth detec-

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tive novel with the same chief inspector who has already applied the very same investigative techniques nine times before. If we consider other genres of the popular culture field, we can maintain that it is likewise boring to watch the 105th episode of a soap opera whose main narrative focus centres on the circular and repetitive ups and downs of an ordinary suburban family. We therefore could ask ourselves as Kate Fox does: Why do millions of ordinary English people want to watch soaps about ordinary English people just like themselves, people who might easily be their next-door neighbours? (Fox 2005: 213)

Being a sociologist and an acute observer of the English way of life, Fox concludes: The answer, I think, lies partly in the empiricism and realism that are so deeply rooted in the English psyche, and our related qualities of down-toearthness and matter-of-factness, our stubborn obsession with the real, concrete and factual, our distaste for artifice and pretension. (ibid)

Even though her claim may raise a number of questions and objections in terms of general validity, it interests me for various reasons. First, as I have pointed out earlier, the male confessional novel is a typically English genre.41 Secondly, it supports my thesis that the generic consumption of popular culture in general, and popular literature in particular, shares a great deal with coming to terms with everyday life. Routines and clearly defined behavioural patterns at the same time imply security and boredom due to repetition. What is asked for is something familiar but a little different; an attempt at a variation on the ordinariness of the everyday. As in 18th-century music, the variation on the theme bears a trace of the theme; it is recognisable and it sounds familiar, but is different to a degree that makes a welcome change to the repetitiveness of the theme. As John Fiske never tires of emphasizing, in order to be popular, the cultural products provided by the cultural industries must contain a whole variety of possible reference points for different consumer groups. There must be a trace of what can be recognised, and I want to propose that the degree to which this is possible is particularly important in middlebrow fiction. Rather than losing oneself in a science fiction tale which is too far removed from our everyday experiences, there are a large number of readers who prefer to watch or read about what they recognise as part 41

In Europe, there are a few German imitations, such as Herr Lehmann (2003) and Neue Vahr Süd (2006) by Sven Regener, Idiotentest (2005) and Stellungswechsel (2006) by Tom Liehr.

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of their everyday life: a problematic relationship, obnoxious neighbours, obstacles encountered in the workplace etc. Even a genre such as romantic fiction which probably entails more ‘realistic’ characters and events than we are likely to find in science fiction, such as a young woman who is in love with a man whose heart she struggles to conquer throughout the book, the readers are aware of the fact that the happy outcome always achieved in such novels bears little resemblance to their own life. This recognition factor is to a large extent responsible for the popularity of the male confessional novel as is its irony and selfreflexiveness, the latter demanding a higher degree of intellectual involvement that I consider a typical feature of middlebrow fiction, which, because of its importance with regard to my object of analysis, deserves some specific attention. Middlebrow

The term ‘middlebrow’ has an ambiguous history. According to Nicola Humble “[it] has always been a dirty word” (2001: 1). It was only coined in the late 1920s and designated “the sort of cultural products thought to be too easy, too insular, to smug” (ibid.), but it already came into existence during the industrialisation in the nineteenth century when the book market was growing due to improved printing technology and the spread of literacy. Middlebrow fiction is closely related to what we call ‘genre fiction’, and the emergence of 19thcentury women’s fiction is probably the best example to illustrate this. The increasing interest in women’s fiction is closely related to the structural changes that affected the middle class at the time. Two major incisive phases contributed to those changes; the first took place during the 19th century when women started to constitute the dominant audience segment for the emerging middlebrow fiction; secondly, during the 1950s, when “the new ‘modern’ middle-class culture of the suburbs was becoming increasingly dominant” (Humble: 87). In that sense, we can see that there is a intricate relationship between social stratification and the changing of the book market (Humble: 2001:42). 42

As a general observation, and without having any direct bearing on the object of analysis at hand, this is a dimension that only rarely gets the attention it deserves in literary studies. An exception to be mentioned, of course, is the attempt to establish the field of the sociology of literature in the 1970s, which was heavily indebted to Marxism. cf. Swingewood and Laurenson (1972), Escarpit (1977), Goldmann (1975), Routh/Wolff (1977), and Hall (1979). The sociology of literature could never really rid itself of its roots, and therefore, sadly, lost its meaningfulness in the academic study of literature. There has been some sort of a revival of the sociology of lit-

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What was at stake in the modernist controversy which Ina Habermann – following Virginia Woolf – calls ‘The Battle of the Brows’ was “a struggle for […] audiences and readers paying money and attention, and for ideological dominance in the public sphere in a context of rapid modernisation” (2007: 43). More people were able to read and therefore the public discourse over literature was no longer confined to the educated few but had to accommodate a myriad of voices and opinions. Hence, the book market became a struggle for signification (Hall); a ‘battlefield of contested meanings’ (Fiske). This has not changed up to the present day, as the bestsellers that guarantee the economic success of publishing houses invariably come from the field of low- or middlebrow fiction. A more detailed discussion of the history of the term would not serve my purpose, but I want to emphasize its analytic importance. Middlebrow seems a practical term because a) it does not assume a straightforward dichotomy highbrow/lowbrow and b) it describes a type of literature which neither complies with the literary notion shared by academic literary critics, nor does it just assume an indistinct mass audience. To put it differently, middlebrow denotes a sort of fiction that is likewise entertaining, intellectually stimulating and aesthetically pleasing. Middlebrow fiction, nowadays, finds its primary audience in the mid-twenty-or-thirty-something, urban, middleclasses, coming to terms with the advantages and inconveniences of late modern urban life, including questions of identity formation, selffashioning in terms of lifestyle-choice on a general level, and what kind of career to pursue and what kind of relationship to envisage on a more specific level. Middlebrow fiction occupies the place between literary expectation and escapism and is presumably read by representatives of the professional, urban middle class. The term middlebrow is borrowed from phrenology and refers to the size of the forehead that is neither high nor low. The size of the forehead, in phrenology, is said to refer to the intellectual capacity of people, i.e. a high forehead implies high intellect whereas a low forehead little intellectual capability (cf. Habermann 2007: 41ff.). Accordingly, ‘highbrows’ tend to read intellectually challenging literature whereas ‘lowbrows’ prefer easily accessible entertainment. On the one hand, the introduction of middlebrow into the highbrow-lowbrow debate does not necessarily pay tribute to the postmodern blurring or erasure of boundaries. On the other hand, however, it even emphasizes the process of blurring by extending to, or erasing, the high- and low ends of the spectrum. We might ask ourselves whether the face has got rid of its brows altogether. erature, cf. Dörner/Vogt. Literatursoziologie. Literatur, Gesellschaft, Politische Kultur. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994.

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Peter Swirski makes the case that what he terms ‘nobrow’ literature serves both a highbrow readership and the lowbrow genre addict. “Nobrow […] is not merely a matter of crossover reception, but, rather, an intentional stance whereby authors simultaneously target both extremes of the literary spectrum” (Swirski 2005: 10). Given this understanding of nobrow literature, I would argue that nobrow and middlebrow differ as they target different readerships. The nobrow novelist attracts readers who otherwise either subscribe to the high- or lowbrow end exclusively, whereas middlebrow fiction is aimed at those who do prefer either but want a bit of both. However, in an attempt to categorise Raymond Chandler, Swirski maintains: Too literary for the murder-mystery mainstream, too lowbrow for the literati, the book [Playback] in which the author and his famous creation shake hands, trade quips, and pay a campy intertextual tribute to an entire literary school may be a nobrow winner in search of a pennant.” (2005: 11)

This description, in my view, comes very close to what I envisage as middlebrow fiction. A possible distinction, and this is more of speculation than an observation based on close analysis, might be between nobrow’s affinity to the postmodern aesthetic known from the genre of hardboiled fiction and the everyday realism middlebrow fiction tries to converge.43 Before I come back to the discussion of the importance of everyday experience with regard to the reception of popular culture, let me summarise the usefulness of the concept of middlebrow fiction as both a descriptive and analytic category. By emphasizing the in-betweeness with regard to the place middlebrow inhabits on the high-lowspectrum, we are able to describe a cultural phenomenon that subverts the high-low divide in as far as it extends the virtual boundaries in both directions. Secondly, it helps to save the social and productive dimension of fiction in terms of difference because it offers points of reference for different, albeit similar, everyday experiences. Thus, middlebrow covers those texts that Fiske calls producerly. Producerly texts are easily accessible because they are, to some degree, formulaic and based on social conventions, but they are also open to differing meaning making processes. The polysemy that is inherent in producerly texts invites irony and humour, and as shown above, everyday experience to which producerly and hence popular texts always have to respond can be a source from which to decipher irony and humour

43

On the British fiction market, the urban novels by Christopher Brookmyer (cf. chapter 1) can be considered to comply to the criteria of nobrow literature as Swirski conceptualises them.

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provided the narrative invites self-reflexivity.44 Fiske lays great emphasis on the fact that producerly texts can in fact be read in a readerly way, too – it is up to the reader whether to comply with the preferred reading (or dominant ideology) of the text or to go the producerly way and to create his or her own reading. Fiske thus salvages the category of agency that in the discussion of popular culture often is sacrificed by overestimating the homogenizing effect the cultural industries apparently impose on their consumers. Reading and interpreting is a matter of choice, and whereas choice in everyday activities and procedures does not always figure prominently, reading popular fiction with a Fiskean understanding helps to recuperate the possibility of taking active decisions and living one’s life at least partly under the circumstance one has chosen. Claire Colebrook contends referring to Fiske and de Certeau, their theory of practice “enables a focus both on the political effects of a text and on the specific position of the reader” (Colebrook 1997: 116).

DECONSTRUCTING

THE POPULAR:

ITERABILITY AND THE POLITICS OF READING

It has often been said that deconstruction is more likely to be found in explicitly literary texts and has therefore been associated with high literature rather than with popular literature. M.H. Abrams in his section on deconstruction in A Glossary of Literary Terms explains: The claim is sometimes made by deconstructive critics that a literary text is superior to non-literary texts, but only because by its self-reference, it shows itself to be more aware of features that all texts inescapably share: its fictionality, its lack of a genuine ground, and especially its patent ‘rhetoricity’, or use of figurative procedures – features that make any ‘right reading’ or ‘correct reading’ of a text impossible. (1993: 229)

44

The producerly text is a coinage of Fiske’s, drawing on Barthes’ distinction between readerly and writerly texts (cf. Barthes 1975). Whereas a readerly text is usually composed in the tradition of realism, i.e. hiding its own discursive nature and is therefore accessible to the reader, a writerly text is open and without unity or transparency. According to Fiske, “[t]he producerly text has the accessibility of a readerly one, and can theoretically be read in that easy way by those of its readers who are comfortably accommodated within the dominant ideology […], but it also has the openness of the writerly. The difference is that it does not require this writerly activity, nor does it set the rules to control it. Rather, it offers itself up to popular production; it exposes, however reluctantly, the vulnerabilities, limitations, and weaknesses of its preferred meanings […]”(1991a: 104).

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Apparently, the metaphoric language and self-reflexivity in terms of rhetorical figures, both characteristics that at the same time appeal to and influence our aesthetic judgement, do not only distinguish the truly literary but lend themselves more easily to show that deconstruction is at work. Language that draws attention to itself, its constructedness as well as its rhetoric and narrativity, lends itself much better to reveal how it undermines what it tries to signify, i.e. to find contradictions within the textual fabric. Or put differently, literary texts by means of a deconstructive reading are much more likely to reveal a socalled aporia, an impasse that cannot be resolved. Aporias prevent the straightforward meaning of a text because meaning becomes undecidable. On the other hand, however, popular texts aim at solving the problem posed by the plot which is usually achieved by good or at least an univocal conclusion, such as for example marriage in a romance, the catching and trial of the criminal in a detective novel. Such univocal conclusions are much more unlikely to be found in texts belonging to the literary canon. Or so it is assumed. It is my contention that the deconstructive preoccupation with works belonging to the canon has reproduced the very foundation of metaphysics and logocentrism it seeks to attack. By studying canonical texts rather than other, more popular texts, deconstructive criticism does inexplicitly maintain the boundary between high and popular literature. As mentioned above, postmodernism has been concerned with the blurring of boundaries more than questioning the concepts demarcated by boundaries. Maybe this can be claimed to be the fundamental difference between postmodernism and deconstruction. Postmodern novels, for example, combine themes of popular culture with literary modes of rhetoricity. From a deconstructive point of view, one might argue that it is exactly this mix of genres that form the undecidability and ultimately undermine the meaning that might be inscribed in the text. What seems to be at stake here is the question of artistic creativity. Given the fact that deconstruction calls into question meaning, signs, truth and essence by laying bare the textual mechanisms that exactly undermine the possibility of an essential truth, i.e. undermine the structure that makes structure possible in the first place, the insistence on the literary as opposed to the non-literary or popular, artistic creativity seems to be one of the very few concepts, or to speak with Derrida, philosophemes, that cannot be questioned; artistic creativity somehow seems non-deconstructable. This is of course a claim that goes beyond aesthetics and acquires a quasi-ethical status. This is no coincidence, since the very few concepts that are not and must not become subject to deconstructive criticism are subject to ethical judge-

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ment as well. One of these non-deconstructables is justice.45 Absolute justice can never be achieved but the thought of absolute justice as a possible future achievement must never be abandoned. That would not only cast doubt on the affirmative nature of deconstruction, but it would also be pessimistic or even cynical and violate the ethical stake behind it. Such a view is certainly not compliant from an ethicaldeconstructive position, but why for that matter, should aesthetic taste or artistic creativity belong to the same class of non-deconstructables? The reason why aesthetics, to put it most crudely, is sometimes confused with ethics, may be found in the ongoing modernist belief in the so-called avant-garde. Avant-garde art is supposed to have the most powerful potential for political intervention and critical engagement with established notions of art. Avant-garde art never stays avant-garde, because it can only be avant-garde as long as it is not accepted by the dominant culture, the ‘garde’. Once this happens, it either gets absorbed by mass culture, i.e. popular culture, or else it is considered, retrospectively, part of a series of truly appreciated works in the case of the visual arts, or in the case of literature, to be included in the canon. The work of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf are two cases in point. I am now going to suggest a possible reason why such misconceptions still haunt literary criticism and critical theory. In order to do this, I intend to have a closer look at another ready-made assumption that governs literary studies and theory, namely the claim that Derrida does not actually distinguish between literature and philosophy. In his writing, Derrida very rarely offers separate sections on literature as such, but more often than not uses literary examples to explain philosophical misapprehensions which in his view litter all Western thought, i.e. are responsible for what he calls ‘logocentrism’. For Derrida, there is no clear demarcation between literature and philosophy because they are unstable categories, and they only seem secure and natural because they have undergone institutionalisation and are thus governed by power and consensus, mainly due to clearly demarcated academic curricula. Thus, Derrida’s approach very much destabilizes the institutions called literature and philosophy. Claire Colebrook, however, challenges this assumption, arguing that Derrida does not collapse the relationship between philosophy and literature, since Derrida’s engagement with literature maintains the necessity of truth. J. Hillis Miller argues along similar lines, claiming that in Derrida’s thinking, literature takes precedence over philosophical expression: “It 45

Absolute justice can probably never be achieved. However, just because it seems impossible does not mean that the state of absolute justice should not be aimed at. Deconstruction is a philosophy of the possibility of the impossible, an argument which is dominant in all of Derrida’s writing. cf. e.g. “Aporias” (1993a).

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takes precedence because it gives unique and irreplaceable access to the truth about a given topic” (Miller 2001: 79). The reading of literature must force us to address the limits of the concepts of truth and possibly allow for a truth beyond truth. Literature affirms singularity before decision: “On the one hand, literary events are singular […]. On the other hand, such singularity, accident, chance or contingency is what makes all thoughts possible: singularity in general” (Colebrook 2004: 76). Fiction tries to create specific moments of presence in which decision taking appears as an act of singularity, or as Derrida puts it: “The possibility of literature – of quoting, departing from presence, repeating and folding back on itself – not only ‘haunts’ all life; one might say that this haunting ‘is’ life” (Derrida quoted in Colebrook 2004: 81). The notion of haunting and spectres is crucial to Derrida’s thinking – it is the absence of a definite presence that makes haunting, i.e. life possible.46 This attack on classical phenomenology reformulates the question of how things appear to us. The answer is, that things do not appear; they are there, but not in an unquestionable presence which may be analysed, i.e. broken down to one single remaining element, which we are likely to call ‘truth’. What deconstruction actually allows us to do is to understand how the concepts, ideas etc. we take for granted bear traces of other such concepts or ideas, or in Derridean language, philosophemes. Such philosophemes are always present: “in literature […] philosophical language is still present in some sense; but it produces and presents itself as alienated from itself, at a remove, at a distance. This distance provides the necessary free space from which to interrogate philosophy anew” (Derrida cited in Wolfreys 1998: 79). What, then, is literature for Derrida? Miller comes up with the following answer: There is no such thing, for Derrida, if one means an infallible rest for determining that you have a piece of literature in hand. Literature is not some essence hidden inside a given text. Any piece of language, oral or written, can be “taken as literature”, not in the sense that we can make it function any way we like, but in the sense that the possibility of being taken as literature is intrinsic to it, just as the serious is built on the non-serious, not the other way around. Literature depends on the possibility of detaching language from its firm embeddedness in a social or biographical context and allowing it to play freely as fiction. (Miller 2001: 60)

46

For a detailed discussion on the notion of “spectrality”, see Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx (1993b). Derrida argues that despite the waning effect of Marxism, we must take Marx’ position seriously, i.e. despite all attempts to silence the various Marxist ghosts and spectres, we must feel responsible to respond to Marx’ insights.

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In conclusion one might want to settle for the following. Derrida questions the taken for granted boundaries between academic fields such as literature, criticism and philosophy. In his view, there is no literature without philosophy and vice versa. There is always a trace of the other which contaminates the text. In this respect, we could abandon the clearly demarcated fields in favour of what Derrida calls écriture. Philosophy is a kind of writing, as is literature or literary criticism. They are all governed by philosophemes that are at the same time typical of a particular field as well as responsible for the destabilizing effect they may have on texts that are usually assumed to figure in a different academic field. According to Derrida, however, it is not possible not to mix genres. It follows that a text cannot be a text in isolation; a text is always a reinscription referring to other texts. There is no purity without contamination. But because of the impossibility of purity and the omnipresence of contamination, there is in literature what Derrida calls a way to respond to the tout autre, the wholly other.47 It is, however, not possible to completely reveal the wholly other, i.e. there will always be a secret of the wholly other. Literature is a host to the secret of the wholly other and by accepting this, the possibility of the impossible becomes possible. As Miller correctly concludes from Derrida’s notion of literature “[l]iterature is the place to study iterability, not just in what happens thematically in a given work, but in the way it works” (2001: 79).48 Let me briefly summarise why I believe in the outlined possibility of marrying Derridean deconstruction with popular or middlebrow fiction, i.e. why the male confessional novel lends itself so well to show how deconstruction is at work. The answer is a simple one because it is one of those middlebrow genres that are most marked by the possibility of iterability. Middlebrow fiction deals with everyday topics that may very easily, phenomenologically speaking, be accommodated against the background of everyday experience. By experience I do not simply include actual experience since from a deconstructionist point of view, even with a side-glance to Husserlian phenomenology, it cannot simply be accounted for. However, what is generally possible might also be experience, and it is experience yet to come that is 47

48

As Winter emphasizes, a possible response to the other can be deduced from de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life. He concludes that de Certeau’s insights may contribute to a cultural analysis that not only preserves the other’s peculiarity or idiosyncrasy but makes the relationship to alterity its central element (Winter 2007: 34). NB Miller’s use of “work” in this quote. Derrida in this context usually prefers “text” to “work” to emphasize the multiaccentuality and openness of a given literary text. However, Miller here draws attention to the ways literature is traditionally conceived of in terms of institutionalised ‘literary works’ that are associated with their ‘origin’, i.e. authorship and socio-historical context.

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most salient in middlebrow-fiction. The following example is supposed to illustrate the law of iterability. I have often wondered why I seem to know what it might feel like to go through somebody else’s things without their knowing, or searching somebody’s house in their absence. Have I ever been tempted to carry out such a secretive and in many ways despicable action? Or do I think I know what it is like because I have read too many detective novels, watched too many crime series or simply have a very vivid imagination? I could not say; it somehow remains a secret. But I do know that this very secret constitutes the possibility of iterability, going through somebody else’s things, it may be repeated at any time. Such is the law of iterability, and in my view, middlebrow fiction is a very productive site of iterability because it does not relate factual events but fictitious ones. This is not spectacular; so do other genres of narratives, too. However, since the ordinariness of the events narrated, as well as the familiarity of how the protagonists think, feel and act, bears a close resemblance with how we may think, feel and act in our everyday lives. I would even go as far as to claim that with the male confessional novel in particular, contemporary fiction has undergone a renaissance of realism. If we consider other genres of narrative fiction, such as the fiction that is usually included in the canon, the experience narrated in such novels does not usually rely on a common ground experience between narrator and reader. At the other end of the spectrum, however, i.e. the experience of a heroine in a romantic novel is very rarely to be relived by the female readers who probably resort to that sort of fiction as a form of escapism. The escapist function, i.e. to experience something which is completely removed from everyday life, of both literary and popular fiction is replaced by an escapism of a different sort in middlebrow fiction: it is in the latter where the effect of the déja-vu, or have-done-all-that, have-been-there-too is at the forefront.49 Before I turn to my analysis of the male confessional novel in the next chapter, I want now to synthesize my working assumption that underscores the reading of the eight novels in question. To summarise the last point made above, I will contend that the male confessional novel draws on the effect of recognition as a strategy to justify routine 49

Alan Sinfield rightly claims that stories are lived; by those who write, read, and consume them in the broadest possible sense. “They make sense for us – of us – because we have been and are in them.“ (Sinfield 1989:24f). This is view is particularly important with regard to the structure of feeling that emerges if similar experiences are made among the the members of a community during the same period of time. Meaning making processes are rendered less complex if texts offer points of references because “[e]very society and practice is characterised by a tension between the creation of differences and the subverting of differences through ‘equivalence’“ (Chouliaraki/ Fairclough 1999:123).

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and security, on the one hand, and possible change, on the other. The novels are marked by a distinct desire to achieve a change while holding on to what prevents a possible change. The narratives thus create points of reference that likewise subvert the very possibility of change. Secondly, I will argue that the male confessional novel can be understood as a renegotiation of masculinities in the light of postfeminism and an articulation of the masculinity crisis that emerged during the 1990s. While they are completely aware of their own inadequacies both as professionals and as partners and future husbands, the male protagonists articulate their uncertainty as to how they should change in order to live up to the postmodern and post-feminist expectations of the society they live in. By taking these expectations to function as a quasi-institutionalised ideology, I hope to be able to show how the protagonists’ dysfunctional behaviour can be read as tactics the protagonists consciously or unconsciously apply in order to subvert social conventions. I will complement my reading of the novels with reader reviews. Thus I intend to show how the novels offer points of reference that enable the readers to read the books either in compliance with the dominant ideology or to create their own meanings. By doing this, I want to underscore my argument that the uncertainties expressed in the male confessional novel are part of a dominant discourse of the 1990s, i.e. the crisis of masculinity-discourse as a response to feminism and an emerging discourse that articulates the uncertainties and undecidabilities that were characteristic of this specific historical conjunction. But as will become evident, there is more to this alleged crisis than the often apparent misunderstandings and incompatibilities in mixed gender relationships because gender scripts are not as clear-cut as the dominant institutions would like us to believe. Gender identities are ambivalent and subject to constant rearticulation in a person’s life-story. Together, these emergent discourses of masculinity ambiguously and conflictingly construct the structure of feeling of the young, male, middle-class generation at that time.

P ART II: W RITING I DENTITY IN THE M ALE C ONFESSION AL N OVEL

In the following, main part I am going to present my analysis of what has been defined as the male confessional novel. This undertaking is based on the close reading of eight representative specimens of the genre, supplemented by reader reviews from the internet in order to bring into dialogue the analytical with the empirical. Readers’ views on books, unfortunately, have mostly been ignored in literary studies, which, in my view, is a gross neglect. The novels in question have enjoyed great popularity among readers and have therefore contributed to the social discourse about gender at the time. The intertextual links readers make between the male confessional novel and other contemporary texts (such as films and sitcoms) are surprisingly frequent. By integrating readers’ reviews into the analysis of texts we get a more accurate insight into discourses and discursive formations that were circulating at a particular time and, by the same token, into the structure of feeling. The aim of the analysis is first of all to view themes and motifs of the male confessional novel against the background of the concepts I discussed in Part I. The socio-cultural background of the 1990s, the alleged crisis of masculinity and the problem of inadequacy that jointly tend to be understood as a backlash against feminism, and the changing discourse of gender relations will be at the forefront of the discussion. The second reason for advocating this framework is to illustrate how the genre of the confession constructs its subject, the confessor, and thus detaches the male voice from its usual unmarked status. Whereas in feminist, gender and cultural studies masculinity has invariably been the norm against which femininity, its alleged other and thus marked gender, has been pitched, the male confessional genre reverses this dichotomy and articulates masculinity as the marked gender. A third reason for looking at the publishing phenomenon of the male confessional novel in the light of the cultural climate of the 1990s is to show how the concept of male confession helps us to place an emergent genre of narrative fiction in a wider framework of the finthe-siècle atmosphere, exemplifying the contemporary signifying practices underlying the structure of feeling of a specific generation. Let me briefly recapitulate the characteristics of the male confessional novel. The main, male protagonist is either in his late twenties or early to mid-thirties and spends the best part of the narrative reminiscing about the past and speculating about the future. He usually asks himself why he has drifted into being average and why he has not quite succeeded in being more successful with regard to both his private and professional life. He usually lives in London and has a badly paid job that does not allow him to lead the lifestyle he assumes he is entitled to. He nurtures the dream of becoming famous like a pop star or a stand-up comedian. He is often short of money, and more importantly, of either the woman of his life, or in the case that he has al-

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ready met her, of the necessary commitment to keep her. He is obsessed with something like music or films or with more trivial things such as making lists, collecting things or just complaining about life and feeling sorry for himself. In other words, the anti-hero of the male confessional novel constructs his identity around inadequacy and selfpity. He tends to have a circle of friends who mean a lot to him, but also make him aware of the fact that he has not quite grown up and that he is going nowhere, either because they display the same immature behavioural patterns as himself or because they have taken on the adult responsibilities he is delaying and urge him to grow up. At one point in the narrative, there occurs a caesura, i.e. something dramatic happens: someone disappears or dies. In the fashion of the Bildungsroman, the male protagonist undergoes some sort of maturation process. This process, however, differs from the traditional Bildungsroman in the sense that the reader is not provided with a narrative covering the development from childhood to mature adulthood when the protagonist finally finds the love of his life, his true professional and spiritual vocation, and his rightful position in his community. In the male confessional novel, we observe the protagonist prolonging his adolescence, reminiscing about the past and worrying about the future. Furthermore, his misguidance manifests itself in delaying decisions, complaining about life and, quite simply, killing time. The anti-hero of the male confessional novel does not always entertain a relationship with the wrong partner at the beginning, but has sometimes already found his match without noticing it. Against the background of the postmodern lack of initiation rituals, the proliferation of lifestyles and identity concepts, the quest for identity is complicated by the fact that he cannot strive for a stable sense of self, but has to learn how to perform his gendered identity in compliance with the different cultural scripts he inevitably has to draw on. He has to find out that his notion of masculinity is different from what he thought it was and secondly, that his self-identity differs from his social identity. Even though the male confessional novel does not always end on a conclusive note, a conceivable solution is at least offered. The development the protagonist goes through is usually linked to the abandonment of a specific excessive passion or obsession that prevented him from maintaining a functioning relationship. The possible reasons for the static and immobile situation the protagonist has manoeuvred himself into are discussed in long monologues marked by a high degree of self-reflexivity, stretching from simple philosophical questions about everyday things such as making toast or the five best pop songs ever to more in-depth-analyses of life and death. This merger between realism and self-reflexivity renders the male confessional novel an

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emergent type of the postmodern Bildungsroman, which thematizes the prolongation of adolescence and the procrastination of decisions. The analysis of the eight novels is subdivided into three separate parts, each of which deals with a specific issue that dominates the narratives with regard to the way the crisis of masculinity is faced and acted out, and how the conflicting cultural scripts of New Man and New Lad interfere with the construction of a stable identity and a sense of selfhood.

STRUCTURES OF OBSESSIONS The thing is that women’s obsessions and compulsions are different from men’s. Men’s obsessions are about control; they collect stamps and catalogue them […] (Val McDermid)

In the first chapter, I turn to three novels that thematize the function of personal obsessions as a hindrance to social compatibility and personal development and change. Although the obsessions are all of a rather different nature (popular music in High Fidelity, insomnia in Time for Bed and failure to get over an ex-partner in My Legendary Girlfriend) the novels nevertheless expose some interesting parallels in terms of how these obsessions emphasize the inadequacy of the main protagonist and his lack of ability to change. Furthermore, identity is created on the basis of these obsessions, which function as some sort of substitute for a more integral and wholesome construction of identity. The male characters are in a rut and they feel they are going nowhere. A specific focus with relation to theory in this part of the analysis, especially with regard to High Fidelity, is the use of popular culture and how the protagonists, as obsessive consumers of popular culture, become producers, albeit to differing degrees. As textual poachers in the sense of Jenkins (1992), de Certeau (1984) and Fiske (1991a, 1991b) they use popular culture, especially film and music, as a resource with which to create their own meanings and identity constructions.1 The question of identity is again taken up on a meta-theoretical level. Specifically, I will illustrate how the writing and archiving of identity is closely interlinked to a certain obsession with time in the sense of passing time and pastimes. To put it more simply, what ap1

I also want to underline my conviction that as a reader-critic and analyst, I myself become a textual poacher, using those novels to flesh out the premises that underlie this book. In this sense, I myself take part in the struggle over meanings and for cultural capital, and being a representative of the academic institution and educational system, I do contribute to the hegemonic struggle over cultural meanings.

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pear to be obsessive pastimes on the surface can be read as a desperate attempt to pass time more quickly. Since the pastimes are structured as individualised semiotic units to narrate and read the protagonists’ life story, the act of archiving is similar to the act of writing. In short, archiving memories in the shape of pop records, for example, may equal the act of writing one’s autobiography.2 I want to emphasize, however, that there are quite a number of significant overlaps between all the novels both in terms of narrative structure as well as themes and topics wherefore the subdivision into three separate chapters does neither follow a clear-cut structural nor thematic difference. In terms of similarities, I want to point out that most protagonists have a profession that is in some way linked to popular culture. There are three exceptions: the English teacher in My Legendary Girlfriend but who has also a degree in film studies and considers himself as a film buff; the jobless hedonist in About a Boy who lives off the royalties of a pop song his father wrote decades ago wherefore in his case, too, popular culture can be considered to be his income source. Therefore, only the estate agent in White City Blue works in a profession that is not part of the popular culture industry. There are other similarities, such as the overarching topic of being average and in crisis and not being prepared to commit oneself. All protagonists are somehow aware of the intricacies of what it means to live in a ‘modern’ world including the proliferation of lifestyles it includes, and they all nurture a certain feeling of nostalgia for past times, they miss the initiation rituals their forefathers had to take part in and they feel there is nothing left to fight for.3

MUSICAL

EXCESS IN

HIGH FIDELITY

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby is usually understood as the first male confessional novel of the 1990s. It was published in 1995, sold over a million copies and made the top ten of the 1990s. The novel has been described as a literary bestseller in the fashion of a postmodern Bildungsroman (cf. Knowles 2002). Hornby is one of the few male confessional novel authors who have made it into academic publications on contemporary British fiction and British authors, and he also

2 3

This is particularly true in the case of High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. I use the term ‘modern’ here because the readers whose reviews I have analysed (cf. following pages) use the term surprisingly often. In an everyday context, people do not seem to make a difference between modern and postmodern, and ‘modern’ quite simply means ‘contemporary’.

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has an entry in the Good Fiction Guide (2005).4 The film version of High Fidelity, directed by Stephen Frears and co-produced by John Cusack in the year 2000, has additionally contributed to its popularity. Gathering from the response it got, I would argue that it is actually the most popular male confessional novel that has ever been written. In 2005, I circulated I questionnaire including an open question where people could comment on their favourite book among the male confessional novels they knew. I got a feedback from eighteen readers, but only ten attended to the open question, seven of whom chose High Fidelity as their favourite novel. To give a flavour of how enthusiastic some of them were, I want to reprint the one that struck me the most. High Fidelity – It’s My Life (original emphasis). Funny and touching, Hornby seems to touch at the heart of most men approaching or experiencing mid life. Reflection, rejection and an overwhelming sense of “who am I?” hits us all, me included, and that’s why, when you read about the relationship issues, the deceit of long ago ex-girlfriends and what’s left of the future for me, High Fidelity puts us all into a perspective and gives us all hope that there is a way out and that the future is not so bleak after all. It’s very funny, observing the mannerisms of sorting records, sorting girls, and trying to put order to chaos through what is left for us to control. Top ten lists also help to sort and order, and also tapped into society’s current desire for lists, heros (sic) and villains. It’s a great read, it’s just me!

As we will see, the identification factor which the above extract alludes to is of great importance with regard to most of the confessional novels I am going to discuss. What is also striking is the connection the reader makes between the social and the personal; he takes a novel to be the particular articulation of a general phenomenon, expressing what I would call the structure of feeling of the 1990s. As I have explained in Part I, despite the manifold attempts by poststructuralists to make us understand that there is nothing essential to either masculinity or femininity, stereotypes still prevail. The following excerpt clearly confirms this fact. High Fidelity – Very funny and accurate account of what it is like to be a slightly geeky man, failing to cope with a break-up. The use of lists accurately expresses the way men think.

What is particularly intriguing about High Fidelity is that Nick Hornby was commissioned to write it. After the huge success of his previous book, Fever Pitch (1992), a highly entertaining literary auto4

Rogers, Jane (ed.). Good Fiction Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

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biography about an Arsenal football fan based on his own life, his then publisher, Gollancz, asked him to write a proper novel on a similar topic. With Fever Pitch, a new genre of writing was created, and when Hornby adapted its topics, style and humour to write a proper novel, he was celebrated as the ladlit author. The blurb on the first paperback edition (Gollancz 1993) of Fever Pitch, published in 2000, gives a good insight into how Hornby’s writing was perceived of at the time. Fever Pitch is a sophisticated study of obsession, families, masculinity, class, identity, growing up, loyalty, depression and joy. He should write for England. (Brendan O’Keefe, The Observer)

This already shows how at the beginning of the 1990s, the idea that this particular genre, with its specific focus on masculinity in crisis, drawing on a mix between popular realism and postmodern selfawareness, had a massive market potential. In the interview I conducted with Hornby in 2005, he refers to the relationship between Fever Pitch and High Fidelity, saying […] these terms [ladlit, male confessional, ao] tend to be used for what I did first, or Tim Lott did, and then, you think I’m not writing another memoir, there’s nothing else to say, so now I’m going to write fiction. So, somehow this career path, right, it’s kind of an interesting career path because it’s somehow new that you start with your autobiography before you turn to fiction. I think it’s a hangover in some sense, i.e. that people write a memoir first and then transfer the confession that is in the memoir on to the fiction.

Hornby’s observation alludes to the fact that the confessional novel is a genre of its own, not least because its genealogy is generic as well. According to Hornby, the confessional novel really did grow out of the confessional autobiography. Because of the huge success of both Fever Pitch and High Fidelity, Hornby’s books have become something like a milestone against which the quality of the other male confessional novels is measured. The rise of this new genre makes us aware of the fact that, as Dominic Head puts it [l]iterary history enjoins us to appreciate innovation as a gradual process; it also exposes the false claims of literary fashion. A case in point is the rise, in the 1990s, of so-called ‘Lad Lit’ and ‘Chick Lit’ novels that concern themselves with the tribulations of urban twenty- and thirty-somethings faced with changing heterosexual mores and the pursuit of a desired lifestyle. This is a prime example of a phenomenon that reveals its significance in an

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evolving paradigm of novelistic change, but that surrenders its import once refashioned as a new vogue. Nick Hornby might be hailed as the originator of ‘Lad Lit’, whilst its counterpart might be said to originate with Helen Fielding. This has certainly been the view of broadsheet articles on the phenomenon. (Head, 2002: 248)

Despite the somewhat deprecating undertone, Head makes a vital point by differentiating between the ‘significance of an evolving paradigm of novelistic change’ and the ‘refashioning as a new vogue’ because it refers to two different aspects of popular culture that replace each other in a rather short period of time, which is characteristic of the late modern cultural industry. If something is fit for the market and sells well, as was the case with Fever Pitch and High Fidelity, it is very unlikely to remain without competitors. The publication of numerous ladlit and chicklit novels and their impressive sales figures are testimony to this market phenomenon.5 What is of interest, though, is the question why those books were so successful in the first place. I am convinced that Hornby’s skills as a writer are part of the answer, the other part grounds in his adeptness to sound out the contemporary cultural climate. Hornby is an accurate observer of social problems and cultural trends, and he always aims at giving average people a voice, talking about issues that he thinks his readers can relate to:6 I think people appreciate reading about these things. I personally get very frustrated with novels that are about special people or clever people. I mean, it seems to me that there is a disproportionate number of books for example about academic life and these books of very articulate people being very articulate, and I’ve never understood the fascination of these varieties because to me a part of the challenge is to write about people who are less articulate. In a book maybe they cannot express themselves directly but you can provide a shape in which they can.7

Hornby’s ambition to compose fiction about ordinary people for ordinary readers endorses Fiske’s contention that popular culture can only be popular if the audience it is targeted at is provided with points of 5

6

7

Chicklit enjoys a far better documentation (cf. www.chicklitbooks.com) and has been given more scholarly attention than ladlit or the male confessional novel (cf. Ferris and Young 2006.). Examples of popular chicklit authors are Helen Fielding, Marian Keyes and Jane Green. This is also the case with regard to his two latest novels, A Long Way Down (2005) and Slam (2007). A Long Way Down is about four people who meet by chance on a tower where they all intend to commit suicide on New Year’s Eve; Slam about the ups and downs of a sixteen-year-old teenager. For transcription of the interview, see Appendix B.

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reference and moments of recognition. To put it differently, Hornby’s novels are popular because they offer a high degree of identification. This assumption is confirmed when we consider how readers conceive of the books; sixty-eight out of a hundred and thirteen readers’ reviews of High Fidelity I analysed claimed that they either identified with the male protagonist or that at least they knew someone who was like him. In other words, two thirds of those readers who submitted a review to amazon.uk explicitly thought that with Rob Fleming, Hornby created a character they could relate to on the basis of their own experience. The following excerpts are typical examples of such reviews.8 I love this book because I really related to the main character; […] To me, he seems decent, pretty cool – the type of guy you’d like to have as a pal. […] I know guys like this. […] I think we all feel a little like Rob. Throughout reading this I have found several sections where I have been able to relate to his paranoia and worries, things that all seem to have some bearing, however limited, on the modern man. Overall, this is a story that deals with the worries that many people can relate to – rejection, loss of motivation, isolation, as well as questioning what it is that really attracts us to each other.

Other reviews that express recognition and identification include statements like: Most of us know someone like Rob. I have to say that life is like this. When I read it, I thought that Hornby is writing (sic) an autobiography of (sic) me! Full of truths about modern life. It hits home so often that you can’t help laughing, and sometimes cringing in recognition. I recognized many of the thoughts of Rob. I feel I know the main character Rob inside out. It captures every inch of life. This book is a slow yet compelling read in which you can worryingly identify with the main character. A realistic modern day novel. A highly accurate depiction of modern times. This is exactly what happened to me!

8

All reviews are taken from www.amazon.co.uk/review/product/014029 3469.

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As becomes clear from these examples, High Fidelity stirs the readers’ emotions because if they do not identify with the main protagonist, they at least recognize traits in him that remind them of someone they know. It seems as if Hornby has created a 1990s Everyman in crisis. This, at least, can be deduced from those reviews in which it becomes clear that the reader is male. Since most reviewers only sign ‘a reader’, it is sometimes rather difficult to determine their gender. There are, however, also a number of reviews whose authors must be female because they comment on how Hornby’s book helped them to understand their boyfriends or male partners, as for example becomes obvious in the following excerpt: If ever I thought I’d never be able to understand men, this book brings me a lot closer to achieving that perspective! The narrative often had me laughing out loud, recognising the (funny and often childish) traits so puzzlingly obvious in many of my male friends and partners. […] Men, I understand you a little better, thanks to High Fidelity!

In contrast to the theoretical approaches that are based on an antiessential stance to masculinity, the categories of ‘masculinity’ and ‘maleness’ are here understood as inherent to the male sex. Without wanting to settle for any kind of speculative interpretation as to whether there might indeed be certain similarities between same sex representatives that complicate personal relationships in a heterosexual context – I am sure these do exist as performative acts drawing on cultural scripts – I read these statements in the light of the increase of media publication that dedicated a lot of space and words to the gender battle in the 1990s. The insistence on the ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’-approach is a way to reduce the complexity of everyday problems. High Fidelity is also used as some kind of self-help book for settling differences or misunderstandings in relationships as the following three excerpts from reviews submitted by female readers illustrate:9 I read this on recommendation from (sic) my boyfriend who is just as confused about love and life as the central character in this book, Rob Fleming. This book was recommended to me by my fiancé because it (sic) thought it would help me understand him. Being a [sic] female, this book shed some light for me and my relationship (sic).

9

Cf. John Gray’s Men are from Mars, Women from Venus as discussed in Part I.

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What we gather from these reviews is the insight that readers use Hornby’s book to make sense of their own lives. They can relate to certain problems the novel discusses, and take issue with them against the background of their own life-world. For some male readers, Hornby’s fiction is so accurate that they actually think its causes a threat because it reveals too many male secrets: As a thirty-ish male, this book is about my life, even though I grew up 12,000 miles from where the action takes place in Hornby’s novel. The descriptions of male angst, worry and relations with the opposite gender are handled with style, wit and delicacy. He gets male-female conversation and attitudes absolutely right. A (male) friend of mine thinks that women should not be allowed to read this book, as it gives away too many secrets about how we think. His wife now understands him a bit better after having read it herself. Anyone who has thought about love and romance, wondered about the role of males in the 90s, or ever listened to music that has moved them through a range of emotions, will love this book.

As all these excerpts exemplify, Hornby captures the zeitgeist very accurately. High Fidelity seems to appeal to its readers because they can relate to what is being told and therefore has a bearing on their personal lives. As I have shown in Part I, misunderstandings between men and women as well as the crisis into which men were apparently thrown by feminism and the resulting changes especially with regard to what women expected from men were a frequent issue in newspaper supplements as well as glossy magazines. Even though Hornby did not actually intend to tune in with the contemporary media discourse, he still created a text that fitted the structure of feeling underlying the debate about the changing gender relations at the time. As should have become clear from my discussion of how popular culture works, it does not really matter whether a discourse is ‘real’ or constructed in order to hold some relevance for its readers.10 They extract their own meanings and use the material provided by the market to their own ends, even if it just gives them the feeling of not being alone with a specific set of problems. Hornby is the only ladlit author who has been noticed by literary scholars; otherwise nothing much has been written on this ‘evolving paradigm’.11 But as mentioned, the phenomenon of ‘ladlit’ was a big 10

11

Readers are understood in a very general sense, including anybody who consumes popular culture and is therefore not restricted to more traditional sense, i.e. the reader of a book. Cf. Knowles (2002); Keskinen (2005), Merbitz (2005), Viol (2006), and Faulk (2007).

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issue in the broadsheets and Sunday newspapers, especially in those that include a section on social issues and life-style – ladlit was not only a topic discussed in the arts section in the form of book reviews, but has often been taken up in other sections, too. As I pointed out in Part I, the crisis of masculinity, the New Lad-movement and its delimitation against the New Man phenomenon were dominant from the mid-1990s onwards. Therefore, we must view the genre of the male confessional novel as an intertextual actuality that tried to match the zeitgeist of the 1990s and hence articulated what we retrospectively view as the structure of feeling.12 Against the background of the crisis of masculinity, the notion of change, or its impossibility contributes to the exploration of boundaries. What most male confessional novels share is their main characters’ insistence on ‘being average’ which ultimately limits the possibility of achieving what is so desperately sought. On the other hand, ‘being average’ also implies opting for the middle ground in order to avoid being pushed to the edges, the boundaries of either side.13 Instead of going for the best while running the risk of being thrown back to the worst, they more or less contentedly go with the flow of being unexceptional and middle-of-the-road. Nevertheless the protagonists seek a change, or at least are aware of being stuck in a rut. In other words, there seems to be an aporia or an impasse; a sort of blockage.14 In the case of High Fidelity this blockage seems more striking than in most other novels under scrutiny because Rob, the main protagonist, actually seems to understand why he does not make any progress in life but stubbornly clings to what he 12

13

14

As we have seen in Part I, Williams understands the structure of feeling as something that is expressed independently, i.e. he does not consider intertextual references or the parallel publication of similar novels to be significant in pinning down the structure of feeling. His view may have been tenable for the period for which he conducted his analysis (1780-1950) but certainly not for the postmodern novel, even if the genre in question does not entirely tie in with the postmodern aesthetic. In other words, intertextuality is a vital concept when it comes to analysing different contemporary works written and published at a specific point of time, or as Williams terms it, at a specific historical conjunction. Such an evolving paradigm reflects a relatively new social and cultural phenomenon, and with regard to the male confessional novel, I take a particular interest in what Head calls “the changing heterosexual mores and the pursuit of a desired lifestyle”. The term ‘intertextual actuality’ refers to the fact that different texts about the same or similar topic together make up a discourse within which the common topics are actualised. This might be viewed as a resistance to acknowledging that there is no true centre, i.e. that there might exist – against all postmodern and poststructuralist theory – a true core of the self. In Derridean deconstruction, an aporia is an insoluble paradox. The term is used to emphasize how a text undermines its own rhetoric. cf. Derrida (1993).

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knows best. He is rather cynical about both life in general as such as well as his own perspective on it. He does not get what he wants; he even seems to know for which reasons, but, such is his deeply rooted conviction, he is not willing to change anything. Maybe this unwillingness to change, while at the same time wanting everything else to change in order to fit his own outlook on life, is responsible for the coinage of the so-called “cynical young men”-generation to which both terms the male confessional novel and lad literature might be attached. Furthermore, the insistence on self-reflection reveals a specific kind of tongue-in-cheek humour – rather unsuccessfully imitated by German male confessional novel authors – which has become a significant characteristic of the British male confessional novel and which has undoubtedly contributed to its popularity.

Plot Synopsis

High Fidelity is a book about an individual’s search for identity, conceptualising the self as an independent and somehow detached site of struggle. Identity is constructed on the basis of monomania, an almost pathological obsession for rock music that, for a large part of the narrative, replaces commitment and a serious and truthful relationship as ironically hinted at in the title. The antihero of High Fidelity, Rob Fleming, is the owner of a minor record shop, Championship Vinyl. Before he bought the store, he used to earn his living as a DJ. He does not make a lot of money, but being a huge fan of rock music himself, he considers music to be his life not just his livelihood (Keskinen 2005: 5). Music, it seems, is the only thing that really matters to him. Rob has recently broken up with Laura, his last girlfriend who is a lawyer and has just joined the professional class. Laura has left Rob because of her feeling that they were moving in different directions: She has moved from being a lawyer in a legal aid firm to a job as a high-profile professional in a ‘proper’ law-firm whereas, Rob is still clinging to his adolescent dreams of trying to make ends meet with his record business. Rob feels challenge by Laura because unlike him, she has always been intense about her work, but whereas formerly she had been intense about tenants’ rights etc., she became intense about work itself. In other words, according to Rob, she swapped her idealism for high-profile professionalism: ”She had to take a job that paid about forty-five grand a year because she couldn’t find one that paid under twenty; she said that this was all you need to know about Thatcherism, and I suppose she had a point“ (78). He tries to gloss over the grief and pain the break-up has caused by rearranging his record collection. Musing on the meaning of relationships, he furnishes the reader with an account of his five most un-

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forgettable break-ups, i.e. “desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups in chronological order” (9), ranging from innocent teenage advances on the playground to the more mature relationships he had in his early adult life. The narrative actually begins with these reminisces, entitled ‘Then’, whereas the recounting of the present day events, making up the biggest part of the book, is entitled ‘Now’. There is Alison, his first girlfriend whom he kisses on three consecutive nights only to detect on the fourth that she has replaced him with a schoolmate of his; there is Penny who successfully resisted his teenage advances to have sex. When he realises he is not ‘getting anywhere’, he leaves her but has to live through the traumatic experience to find out that she immediately has given in to another boy’s desires. Number three, Jackie, he steals from his best friend at college but after some time, she decides to get back to her former boyfriend. Charlie, number four, is too attractive and too clever and hence ‘out of his league’, and Rob is defeated and exchanged by someone he believes to be ‘within her league’. He then makes up his mind to look for somebody as average as him and starts going out with Sarah, a match made in the heaven of mediocrity as it seems at first, but she too, leaves him for someone else. After reminiscing about his past relationships, Rob comes to the conclusion that Laura does not figure in his top five list and therefore decides this one will be easy to get over. Nevertheless, he soon loses his detached attitude when it occurs to him that Laura might be going out with someone new, a suspicion that is triggered by a remark of a friend of hers, saying that she would not think much of this Ian bloke. As the novel progresses, he increasingly gets more upset with the idea that Laura might have already embarked on a new sexual relationship with Ian, who on top of everything and to his sheer horror turns out to be their former neighbour from upstairs. Ian represents everything Rob hates, including nouveau riche attitudes as well as a preference for alternative music and to whose vigorous love-making they often had been witnesses due to the deplorable state of the walls. Laura confirms his suspicion when she briefly returns to the flat to collect some things, but she also says that she has not slept with Ian yet. In order to forget about Laura and her possible new life, he tries to seek solace in the arms of an American singer, Mary La Salle whom he meets at a club on a night out with his workmates, Dick and Barry. The latter are, like Rob himself, pop music enthusiasts and strongly opinionated regarding to what counts as good music and what does not. They swap compilation tapes and engage in endless discussions about music in general, thus confirming their masculinity and their homosocial bonds. Like many other protagonists in the male confessional novel, they are competitive and like to expose their friends and workmates in guessing games. They all take a very idiosyncratic view

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of life which turns them into rather dysfunctional human beings when it comes to social encounters outside the safety of the sphere of popular music. When Rob realises that his romantic encounter with Mary La Salle is destined to remain a one-night stand only and therefore does not create a good chance to forget Laura, he makes a futile attempt at sorting out his life by seeking out his former girlfriends – those on the top five list – in order to find out why he always goes wrong and why his relationships have never been happy ones. Even though he manages to make contact with all of them, he remains unable to ascertain the clue to his problems. He believes that he has always been the one who was dumped but during his quest he finds out that there are always two perspectives that do not necessarily overlap. At this point, Rob still refuses to see that his unsuccessful love life follows a certain pattern, like playing the same record time and again, but stubbornly goes on believing that his failures are either the women’s fault or that he just has not been very lucky in the romantic department. A turning point, however, ensues, when Laura’s father dies and Laura’s mother invites him to the funeral. During the reception at her mother’s house, he loses his temper because everyone seems to find fault with him, as a reaction to which he angrily rushes out of the house. Laura, who has been extremely fond of her father and does not cope really well with either the bereavement or the relatives who try to console her, runs after him and talks him into having sex with her in order to numb the pain the loss has caused. Before they actually become aware of it, they are going out together again. Laura claims – to Rob’s distress though – that she is too tired to continue ‘looking’. Furthermore, she convinces Rob that there is more to life than music which does not mean that he should not stay in the musical profession, but that she actually convinces him to go back to DJing, a job Rob very much liked. She also forces him to see that he cannot judge people solely on the basis of their music preferences, by introducing him to a couple of friends of hers whom she knows Rob would like but would probably disapprove of their CD collection. Towards the end of the narrative, Rob proposes to Laura, but she turns him down. She knows that he only does what he thinks he ought to do, and Rob’s explanation for his sudden change of mind, that he was “just sick of thinking about it [giving up his freedom and get married] all the time” (249) does not really convince her. Albeit a bit late, Rob learns his lesson at the end and settles for a serious relationship that involves commitment without being forced to give up his freedom completely.

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Arche-Hi-Fi-mania

In the following, I am going to concentrate on a few but important issues, those being the construction of identity by way of music fandom, and the exploitation of music as a substitute for human relationships. The aim is to demonstrate how Rob, rather ironically if he is to be considered as a Bildungsroman hero, tries to avoid the process of formation instead of entering it. As mentioned above, male confessional novels display an odd obsession about archiving things. Whereas Frankie Blue in White City Blue, to which I will turn later, uses his friends as the storage place for his memories, moments of happiness, and more generally as his identity markers, Rob in High Fidelity retreats to his music collection. At the beginning of the novel when Rob and Laura have split up, he seeks solace in reorganising his record collection. Tuesday night I reorganize my record collection; I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I’m not one of them. This is my life, and it’s nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it. When Laura was here I had the records arranged alphabetically; before that I had them filed in chronological order, beginning with Robert Johnson, and ending with, I don’t know, Wham!, or somebody African, or whatever else I was listening to when Laura and I met. Tonight, though, I fancy something different, so I try to remember the order I bought them in: that way I hope to write my own autobiography, without having to do anything like pick up a pen. I pull the records off the shelves, put them in piles all over the sitting room floor, look for Revolver, and go on from there, and when I’ve finished I’m flushed with a sense of self, because this, after all, is who I am (my emphasis).15

Rob does not talk to anybody about his personal problems, but numbs his pain in moments of emotional upheaval by shuffling around his records. The physicality of the records make up for the absence of the lover he has recently lost. He delves into the past, shutting out the present, a fact that is underpinned by his collection consisting of records rather than CDs as could be expected in the 1990s, and by his retrograde taste for 1970s rock and punk rather than contemporary music. Second, he believes that by putting his records in a particular order, he can write his autobiography without lifting a pen. Taken very literally,

15

Hornby 1995: 51f; subsequent page numbers will be given in the main text.

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the filing system replaces the actual writing of an autobiography.16 On the other hand, the records mark a specific place in the whole arrangement and therefore leave a trace of something he has done or felt at the time he actually bought the record. Thus, the record collection functions as a supplement, in the sense that it replaces something, a written autobiography, social interactions or romance. On the other hand, it complements Rob’s life, adds something to it: “But what I really like is the feeling of security I get from my new filing system; I have made myself more complicated than I really am.” This is a compelling statement as it makes clear that Rob considers rendering himself more complex adds to his security. The intimacy he builds up with his record collection makes him feel more secure because he becomes unintelligible to other people; his Rock LPs replace the love of a woman. Rob cannot see why some people consider the romantic relationship he has with his record collection as strange if not pathological. Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It’s not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There’s a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colourful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music. (73)

Rob lives in his record collection; it replaces the world he cannot make sense of. Music is his sole signifying practice, his only frame of reference. However, his collection is also an attestation to the career as a professional musician that he has missed out on. Even though he lacks the creative potential to compose music or to engage in any kind of artistic occupation with music, he produces his own categories and hierarchies by making carefully planned compilation tapes or by rearranging his collection in the way explained above. Hence, in Fiske’s sense, he transgresses the boundaries of consumerism and becomes an active producer himself. I will comment on the different levels of productivity in more detail below. The record collection is Rob’s basic foundation on which he constructs his identity. It gives him the feeling of security and belonging. Moreover, he seems to actually build his identity by coming up with a complicated filing system, which suggests a complex person. The fact that nobody else is likely to find their way round in Rob’s record col16

In this respect it is important to note, however, that the capability of writing his autobiography is not grounded in Rob’s role as a consumer of popular music but in his own way of interpreting and thus creating a new meaning. Cf. Fiske (1991a and 1991b).

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lection gives him the sense of being interesting, even unique. By way of applying his own personal archive system, he creates his very personal microcosm for which an outsider would need a manual. He tries to get back to his roots – in his case, musical roots. In this respect, it is worthwhile having a closer look at the relationship between archive and beginning. In Archive Fever (1996), in his unique and painstaking fashion, Derrida traces the meaning of ‘archive’ back to a related word of Greek origin, arkhè, which means something like commencement or commandment, maintaining that “[the] name coordinates two principles in one: principle according to nature or history, there were things commence – physical, historical, or ontological principle – but also the principle according to the law, there were men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given – nomological principle” (1996: 1; emphases in original). Thus, arkhè, in all its meanings, embraces or at least touches on the notion of home and identity. Archive itself is also of Greek origin, coming from arkheion, which means ‘house, domicile, address, or the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons’ (cf. Derrida 1996: 2). The domicile is the place where important, official archives were stored, i.e. archived. The term domicile in this respect carries a reference to both a person and a location, or in Derrida’s words, they (the documents: ao) need at once a guardian and a localization. Derrida speaks of topo-nomology, meaning the intersection where the topological and the nomological, the place and the law, meet. He furthermore engages in an interesting word-game, claiming that the topo-nomological nature of the archive has an ontic (archontic) and authorial (patriarchal) function. To put it more simply, what Derrida’s somehow quizzical excursus describes is the process of consignation, or the gathering of signs. The intersection furthermore refers to two different, but related topoi, one dynamic, the other one more static, i.e. the house and the museum. In both places, identity is constituted and articulated. The house is the place where a good part of an individual’s everyday life takes place; the museum in the sense of what is stored in a house or home, makes reference to the storage and display of what is important to that particular individual. The riddle of and the quest for an origin with which Western philosophy has concerned itself for centuries, and which is the main target of Derrida’s critique, he has reworked in an approximation which he calls arche-writing (archi-écriture). Arche-writing refers to a general notion of writing which maintains that there is a difference between what is communicated through writing and what is eventually communicated, and likewise to the desire it to be otherwise (cf. Derrida 1976).

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The parallel between Derrida’s explication and Rob’s situation is obvious: Rob turns his home in which he stores his records into a museum and thus records his life story. In doing so, he at the same time constructs and deconstructs the foundation of his social identity by the topo-nomological principle of the archive. He commands in his home/museum by archiving his ‘life’ on the basis of his own idiosyncratic principles that blur the process of consignation and thus render his construction impenetrable to anybody else. That results in the paradoxical situation that by building his identity around a complex filing system nobody else could make sense of, he at the same time constructs and erases his identity. Rob not only constructs his own identity around music, but also categorises people according to their musical tastes. Music is his only frame of reference, and he does not take people seriously who have less than 500 records or hold musical preferences that are not compatible with his own. At the beginning of the book when he talks about his ‘desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split ups’ (9) he categorises his second girlfriend, Penny Hardwick, as follows: “Penny was nice-looking, and her top five record artistes were Carly Simon, Carole King, James Taylor, Cat Stevens and Elton John” (14). As Claus-Ulrich Viol observes correctly, the point Rob is trying to make with this description is to hint at the fact that Penny is middleof-the-road (2006: 156). Her musical taste is not what would make her into a connoisseur according to the standards of Rob and his mates, but it could be a lot worse, for example if she listed Phil Collins or Tina Turner among her five favourite pop artists. Thus Penny cannot be the ultimate heart-breaker, her ‘niceness’ and average musical preferences make her into an average person. The same goes for Sarah Kendrew, number five on the list and whose five favourite recording artists are Madness, Eurythmics, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Bob Marley. She replaces number four, Charlie Nicholson, whom he had met at university and who was too smart and sophisticated for Rob. Charlie is, so to speak, the epitome of Rob’s failures. As he puts it himself: The lesson I learned from the Charlie debacle is that you’ve got to punch your weight. Charlie was out of my class: too pretty, too smart, too witty, too much. What am I? Average. A middleweight. Not the brightest bloke in the world, but certainly not the dimmest. (29)

What is interesting about Charlie is that, unlike the others, Rob does not classify her according to his musical preferences; Charlie is in a league of her own, doing a design course at university and having a lot of interesting people as her friends. “She was tall, with blonde cropped hair […], and she looked different and dramatic and exotic.

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Even her name seemed to me dramatic and exotic […]” (23). Even though both Charlie and Rob come from a middle-class background, she clearly belongs to the upwardly mobile stratum of the middle class whereas Rob represents the residual working class. His musical tastes are retrograde, and he admires artists representing either the late 1970s punk rock movement such as the Clash, American blue-collar rock à la Springsteen or black soul musicians such as Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye. Therefore, Rob does not approve of 1990s Britpop which was hailed as the renaissance of British pop music and which dominated the charts at the time the book was written and published. As Knowles explains, Rob’s politics of musical taste are a backlash against contemporary music (2002: 47). Not unlike Arnold or Leavis, Rob despises the mass produced popular culture favoured by the majority of rock music fans and vehemently defends what he thinks is the canon of authentic rock music: thus he represents a rather conservative attitude towards popular music. Nonetheless, the question of class with regard to Rob’s musical tastes is a rather problematic one. On the one hand, one could argue that Rob adopts an elitist attitude borrowed from the high culture institution, applying the same aesthetic matrix to popular music as we know it from canonical literature, for example. On the other hand, he could be thought to be harbouring a nostalgia for the working-class and blue-collar culture, given his preference for punk and American roots music. The last aspect is overlooked by Faulk who claims that the class affinity in Rob’s case is even more complex since his musical preference, as a class marker, insinuates that “the specific class orientation of the middle-class professional lurks behind this manifestation of the literary popular” (2007: 155). This is a compelling point as the ‘literary popular’ precisely hints at the amalgamation between high and popular culture. Such a conception bears the overtones of a minority culture guarding the gems of the past. However, to claim that the middle-class professional is lurking there somewhere also hints at a rather different direction with regard to class affiliations. Rock music, in its heyday, was associated with dissidence and provocation. As Faulks argues, in the 1950s “[it] was a simple product of the marginal white culture of poor whites and segregated blacks, but received by the dissident bourgeois as bohemian sacrament” whereas the Rock’n Roll of the 1960s represented “a time of boundary and genre breaking. Performers transgressed gender or racial categories and attracted fan bases across the social spectrum” (2007: 159f). Even though rock music soon became absorbed by the music industry and its mass distribution mechanisms, rock stars were thought to battle against social and political injustice and were therefore viewed as some kind of revolutionaries. With the collapse of the social movements, however, “rock lost its viability as social politics, then as cultural politics, finally

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emerging in its dominant form as simply one consumer practice amid a wide range of lifestyle options” (2007: 161). What Faulk’s line of argumentation conveys is that there is a strong affinity between the emerging managerial class of the 1960s whose members started off as social revolutionaries in order to articulate difference vis-à-vis their elders, but then quickly appropriated the comforts and easiness of economic success. Thus, Faulk concludes, “[t]he story of rock’s oppositional qualities clarifies how the new managerial class gained self-consciousness and solidarity” (ibid.). In Faulk’s view, High Fidelity demonstrates the obliviousness to the genealogy of rock because its representatives of professional managerial class are transformed into ‘schizophrenic subjects’ who use rock music in a manic fashion, and thus efface its once social function. Consequently, rock music does no longer fulfil the needs of a community, but in the cases of Rob, Dick and Barry,17 those of fanatic individuals who build their identity on the basis of their expert knowledge of oldfashioned rock music and thus fashion themselves as ‘true believers apart from the masses.’ In that sense, then, “High Fidelity reveals the persistence of class and rank in the putatively classless world of rock” (2007: 162). As I argued above, music in High Fidelity is a highly solipsistic and closed signifying system that isolates the individual from its social environment. Despite the fact that music serves as an allegedly sound foundation upon which Rob constructs his identity, the ways in which he uses the categories and hierarchies are impenetrable to outsiders, except to his even more fanatical workmates. Dick and Barry cannot relate to anyone who does not appreciate rock music to the same degree as they do. They are rather different from each other though; Dick is the shy freak whereas Barry displays a rather aggressive nature, lecturing people on their bad taste and refusing to sell them a record if it does not rank in his category of what counts as good music. All three of them find it difficult to communicate with nonobsessive music lovers, let alone to relate to women. Music, or talk about music, fills the silence that would ensue if it could not be used as a substitute for ‘normal’ communication and social interaction. They are in the habit of giving each other compilation tapes, which are not to be considered as simple gifts, but as tokens of their same-sex friendship and a reaffirmation of their homosocial bonds. In High Fidelity, compilation tapes function both as a language substitute and as the currency of a subcultural economy. 17

‘Rob, Dick and Barry’ echoes ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’ from the popular saying ‘every Tom, Dick and Harry’. The phonetic resemblance is rather ironic since they would do anything in order not to come across as every Tom, Dick and Harry.

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Since Rob would not know how to express his emotions otherwise, making a compilation tape is like writing a letter as far as he is concerned. If he is in a romantic mood and plans to seduce a woman, he makes a compilation tape for her. Keskinen (2005: 11) rightly points out the parallel rhetoric between the acoustic letter writing in High Fidelity and the tradition of the epistolary novel in the 18th century which usually involved the motif of seduction. Keskinen, in a very original way, reads High Fidelity’s formats of recorded music, the single, the LP and the compilation tape as metaphors for three types of personal situations, singledom, marriage (or cohabitation) and promiscuity. For Rob, these formats are mutually exclusive, and just as one makes a choice in favour of a musical format, one has to decide which format one subscribes to with regard to personal relationship. He very much favours the compilation tape because he can become active himself, deciding on the sequence of the songs, as he wants to be in control of the chronology of his relationship with Laura. To him, her leaving before he could see an end is like stopping a tape in the middle of a good song. The compilation tape has yet another metaphorical meaning, though, since it is a betrayal to high fidelity in both senses of the phrase. First, in the technological sense because its rather basic mechanism cannot reproduce the high-end sound of a CD or a professional record player and secondly because it foreshadows a possible act of infidelity in the sexual sense. To sum up, Rob does not want to give up his freedom and pictures his life and relationship as a compilation tape that can be played until one gets tired of it. He does not realise that his existence is tied to a self-made prison. Music is his sole point of reference; the world does not make sense to him without it. His obsessive love for music prevents him from having a sound relationship because his only relationship is with sound so to speak. His fidelity is to music only and thus makes him unable to maintain a proper and fulfilling relationship with a woman. In the following, we are going to see how Rob’s maturation process gets into motion because of four specific turning points in the novel. Because he has lost the security of a steady relationship, Rob has to redefine himself as a man. He realises that he has no clear concept of masculinity. A second turning point ensues when he tries to find out who he is on the basis of what he has done in the past and therefore seeks out his former girlfriends. The third incisive moment in his maturing process is triggered by the sudden death of Laura’s father and the realisation that the potential of music to match somebody’s grief is very limited. The last turning point follows when Laura succeeds in teaching him that music should be treated as a hobby or a profession at most, but not as the ultimate meaning of life.

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The sound of home

It first dawns on Rob that a change is called for when he feels really low one Sunday morning and wonders where he belongs: “I don’t belong at home, and I don’t want to belong at home, but at least home is somewhere I know” (113, emphasis in original). He decides to pay his parents a visit in the suburban area near Watford where he grew up. The trip home does not really cheer him up. First of all, even though he does not care too much about his parents, he is upset when they are not at home. He then finds them having a great time enjoying a wine tasting, which completely unsettles him, because “the one thing I wanted from the afternoon was incontrovertible proof that my life may be grim and empty, but not as grim and empty as life in Watford” (115). To make matters worse still, his parents talk him into joining them for an outing to the cinema in the afternoon. It is at the cinema where he realises that he has to change: Going to the pictures aged thirty-five with your mum and dad and their insane friends does not take your mind off things, I discover. It very much puts your mind on things. While we’re waiting for Yvonne and Brian to purchase the entire contents of the Pick’n Mix counter, I have a terrible, chilling, bone-shaking experience: the most pathetic man in the world gives me a smile of recognition. The Most Pathetic Man In The World has huge Dennis Taylor-style spectacles and buck teeth; he’s wearing a dirty fawn anorak and brown cord trousers which have been rubbed smooth at the knee; he, too, is being taken to see Howard’s End by his parents, despite the fact that he’s in his late twenties. And he gives me this terrible smile because he has spotted a kindred spirit. […] This, really, is the bottom line, the chief attraction of the opposite sex for all of us, old and young, men and women: we need someone to save us from the sympathetic smiles in the Sunday night cinema queue, someone who can stop us from falling down into the pit where the permanently single live with their mums and dads. I’m not going back there again; I’d rather stay in for the rest of my life than attract that kind of attention. (117f, emphasis in original)

Rob is distressed because the most pathetic man in the world has recognised him as a kindred spirit. Apart from the fact that he feels embarrassed being taken to the cinema by his parents at the age of thirtyfive, he does not want to be mistaken as a lost soul who does that every Sunday because he has no one else to turn to. Even though this realisation does not yet trigger the maturation process as such, at least it is some sort of an awakening to the idea that things have to change. To ensure that something like that will not happen ever again, he wants to make himself eligible for the romance market again, and in

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order to avoid the mistakes from the past, he needs to find out why he has never been able to maintain a relationship for a longer period of time. Rob often toys with the possibilities past experiences offer for the future. By looking back on happy times, by retaining what was best in the past, a sense of hopefulness is created on the grounds that there is always a chance that such happy moments may be repeated. This becomes clear in a passage earlier in the novel when he realises that he misses Laura but is also in love with Marie La Salle, an American folk singer: The Marie bit is easy enough to understand, then. The Laura thing takes a bit more explaining, but what it is, I think, is this: sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time. (58)

According to the law of iterability, traces of past experiences may be inscribed in future events.18 But this extract also shows how by the merging of the past and the future the present seems to vanish altogether. Rob does not actually live in the present. He tries to come to terms with his identity by piecing together the past and by projecting the future. Despite his apparent inability to deal with the present, he is nonetheless aware and self-reflexive regarding this deficiency: I was kidding myself that there was something I could go on to, an easy, seamless transition to be made. I can see that now. I can see everything once it’s already happened – I’m very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand. (74)

Rob builds his entire identity around the past. At the very beginning of the novel where he talks about his “desert-island, all-time, top five memorable split-ups in chronological order” (9) he not only builds up his identity on past experiences but also on those that were disruptive and stressful. Even though he seeks continuity, a sense of belonging, comfort and happiness, he always falls back on listing disruptions and caesuras. As Keskinen remarks, Rob does not want to start anew, but to start again (2005: 5). That is why he is constantly trying to make sense of the past and to make it responsible for the problems he is confronted with in the present. Inspired by a Bruce Springsteen song, he decides to track down his former girlfriends to ask them why their relationships failed:

18

This becomes particularly obvious in a novel I will discuss further below, i.e. White City Blue.

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I want to see them now: Alison Ashworth, who ditched me after three miserable evenings in the park, Penny, who wouldn’t let me touch her and who then went straight out and had sex with that bastard Chris Thomson. Jackie, attractive only while she was going out with one of my best friends. Sarah, with whom I formed an alliance against all the dumpers in the world and who then went and dumped me anyway. And Charlie. Especially Charlie, because I have her to thank for everything: my great job, my sexual self-confidence, the works. I want to be a well-rounded human being with none of these knotty lumps of rage and guilt and self-disgust. (130)

Even though it is hard not to notice Rob’s cynicism, he here clearly displays traits that fall in line with the New Man-script. He realises that his usual attitude bears some potential for failure and that it might be necessary to change his approach to love and life. He wants to become a ‘well-rounded human being’, a development the didacticism of a Bildungsroman usually suggests, albeit through the maturation process the protagonist has to go through without reflecting on it first. In contrast to the traditional Bildungsroman hero who can choose between different options but not necessarily between different identity concepts and gender performances but ultimately aims at becoming a wholesome member of the community fit for marriage, Rob somehow oscillates between different identity and gender concepts, i.e. the New Lad-script and the New Man-script: There are men who call, and men who don’t call, and I’d much, much rather be one of the latter. They are proper men, the sort of men that women have in mind when they moan about us. It’s a safe, solid, meaningless stereotype: the man who appears not to give a shit, who gets ditched and maybe sits in the pub on his own for a couple of evenings, and then gets on with things. (129, emphasis in original)

This New-Lad behaviour is how he used to fashion himself, but it neither helped to maintain the relationship with Laura nor to prevent him from being spotted by the pathetic man in the cinema queue. As he observes himself, “I’ve lost it again, just like I lost it with Charlie, all those years ago” (129). Rob does not approve of the New Man-script because in his view, a New Man is not a ‘proper’ man, and when he finds out that his fears that Laura has already been intimate with Ian have been in vain, he enthusiastically remarks: “I feel like a new man, although not very much like a New Man. I feel so much better, in fact, that I go straight out and sleep with Mary” (95). The New Lad-script helps him to act out the sort of masculine behaviour that is regarded as ‘normal’ in an all-male environment. This becomes obvious when Rob ponders the question how far male friend-

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ships differ from relationships with women; he can very clearly put his finger on what is crucial to the comportment in a single-sex context whereas the way he is supposed to behave in a relationship somehow remains unfathomable to him: Sometimes, it seems as though the only way a man can judge his own niceness, his own decency, is by looking at his relationships with women – or rather, with prospective or current sexual partners. It’s easy enough to be nice to your mates. You can buy them a drink, make them a tape, ring them up to see if they’re OK… there are any number of quick and painless methods for turning yourself into a Good Bloke. When it comes to girlfriends, though, it’s much trickier to be consistently honourable. One moment you’re ticking along, cleaning the toilet bowl and expressing your feelings and doing all the other things that a modern chap is supposed to do; the next, you’re manipulating and sulking and double-dealing and fibbing with the best of them. It can’t work out. (62)

Rob is fully aware that there are lots of things at stake in both male friendship and a relationship with a woman. However, whereas the expectations in male friendships seem to fit into a neat matrix of competition in terms of who knows more about rock music, he is at a loss when it comes to play by the rules in a mixed gender relationship. On the other hand, however, I again would like to draw attention to the meaning of making compilation tapes. I have already mentioned the metaphorical trichotomy Keskinen uses to make sense of Rob’s fusion of the romantic with the musical, claiming that the compilation tape represents promiscuity. Whenever Rob meets a woman who stirs his sexual interests, he makes her a compilation tape. The very same format, however, is also used to give to male friends, albeit for different purposes. The fact remains though, that the compilation tape functions as some sort of seduction, either to get the attention from a possible (female) sexual partner or from a fellow music expert who invariable happens to be male. Rob uses the compilation tape to state his preferences and to tell other people who he is, but he also uses it to flirt, i.e. to convince possible lovers and fellow music buffs that he has an attractive personality. Rob’s strategies are very ingrained and seem difficult to get rid off, so when Rob makes the decision to revisit his past, it is not clear whether he is indeed willing to embark on this undertaking in order to find out what he might do differently in the future, or simply to reaffirm his misery and underpin his chronicle of failures.

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The sound of repetition

Rob contacts all his ex-girlfriends, which marks the second turning point in his maturation process. He begins with Alison, his very first girlfriend. He talks to her mother on the phone and finds out that she is married to Kevin Bannister, the ‘boy’ who stole her from him on the playground. This news cheers him up tremendously: “What chance did I stand against kismet? No chance at all. It was nothing to do with me, or any failings on my part, and I can feel the Alison Ashworth scar healing over as we speak” (136). He feels similarly relieved after speaking to Penny, the girl who did not want to have sex with him. When she confesses that she was devastated when he left her and only went out with Chris Thompson because she felt so awful, he concludes: “So that’s another one I don’t have to worry about. I should have done this years ago” (141). So far, Rob is pleased with what he finds out from his ex-girlfriends because it flatters his ego and reaffirms his masculinity; he does not seem to have started to truly mature yet with regard to his comportment towards women. He then seeks out girlfriend number three, Jackie, who is married to Phil, Rob’s friend from college who had gone out with Jackie before Rob did and later won her back. They are married, and according to Rob, “the most boring people in the south-east of England, possibly because they’ve been married too long, and therefore have nothing to talk about, apart from how long they’ve been married” (145). To Rob, that amounts to playing the same bad record time and again and therefore he considers himself lucky not to have stayed with Jackie. Girlfriend number four, Sarah, at thirty-five, is a sad single woman who would not mind going out with Rob for a second time. Rob briefly considers this option, but then immediately rejects it: “But you wouldn’t just be sleeping with a person: you’d be sleeping with a whole sad single-person culture” (149). In conclusion, the result of Rob’s quest to find out what went wrong with his former lovers has not really made him into a sensitive and mature New Man – it has only made him feel better about his past failures, which, in the light of the present do not actually seem like failures anymore. However, he does acknowledge that they are in the past, and he is determined to no longer let the past interfere with his future. Accordingly, he has at least learnt to let go even if it is not necessarily for the right reasons. But he still has to meet Charlie, his out-of-his-league ex-girlfriend, the one that he has always been most proud of but also the one in whose presence, with hindsight, he felt the least comfortable. Charlie is also the one he has blamed for all his failures regarding his job prospects because he was so low at the time of their break-up that he just could not be bothered to sort out his life. He phones her up and leaves a message on her answering machine and a few days later, she rings him back. They have an awkward conversa-

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tion during which Rob decides that Charlie’s awful: “She didn’t use to be awful, but something bad has happened to her, and she says terrible, stupid things and has no apparent sense of humour whatsoever. What would Bruce Springsteen make of Charlie?” (156). He still has not understood that pop songs do not necessarily tell him how to live his life and provide answers to his questions. He nevertheless wants to find out in what way Charlie has changed and therefore accepts her invitation to a dinner party. Even though Charlie is still as attractive as she used to be, Rob does not enjoy the dinner party because he feels out of his depth. He cannot make any sense of the other guests’ lifestyles and behaviour. As mentioned earlier, Charlie lives the lifestyle of the nouveau riche and therefore belongs to the upwardly mobile section of the middle class whereas Rob, with his suburban background and low income is a member of the lower middle class. Once again, he has this feeling of not belonging, of not being at home: “If these people were ever up my street I’d have to barricade myself inside the flat.” (159). Rob again becomes aware ho his lack of belonging and, as the following extract shows, of being average; of having neither a decent education nor a respectable job: The difference between these people and me is that they finished college and I didn’t (they didn’t split up with Charlie and I did); as a consequence, they have smart jobs and I have a scruffy job, they are rich and I am poor, they are self-confident and I am incontinent, they do not smoke and I do, they have opinions and I have lists. (160).

He also becomes aware of the fact that Charlie and her friends have a different sort of way to archive the meaning of life; whereas they express opinions about life and politics, Rob contents himself with drawing up lists of what he likes best and what he likes least, especially in terms of music. His list making tendency is related to archiving his records because lists also create meaning. As Merbitz argues, lists act as self-reflexive elements since they defy the construction of a unified plot in terms of narrative structure (2005: 184). However, Rob uses lists as a kind of narrative principle that sheds light on his preferred categories that help organise his life. He makes lists of all sorts of things, the most memorable one being the one with his top five breakups. But he also lists things he should have or should not have done. So apart from listing his favourite songs and records, he also tries to make sense of his life-story, which again makes clear that he is aware of his failures and yet refuses to change, at least up to the point where he begins to understand that lists do not replace opinions in a more political sense. He realises that being a fully functioning member of the community requires more than having a strong opinion as to which song figures among the top ten records ever.

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The sound of death

High Fidelity is marked by a high degree of irony, sometimes in the form of self-deprecation (“what am I? – a middleweight”), sometimes in the guise of self-reflexivity that more often than not sounds like he was looking for excuses. As I explained in Part I, the male confessional novel is a mix between apology and accusation, the latter being inherent to the genre of the confessional novel, the former explicitly acted out by the male narrator. But the latter also comes to realise that in order to overcome his inadequate matrix of making sense of the world, he needs to change, he needs a rite of passage that allows him to enter maturity. A bit earlier in the novel, after he has engaged in another non-sensical discussion with his workmates Dick and Barry, Rob suddenly realises that their way of having conversations might not be completely adequate for adult human beings: I feel as though I have been having conversations like this all my life. None of us is young any more, but what has just taken place could have happened when I was sixteen, or twenty, or twenty-five. We got to adolescence and just stopped dead; we drew up the map then and left the boundaries exactly as they were. (125)

Consequently, Rob feels as though he has missed out on something. He has stuck to the same sort of friends, tastes and behavioural patterns all his life. He did not want to grow up, he has prolonged his adolescence and put off taking an adult outlook on life. For a long time, he fitted in with his age group, but on reaching his mid-thirties, he does not anymore, a fact which the party at Charlie’s makes more than obvious. Even though he has not completely realised the full extent of his apparent inadequacy, he nevertheless is aware of the fact that he has changed; he has become bitter. So far, he has not located the source for being bitter or sour within himself, but rather with external circumstances that led to his present lifestyle, made him split up with Laura, and prevented him from achieving more than running an unsuccessful second-hand record shop. Rob, then, is not capable of seeking change from within. In other words, he does not succeed in finding a way of changing himself relying on his own resources, he does not look for a different way of writing his identity. He keeps procrastinating, i.e. deferring the signifier life to the next without settling for a fixed signified. He waits for something to happen. Then Laura’s father dies and Laura falls back on Rob again, initially simply for the fact that she feels lonely in the hour of bereavement. Rob does not think of the implications this might have; he all too happily runs to rescue his distraught former girlfriend. However, he starts to reflect on the meaning of life and death, which I

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see as the third significant turning point in the process he undergoes. At Laura’s mother’s request, he accompanies Laura to the funeral and for the first time in his life, he learns what pain caused by the loss of a beloved person might mean: […] and there’s this sudden, heart-stopping clanking of machinery and the coffin disappears slowly through the floor. And as it does so, there’s a howl from in front of us, a terrible noise that I don’t want to hear: I can only just tell that it’s Laura’s voice, but I know that it is, and at that moment I want to go to her and offer to become a different person, to remove of what is me, as long as she will let me look after her and try to make her feel better. When we get out into the light, people crowd around Laura and Jo and Janet, and hug them; I want to do the same, but I don’t see how I can. But Laura sees Liz and me hovering on the fringe of the group, and comes to us, and thanks us for coming, and holds us both for a long time, and when she lets go of me I feel that I don’t need to offer to become a different person: it has happened already. (192)

Rob senses that a change is looming somewhere, but he has neither got the strength nor the will to initiate it without the help of external forces. When he feels this urge to become a different person, i.e. to erase the person he has been up to the present moment, he very contentedly gives in to the emotional atmosphere created by the external circumstances he has been plunged into by chance. He feels Laura’s need for him to be there, which is already enough for him to feel a different person. The erasure of the old Rob and the creation of the new one does not take more than a few minutes. However, given his fear of being average, inadequate, devoid of feelings, and what is more, unable to give anything to anybody, at a second glance, it is not surprising that he feels different after what happened at the funeral. When he talks to Laura’s sister afterwards, she expresses her fear that Laura might not be alright: “She’s had a pretty rough few weeks already, without this” says Liz, and I feel a little surge of something like pride: That was me. I made her feel like that. Me and a couple of others, anyway, including Laura herself, but never mind. I’d forgotten that I could make her feel anything and, anyway, it’s odd to be reminded of your emotional power in the middle of a funeral which, in my limited experience, is when you lose sense of it altogether. (193)

On the one hand, Rob does not understand how a funeral can make you become aware of your own emotional power because for him, funerals are most likely to be associated with immobility and powerlessness. On the other hand, however, he exploits the funeral and the be-

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reavement of others to feel powerful himself. He has caused something, even if it is only to make Laura feel awful. He is the cause of something, and given the numbness he felt before Laura’s father had died, he would rather cause pain than nothing.19 In this sense, he is not unlike Laura who asks to him to sleep with her after they have left the reception, explaining her behaviour as follows: “I just feel like I want sex. I want to feel something else apart from misery and guilt. It’s either that or I go home and put my hand in the fire. Unless you want to stub cigarettes out on my arm.” (200)

They both prefer feeling something to nothing, and together, they seem to be able to fill the void they have fallen into. Laura’s reaction may of course be explained by drawing on Freud, claiming that love and death, Eros and Thanatos, are closer than civilization usually acknowledges because it somehow seems rather morbid to have sexual intercourse in a moment of bereavement, but it is exactly this numbness caused by a sudden absence that fuels the desire to engage in the act of reproduction.20 Rob has probably not pondered this possibility in these terms, but on a different level, he has the same urge to fall back on the possibility of reproduction because in times of emotional distress, he relies on the reproduction of music. He listens to the songs he thinks are both responsible for and offer a remedy for being sad. In short, music at the same time functions as poison and as pharmakon.21 Laura is the one who brings about some change in Rob. As Knowles (2002: 25) observes, she is the catalyst for Rob’s actions. However, what is often overlooked, is that at this particular moment, having just experienced the death of her father, she somehow seems to fall back into the same immaturity Rob has claimed for himself for so long. She does not want to be grown-up because mature people are expected to be able to deal with death; she wants to be a girl again, a girl who is fussed over and looked after. Her weakness brings her closer to Rob who has just experienced a short moment of realising what being a grown-up might actually mean.

19

20 21

Similarly, in My Legendary Girlfriend, Will is proud of maybe having made a woman pregnant even though he would never be prepared to assume his responsibilities as a father. The tension between the childish pride the male protagonists foster for something they have caused they do not even want, is a recurrent topic in the male confessional novel and to some extents justifies the confessional narrative. Cf. Freud’s The Ego and the Id (1927). I will come back to the double meaning of pharmakon in my analysis of White City Blue by Tim Lott.

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Another reason why they are drawn together again lies in the fact that they are both tired. After Laura and Rob had sex after the funeral because Laura wanted to feel something else apart from misery and guilt, she informs Rob that she is too tired not to go out with him (204). Laura is tired of looking for grown-up men while in a moment of crisis, Rob is still the only one she can rely on, and Rob is too tired of not feeling at home. So even though Rob has a short panic attack (“Suddenly I feel panicky, and sick, and I want to get record label logos painted on my walls and sleep with American recording artists. I take Laura’s hand and kiss her on the cheek.” (204)) when he understands the implications of what Laura told him, but he does let himself be led home by her very contented: “‘We’re going home’, she says, and that is how our relationship resumes its course” (205).

The sound of maturity

Throughout High Fidelity, Rob tries to make sense of more or less everything with the help of his record collection. Even though he is reluctant to undergo the transformation he feels is necessary in order to lead a more fulfilling life, he eventually comes to understand that music cannot be the answer to everything. Towards the end of the book when Laura’s father dies and when he tries to find a possible way to console her, he realises that not even his record collection may be able to deal with the pain the loss of a beloved person may cause: “[…] we have about seven squillion hours’ worth of recorded music in here, and there’s hardly a minute of it that describes the way Laura’s feeling now” (187). This marks a significant change in Rob’s development. The realization that music after all is not able to capture emotions, Rob has to question his philosophy of life. He has used music as a supplement for real emotions without understanding that the insoluble tension between what music pretends to refer to and the depth of feelings it cannot make sense of. Rob has used music as a signifier for emotions without being aware that the signified cannot be captured. His life has been a continuous deferral. Whenever a clear-cut decision or a declaration had been asked for, he resorted to music, and thereby deferred the sort of meaning that would have helped him to change his life. Like the turntable of his record player, he has gone round in circles; he has thought he could wind his life backward just like his compilation tapes. It needed the moment of the ultimate standstill, the death of Laura’s father, to make him realise that repetition is not the key to life, that death, like ending a relationship, opens up a void, which cannot be filled that easily. Death then, is the ultimate loss of something that cannot be brought home again.

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There are a number of metaphors in the novel to describe the yearning for a place to belong to, for example, that of homesickness. Rob lives in the environment he knows best; he should feel at home where he his, and yet when his American friend points out that she is thousands of miles from home he sympathizes because he feels the same way, too. He is miles away from where he thinks he might belong: “Since I split up with Laura I really feel like slumping on to the floor and bawling my eyes out. I’m home-sick” (179). However, Rob’s yearning for a place to belong seems so strong because he has not the means and tools to get him there; he lacks the necessary communicative skills. He thinks he can write his biography by filing his records in a specific order; he tries to fill the present by listening to songs that meant something in the past, and he thinks that making a compilation tape for somebody he likes will tell them about how he feels: “If I can’t buy specially priced compilation albums for new girlfriends, then I might as well give up, because I’m not sure that I know how to do anything else” (169). To Rob, his record collection is a multipurpose tool box that enables him to make sense of who he is and makes up for his lacking communicative skills. Furthermore, the filing of records and their rearrangement is also a metaphor for Rob’s search for the right place for feeling at home. Which record goes where is important (as well as how they can be instruments to tell a story, to declare love, or to reflect identity). Their actual value in a specific place is important to Rob, and reflects his desire to also feel properly located. In conclusion, High Fidelity is a book about the search for identity and the meaning of life – it is about writing identity. As we have seen, Rob tries to make sense of his life, experiences, relationships etc. in terms of records. He puts them in chronological, alphabetical or some other order just as he does with his former girlfriends. His signifying practice is to extract meaning from music as if songs were life experiences. At the end of the novel, which marks the last turning point, he becomes aware of the fact that records, in whatever filing system they may be kept, help him to archive his past, but do not actually serve as a matrix according to which his present and future life may be planned. He does not have the ability to initiate the process of maturation himself and therefore relies on external forces. Seeking out his ex-girlfriends, his changing relationship with Laura, that he most vividly experiences when Laura’s father dies, provides a source from which he can start building a new identity. When they resume their relationship, Laura makes him understand that his survival strategies, i.e. categorising and evaluating everything according to record labels, might not be the adequate strategy to come to terms with life’s ups and downs.

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A few weeks into the new phase of their relationship, Rob tells her off for not making a distinction between Art Garfunkel (whom he detests) and Solomon Burke (whom he loves): “How can you like Art Garfunkel and Solomon Burke? It’s like saying you support the Israelis and the Palestinians” (208, emphases in original). Laura refutes his point by saying: It’s not like saying that at all, actually, Rob. Art Garfunkel and Solomon Burke make pop records, the Israelis and the Palestinians don’t. Art Garfunkel and Solomon Burke are not engaged in a bitter territorial dispute, the Israelis and the Palestinians are. […] There are so many other things to worry about. I know I sound like your mum, but they’re only pop records, and if one’s better than the other, well, who cares, really, apart from you and Barry and Dick? To me, it’s like arguing the difference between McDonalds and Burger King. I’m sure there must be one, but who can be bothered to find out what it is?” (208f)

Rob’s first reaction to Laura’s lecture on where difference matters is to insist that the referential system he applies to rock music matters very much to him because without it, there would not be much left of him: “Look at me. Look at the flat. What else has it got, apart from records and CDs and tapes?” (210). Rob thinks he needs his music; it is “stuff that stops you floating away” (211). But Laura teaches him how to let go, i.e. how to let things happen. She takes him to see a couple of friends of hers. Rob feels very much at ease with them: I fall in love with both of them – with what they have, and the way they treat each other, and the way they make me feel as if I am the new centre of their world. I think they’re great, and I want to see them twice a week every week for the rest of my life. (221)

Rob finally feels at home – until he has a closer look at their record collection which features all his most detested artists. He is angry with Laura because he suspects that she tricked him into coming along because she knew he would like her friends despite their taste in music. Laura even admits: “Everybody’s faith needs testing from time to time. I thought it would be amusing to introduce you to someone with a Tina Turner album, and then see whether you still felt the same” (222). Rob, for the first time, reconsiders his value system: I’m sure I do. Or at least, I’m sure I will. But tonight, I have to confess (but only to myself, obviously) that maybe, given the right set of peculiar, freakish, probably unrepeatable circumstances, it’s not what you like but what

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you’re like that’s important. I’m not going to be the one that explains to Barry how this might happen, though. (222f)

It is important what you are like, not what you like. Rob is now able to question his old categories. Even though he has not changed completely (his ironic tone makes that more than clear), thanks to Laura, he has had some valuable insights that may help him break with his rigid value system. He almost has a relapse when an attractive music journalist asks him to give an interview to which he agrees. He even starts making her a compilation tape, his last flirt with polygamy, but when Laura asks him who it is for, he realises what the compilation tape really stands for and that Laura knows it, too: “She of all people knows what compilation tapes represent” (246). The novel ends with Rob’s return to DJing at a party where Barry and his group give a concert. Rob fears the worst, but to his utter astonishment, they launch into Twist and Shout and everybody likes it. In his head, Rob starts compiling a compilation tape for Laura. The tape will contain, unlike in the past when he only recorded songs he liked, songs she likes: “Tonight, for the first time ever, I can sort of see how it’s done” (253). The compilation tape has finally lost its metaphorical meaning of promiscuity and might live up to the expectation in both music and romance: high fidelity.

LOST IN THE LAND GIRLFRIEND

OF

LOVE

IN

MY LEGENDARY

Mike Gayle is a freelance journalist and used to work for a music fanzine. My Legendary Girlfriend (1998) is his first novel, and he summarises his motivation and inspiration to write a confessional novel as follows: I always knew that the kind of novel I would write would be about ordinary people doing ordinary things and would have a confessional nature to it. Obviously Catcher in the Rye was a big inspiration as I suspect it is to nearly everybody who reads it as a teenager and also the Adrian Mole diaries too. Douglas Coupland’s Generation X was also a big influence and that he was part of that whole early nineties post grunge introspective slacker scene epitomised by films like Richard Linklater’s Slacker […]”.22

As we can see from this short extract, Gayle, like Hornby, intended to write about ‘ordinary people’ doing ‘ordinary things’. In this sense, he 22

Cf. Mike Gayle’s homepage (www.mikegayle.co.uk).

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fully complies with the social realism of the male confessional novel. Furthermore, the two authors share their love for music. Gayle’s novels are full of references to pop music, and My Legendary Girlfriend is actually a song title by the British Britpop band Pulp. They were most popular during the 1990s, a fact to which the novel obviously pays tribute. Gayle’s literary influences suggest a mix between teenage angst and hippie culture, which his novel is not. However, if we regard all three novels, Salinger’s (1954), Coupland’s (1991) and Gayle’s as stories of young men who do not think they fit in with their age group at a particular historical conjunction, then there is a certain resemblance. The main protagonist in My Legendary Girlfriend, Will, displays some rather obsessive and erratic behavioural patterns like Dag in Generation X; with Salinger’s young hero Holden he shares the refusal to comply with the normative rules that come with the social position he is in. Holden struggles against the expectations a college student has to live up to; Will cannot identify with what is expected from him as a teacher. As becomes obvious from the reader reviews, Hornby and Gayle have often been compared, usually in terms of which of the two authors is the better one. This is important to note because as I mentioned when explaining the term ‘middlebrow’, the combination of intellectual stimulation and entertainment while being ‘realist’ at the same time is of prime importance to fulfil the generic requirements of middlebrow fiction to which the male confessional novel, i.e. ladlit belongs. I thought Nick Hornby had the monopoly on summing up the male psyche – that is, until I red Mike Gayle’s My Legendary Girlfriend. If you want to read the ‘male Bridge Jones’, read High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, it’s much better than Bridget Jones, and is completely uncomparable (sic) with this sorry excuse for modern, urban fiction. [I]f you have read BJ [Bridget Jones] or High Fidelity, you wouldn’t dream of finishing this. Nick Hornby is a thousand times funnier. If you really like this genre look for Nick Hornby, more mature and sophisticated but equally funny. Save your pennies, buy High Fidelity instead. I picked up this book hoping it would have as much insight and me laugh as much as Nick Hornby did in High Fidelity, but I was left disappointed. [I]t is a passable first novel but with none of the charm of High Fidelity.23

23

All excerpts from readers’ reviews are taken from www.amazon.co. uk/review/product/0340718161.

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From the above excerpts it becomes evident that most readers who compare the two authors are of the opinion that Hornby is the true master of the genre. It is not clear in how far this has got to do with the publishing history of the books, and I cannot rule out the possibility that the readers were influenced by other reviews on amazon.co.uk. Most interestingly, if one has a look at the literature map where authors are compared in terms of how close they are with regard to generic characteristics, i.e. show how likely it is if someone likes author A then also reads the novels by B, C, D etc., Gayle appears on the map if one types in Hornby’s name but not the other way round.24 This I take as another indicator of Hornby’s ‘founding father’-status, and by the same token, as proof of the claim that popular fiction lovers read generically, i.e. if they have liked one book of a particular genre, they want more of the same (cf. Gelder 2004). Furthermore, according to the demographics of the literature map, Douglas Coupland is the author who comes closest to Hornby whereas he does not come up on Gayle’s site, not even in the margins. However, even if the author of Generation X is more associated with Hornby than with Gayle, who names him as an inspirational source, it still underpins the assumption that they all write and publish within generic proximity, and that there is a certain degree of overlap in terms of the problems that are thematized in their books. To put it differently, the intertextual relationship between books, authors, opinions of authors and readers articulates the zeitgeist of a particular time and the structure of feeling of a specific generation. Besides, it is also quite interesting that Roddy Doyle appears on Gayle’s map but not on Hornby’s even though the latter names Doyle as his most influential literary ideal.

New women and girl power

My Legendary Girlfriend is a male romance. However, Will’s selfpity that dominates most of the narrative often overcasts the romantic element. As one reader observes, Will can be characterized as ‘weak, lazy and completely self-centred’. He thinks that at the age of twentysix, his future looks grim and miserable, and that he has not done anything with his life except for smoking, eating pot-noodle sandwiches and whining because his girlfriend left him on his twenty-third birthday. He is, however, completely aware of the fact that his constantly feeling sorry for having lost the sole purpose in his life does not actually help him move on, i.e. get a life in the first place. He needs to feel safe and secure, and he thought having found the right partner would guarantee that feeling: “My sole aim in life was to find a girlfriend 24

Cf. www.literature-map.com

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who would make me feel so secure that I’d never have to worry about relationships again” (173). Will is stuck, in a state of limbo, without the energy to change things. As we have seen while discussing High Fidelity, the aporia that results from seeking change while hanging on to the past, is a recurrent topic in the male confessional novel. As Will explains during one of the many telephone conversations he has with Kate over the weekend: But at the end of the day what have I got? Nothing but memories. I’m twenty-six and I constantly live in the past. I’ve been without Aggi longer than I was with her and I still can’t get over her. Ignorance would be bliss.25

Will does not make it easy for the reader to feel any compassion for him, and as the above extract from a review indicates, opinions whether Gayle’s first book deserves to range among the male confessional novels à la Hornby are utterly divided, ranging from total identification with the main character (‘Will Kelly is me. I am Will Kelly’) to appreciation because of the accuracy of the male perspective (‘it helped a great deal to show the male side of things’) to complete dismissal (‘This is a terrible book, utterly unbelievable and headshakingly trite’). Apparently, the book also managed to provoke aggression, as several readers claim they felt like shaking and slapping the main character, or threw the book away in frustration. However, fifty percent of the readers who submitted a review on amazon.co.uk claim that Gayle’s novel contains valuable insights and that they could identify with Will or knew someone like him. Like High Fidelity, My Legendary Girlfriend seems to proffer a high potential for identification, recognition moments and points of reference as the following examples clearly indicate: Its (sic) not often you get to read a book that epitomises the thoughts and emotions that each and every one of us will struggle with at some point in our lives. It’s nice to read that you’re not the only one out there. This book made me feel a normal human being! For anyone around 25-26, male (sic) this book is a BIBLE. I can name a dozen men (myself included) who, in some way, are very similar to Will.

Will is also being associated with a certain generation and with the masculinity crisis of the 1990s.

25

Gayle 1998: 57; subsequent page numbers will be given in the main text.

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For those of us of a certain generation, our lives inextricably interwoven with memories of past loves, fears of daunting futures, and references to John Hughes movies and Star Wars. Most men his age can relate to [the book]. Will Kelly is a spokesman for the young men of the nineties, still shellshocked and reeling from the advent of “girl power”.

At this point I think it useful to elaborate further on the feminist reaction to the New Lad-movement of the 1990s as it underpins my analysis of the male confessional novel. In this respect, it is quite intriguing to note how the generation who were in their mid-twenties in the 1990s, i.e. those who were born after the second feminist movement started, view the challenge to masculinity in terms of ‘girl power’. The term ‘girl power’, as Whelehan reminds us, will ultimately be remembered as the catchphrase of the Spice Girls, who burst on to the music scene 1996 […and] have managed to spin beyond the orbit of teen pop as newsworthy ambassadors of ‘Cool Britannia’ and as post-feminist icons up there with Madonna. These ‘girls’ are constantly quizzed about their attitudes to femininity, and their vision of ‘girl power’ plays on the illusion of a contemporary culture full of ready choices and opportunities for self-expression available equally to all women.26 Girl power adds fuel to the myth that young women are ‘in control’ of their lives and as such offers a more positive libratory message to young women than contemporary feminism ever could. (2000: 37f)

As I have shown in Part I, Whelehan tries to defend the project of feminism against the 1990s lad culture, which she accuses of using irony in order to hide its relapse into pre-feminist attitudes. Even though I do not support her main claim in all its aspects, I share her concern about the phenomenon of ‘girl power’. As it becomes obvious, the term refers exclusively to young women, in their mid-to-late twenties, but the usage of ‘girl’ instead of ‘woman’ nevertheless strikes me as odd because it seems highly unlikely that such a coinage would contain the term ‘boy’ if it were to describe a similar male phenomenon. But the fact remains that among the representatives of that particular generation, the ironic overtones of ‘girl power’ do not mat-

26

The phrase ‘Cool Britannia’ is a pun on the English anthem ‘Rule Britannia’ and even though it was coined in the late 1960s, in its current use it is associated with the British culture of the 1990s. It refers to a wide spectrum of cultural change taking place during the 1990s, referring for example to the Britpop revival as represented by groups such as Blur, Oasis, The Verve or Pulp, but also to the New Labour Government that came into power in the spring of 1997.

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ter to the same extent as they do for an avowed feminist such as Whelehan. Rather, it seems that young men felt challenged by their female peers. This shows how the masculinity crisis must not be understood as a homogeneous phenomenon, affecting all men to the same extent but that the specific articulation of the gender battle is very much that of one specific generation. Furthermore, as we will see especially when discussing Gayle’s second novel, Mr Commitment, there exist different conceptions of the gender divide even among the members of the same generation. I would like to maintain that ‘girl power’ is present in probably all the novels under scrutiny. The degree to which the women characters subscribe to girl power or any other feminist version may vary, but female independence is taken to be a self-evident truth. In my view, this has not so much to do with the fact that the male protagonist invariably feels that it is the way it should be, but is the reflection of a generation who grew up when gender relations were most fervently discussed in the 1970s and reached adulthood when at least some effects of feminism were already taken for granted. Will is very much aware of the female power that surrounds him, from his female students who look much older than they really are and who are already quite literate in terms of mixed gender encounters to the three most important female characters in the book, his exgirlfriend Aggi, his best female friend Alice and the ex tenant of his flat, Kate. It is through them that he learns how to break free of the past and to relate to himself in the present. This development unfolds as a kind of maturation process revolving about these three women, with each of them representing a particular phase of his life; Aggi the past, Kate the (imaginary) future and Alice the present. Plot synopsis

My Legendary Girlfriend is in many respects a ‘classic’ male confessional novel. It features a pitiful, self-loathing, miserable antihero living in London in the 1990s. Will is tired of his shabby bedsit, his boring teaching job, his best friend Simon and most of all, with being in love with his ex-girlfriend who dumped him exactly three years ago on his twenty-third birthday. Will hates thinking about the present and is afraid of the future. All he wants is his past back. Between the age of twenty and twenty-three he was happy; he had everything he wanted, epitomized in Aggi, his ex-girlfriend, the legendary girlfriend. He is depressed, tired of life, and sorry for himself to an extent that at times makes the reader wince. Will was left by Aggi for the same reason Laura left Rob in High Fidelity: “You didn’t let me grow, Will. I’ve been going out with you since I was nineteen. I’m not the same

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girl! You’ve stayed the same though, you haven’t changed at all” (169). The narrative begins on a Friday evening and ends on the following Monday afternoon. In these two and half days, Will is on an emotional rollercoaster. He is depressed because of his job and his flat, and he is scared he might have impregnated Martina, a girl with whom he had a one-nightstand out of sheer boredom a couple of weeks before and who dotes on him. What makes matter worse still is that his best friend Simon decides to confess that he had an affair with Aggi while she and Will were still seeing each other. In a fit of anger and rage, Will breaks up the friendship and wishes Simon the most painful death. This all happens on the eve of his twenty-sixth birthday. He is in a very bad mood because he fears he will not receive the number of birthday cards that would make him feel popular and well-liked, and he wastes hours on end making lists and thinking about his exgirlfriend. To relieve his anger, he calls Aggi in a fit of frustration and blames her for leaving him and the misery he has been in ever since. The most exciting thing that happens to him on Friday evening is that he gets to know the former tenant of his flat because she rings him up to ask whether a cheque for her has arrived. In the course of the following forty-eight hours, they spend hours on the telephone, and Will feels in a much better mood because there is now somebody whom he enjoys conversing with. There is of course Alice, his best female friend with whom he has several telephone conversations over the weekend, too. He fell in love with Alice when he was still at school but she paired off with Simon, which did not prevent her from becoming best friends with Will. When a crying Alice rings to inform him that her boyfriend, Bruce, has left her, he talks her into destroying all his belongings which she does while Will gives her instructions over the telephone. She decides to travel around the world the idea of which Will does not like in the least because selfish as he is, he cannot bear the thought of being without his best friend, especially after he has destroyed his friendship with Simon. While he is moving the furniture in the flat to lend it a less depressing outlook, Will randomly comes across a bunch of holiday pictures Kate must have left behind. He spends a great deal of time contemplating the pictures, and after a couple more telephone conversations in which they discuss everything from their love lives, most favourite films, books and pop-bands, how they would like to die etc., he is convinced that he is in love with Kate. In order to be sure that he is completely over Aggi, he calls her out of the blue, and when she gets angry with him, he tells her that he has phoned her up to finally take her down from the pedestal he had put her on for years. Will feels completely free, and during the next telephone call with Kate he proposes to her and she accepts. They make plans to meet in Brighton the following morning, and after ring-

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ing off, Will calls his family, Martina, and Alice to let them know that he is getting married. Alice starts crying and Will thinks that his sudden happiness makes her sad after what she has been through the past twenty-four hours. He also calls Simon despite their row to tell him about his wedding. Simon sounds very depressed and confides in Will that he was stupid enough to end the relationship with the only woman he has ever loved. Her name is Kate, and Will suspects that it might be ‘his’ Kate but immediately represses the thought as he has decided to be happy for a change. The night before he intends to make his departure to Brighton, Aggi visits his flat because she is furious with him for having called her out of the blue. Before she leaves, Will asks her about her and Simon at which point Aggi’s mood changes and they end up kissing. Before one thing leads to another, he decides that he cannot cheat on Kate and tells Aggi about his new love and his plan to marry her. Aggi is convinced he has lost his mind and leaves him for good. Will gets up early the following morning in order to make it to the station in time. He already sits on the train, when he suddenly realises that he cannot go through with it; he is now convinced that Simon loves Kate. He calls her and explains that he is not coming. Kate breaks down, pleads with him to come to Brighton after all. Will then informs her that her ex-boyfriend is actually his (ex) best mate and gives her Simon’s number. He goes back to school and teaches a class on Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Will suddenly realises that the right person for him is Alice, and always has been. The narrative reaches the climax when he leaves the classroom to phone Alice who is supposed to travel to Australia later on the same day and she does not answer the call. Devastated he returns to the classroom where Alice is waiting for him. In front of the all the students, they declare their love for each other. In the epilogue, he confesses that when she says that she claims to be his legendary girlfriend, he does not know whether this is true or not, but he does know for certain that their love does not feel bad which is the most important thing. Eventually, Will has emerged out of his state of limbo because he has undergone an important formation process whose individual stages have taught him how to become a more responsible human being.

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Living in the past

Will is unhappy with his life, he hates being a teacher, he hates being on his own, and he hates his flat.27 Will knows that wanting back the past does not actually help to get a life and a future, but nevertheless he stubbornly refuses to take any action himself. Like Rob in High Fidelity, he is a genius at drawing up lists regarding any topic; lists of things he likes or hates most, things he has got to do over the weekend, and lists of reasons why he should or should not ring Aggi. Therefore, the book is full of lists what he could and should do to change his life, from minor ones such as going down to the launderette or cleaning the flat, over forgetting his ex right, to changing the world. Making lists seems like an impulse he cannot fight. When the telephone rings, and he does not feel like answering it, in a split second he draws up a list with possible excuses: “a) Amnesia? b) Too busy? c) Answering machine not working? d) The truth? e) All of the above?” (64). He usually chooses an option that does not figure in the list, so his list-making is not really of much service to him. Listmaking is not employed as a pragmatic strategy to organise his life but to defer things, or, to fill a void or to simply kill time. The eve of his twenty-sixth birthday when he realises that he has no one to go out with for a pre-birthday drink is a good example to illustrate this. He tries to find possible explanations why his life has been more or less an unhappy one and why he lacks the self-confidence to make friends. He comes up the following catalogue of disasters: • Losing my Action Man at the age of six. • Accidentally leaving my Maths homework at home when I was thirteen. • Failing my O-level French at sixteen. • Being dumped by Aggi at the age of twenty-three. (212) The degree of disaster increases in accordance with his age, but as he concludes, “[n]one of them seemed depressing enough, even though I’d been devastated by them all at the time” (ibid). He realises that in fact he has no reason to feel depressed, and that he has only got himself to blame for the miserable state he is in. Applying a Freudian gesture, he then tries to uncover a few things that had unsettled him in the past but he has decided to ignore. He calls these thoughts “stagnant pools that would only smell if the horrors putrefying in their deeper 27

Gayle’s explanation why he decided his main protagonist had to be a teacher, runs as follows: “Will is an English teacher simply because a lot of my friends went into teaching after university and a lot of them hated it and left after a few years. It seemed like exactly the right profession for someone like Will (www.mikegayle.co.uk.).

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waters were disturbed” (213). These stagnant pools include the incident when his father left him, his mother and brother when he was nine. The second stagnant pool also refers to fatherhood, only of a completely different sort: “This morning I was nearly a father. This evening I’m still just a loser” (214). He suddenly resents that Martina, his one-night stand is not really pregnant because even though he does not want to live, let alone raise a child, with her, at least he would have ‘achieved’ something.28 Infidelity inhabits the murky waters of stagnant pool number three. He is convinced that Aggi’s being unfaithful to him has “completely thrown him” and left him wondering “what was real and what wasn’t” (ibid.). Will does not realise that he is an active creator of the events and situations that make his life so difficult, and one of his most striking problems, as with some of his other fellow male confessors, is grounded in the inability to merge real life with his life. This becomes evident in an extract where he reminisces about a schoolboy experience. He went away for a weekend with the boy scouts and his only pair of glasses was destroyed (“I was twelve years old before I realised people were supposed to see the world clearly” (72)). As a consequence, he had to spend the weekend without clear eyesight, which, retrospectively, and paradoxically, seems to have been a rather illuminating experience: The thing about that weekend without glasses was that what I could see looked really nice. Nothing had any definition about it. Colours merged. It was like constantly being caught in the sort of cheesy soft-focus normally reserved for swooning heroines, all the rough edges smoothed away, all the blemishes blurred out of existence. Real Life seemed far away. (74)

When he got back home from his blurred-visioned weekend, Will was taken to the optician’s to choose a new pair of spectacles but to him, “[i]t was like being asked to choose another nose” (ibid). At the delicate age of twelve when being accepted by ones peers completely depends on coming across as ‘cool’, and the necessity to wear glasses obviously diminishes the chances to succeed in just that, Will was often the butt of his friends’ jokes. However, he found a way to reinvent himself. When his ‘legendary’ glasses broke during a fight he was involved in, he sellotaped them and added a biro to the right arm of his glasses in order to lend them an ‘intergalactic’ air. By way of giving 28

The preference for something, or rather ‘anything’ to replace ‘nothing’ is a recurrent topic in the male confessional novel. In High Fidelity, Rob and Laura make love in order to feel ‘something’ and to substitute the void and pain the death of Laura’s father has caused.

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the glasses a new meaning, Will managed to score points with his peers, who also started to add writing utensils to their glasses, and he gained lots of popularity points. When his glasses were smashed beyond repair, he lost a vital part of his self-confidence, and consequently, of his identity.29 Will mourns the days of his childhood because as an adult, reinventing oneself in the above fashion does not work anymore. He wants to be different, different from himself and others, but he also desires to fit in with the rest. Like most of the other main protagonists in the male confessional novel, Will seeks freedom and change, but at the same time cannot give up the obstacles that prevent him from reaching this goal because they define him, i.e. are the very things that make up his identity. Without Aggi and Will’s antagonising over losing her, he would not be the person who wants to change. Like when he was the boy without glasses, what he needs most, in its absence, blurs his sight. Legendary self-pity

Will is so possessed by his self-pity that he does not recognise the stability he gets from what he has got. He is too busy being sorry for himself that whatever happens to him appears in a negative light. Moreover, he wants adventure and stability at the same time, which he believes his current life is deprived of. He cannot see that having a steady job as boring as it might be and having a permanent address even if it is located in not a very sought-after area in North London add to his security. He cannot appreciate these things because he blinds himself with the one thing that he cannot have while being the only thing he really wants, his ex-girlfriend. He has lost all sense of reality, a fact of which he becomes aware when he pays a visit to Highgate cemetery to have a look at Karl Marx’s tomb: I studied the inscription on the tomb again and felt ashamed. Marx had tried to change the world and make it a better place. He wanted workers to be able to study philosophy in the morning and go fishing in the afternoon. He 29

As Hebdige (1979) has shown, ordinary, everyday items can acquire an altogether cultural significance if they are altered in a particular way and can thus work as an enforcing factor concerning identity construction processes within a subculture. While I do not want to suggest that Will started any kind of subcultural movement by sellotaping a biro to his glasses, I nevertheless think that it shows how it can be read as an attempt not only to re-define himself by the excorporation of an ordinary, everyday article and thus start a kind of a new cultural trend, but also as an act of resistance.

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wanted an end to tyranny, based on the belief that all men were equal. All I wanted was to get my ex-girlfriend back. It was a selfish pursuit benefiting no one but myself. Even as these self-chastising thoughts entered my head, I felt my shoulders automatically hunching up into a so-what shrug. I wondered if every man was like me. Give a man a noble cause and he would fight to the death for what he believed in, but get the woman he loves to leave him and his once honourable principles would cease to be quite so important. (138)

This extract clearly shows how much Will is actually aware of his own predicament. He realises that he is so completely obsessed with himself and his problems so much that he actually feels tempted to put himself on an equal footing with Marx and compares his battle to survive with what Marx had fought for. Even though, on second thoughts, he realises how ludicrous his comparison is, he cannot shrug it off because he is entrapped in his own misery-ridden micro-cosmos and he cannot abandon what he is best at: feeling sorry for himself. His entire identity depends on him feeling miserable, cheated by fate and an unfair world. However, because he is aware of his inability to change and his inadequacy to become a fully functional, mature member of society, he sometimes overestimates the consequences of his failures, which completely blows his weaknesses out of proportion. This, for, example happens when he confesses to Alice that he considers himself to be a bad teacher, which could result in thirty kids failing their GCSEs, consequently getting badly paid jobs or none at all. Some years later, they would have children themselves and live off social security. Multiplied by a couple of more years, he, Will, might therefore become responsible for “increasing unemployment in the UK more than any government” (42). It goes without saying that this sort of observation adds to the humour that is one of the defining characteristics of the male confessional novel and responsible for its success; Will’s idiosyncratic way of applying logical deduction reveals his cultivated self-importance. Will’s self-obsession, as hard as it is to take at times, is also responsible for lending the narrative a funny tone because his being at odds with life drives him to the most absurd actions. The following incident is another such case in point, and however farcical it sounds at first, it also marks the first little step towards a more mature self. Because it is his birthday on the Sunday of the weekend around which the whole narrative spans, and because his friend Alice has announced a ‘special surprise’ for him, he is devastated when he only gets four birthday cards. He is convinced that Alice has sent him a parcel as well, and when he spots the postman in the street, he comes to the conclusion that he must have stolen his parcel:

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A tall, wiry man in his mid-thirties was standing five doors away, shovelling mail through a letterbox. The very sight of him sent me into a frenzy of anger, transporting me to a world where the only colour was red and there was no such thing as ‘keeping things in proportion’. A yobbish ‘Oi’ was all I needed to grab his attention as I ran towards him. ‘Come on, where is it?’ I asked, adopting the no-nonsense manner of the TV ‘tec who uses unorthodox methods but always gets results. The postman studied me nervously. ‘Where’s what?’ ‘My sodding present.’ I got the feeling that he wanted to run but terror rooted him to the spot. ‘Your what?’ ‘It’s my birthday tomorrow. Where’s my present?’ He looked bewildered. A look of relief drifted across his face and his eyes darted about feverishly, presumably looking for the Beadle’s About spy cameras. When he didn’t find any his look of terror returned. ‘Er … Happy birthday.’ ‘I don’t want your congratulations, I want my birthday present.’ My eyes dropped down to his postbag. He followed my line of vision and draped his arm over it protectively. ‘It’s illegal, you know – tampering with the post. I’ll call the police.’ (108)

The parcel mystery is solved only moments later when the pizza man arrives and delivers Will’s favourite pizza Alice has ordered for him and when a special delivery is made and Will receives a parcel containing a box of cigarettes and a letter informing him that he has become the proud owner of a donkey called Sandy. His joy of being loved and given birthday presents he thinks he deserves is spoilt by a phone call from his best friend Simon. They have been friends since nursery school even though Simon always pretended to have more luck in getting the jobs and the women he wanted, but Will takes great solace in the fact that Simon has not really been more successful than him: Until the record deal, Simon’s life had been my sole source of comfort when feeling guilty about Not Getting A Life. While languishing on the dole in Manchester I was constantly cheered by the thought that though I wasn’t doing anything constructive, at least I wasn’t him, at least I wasn’t killing myself, putting all this energy into something so hopelessly futile as a band. We hate it when our friends become successful. Indeed. It was frustrating. I had more talent than Simon could ever dream of. I just didn’t know where my genius lay, and in my latest incarnation as a secondary school English teacher it wasn’t likely I’d find out either. (125f, italics in original)30

Will would not have liked Simon or any of his friends to do any better than he did. However, when Simon and his band pull a record con30

We hate it when our friends become successful was a single by Morrissey released in 1992, to which the above quote obviously refers.

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tract, he feels betrayed by the fact that Simon seems to have made it while he still has not had the big break-through. What is interesting about this sort of jealousy is that it solely applies to his male friends because he does not resent Alice, his best female friend for getting on in life: After Alice got a job as marketing manager for British Telecom, she and Bruce moved to Bristol and led the kind of life that involved expensive restaurants, shopping trips to Bond Street and weekend breaks in Prague. I considered being jealous of her quite a few times but I couldn’t. Though she earned more in an hour than I used to get in my entire fortnight’s Giro, she was still the same person inside: kind, patient and understanding. As a rule, I disapproved of successful people, especially those of my generation, but I couldn’t resent her. Success not only suited her, it appeared to be made for her. (39)

Will obviously makes an exception in Alice’s case. Because she is a woman, he does not feel threatened as he does with Simon. Simon is a man and stands for masculinity and success. It is bad enough that he is more successful with women, but when he seems to be doing well with his band, this is too much for Will to take. The reason he is jealous of Simon but not of Alice may also be linked to the fact that Alice has chosen a rather conventional line of profession whereas Simon considers himself to be an artist, something a bit special, and hence something that would appeal to Will, too.31 Inferiority complex

In view of the above, and as a qualification to the earlier claim that Will’s self-pity is considered to be the most important source of his misery and in consequence, for his identity construction, it has to be noted that the comparison with others and their failures and successes play an important role, too. In spite of the fact that Will is trapped in the environment surrounding a single, secondary school teacher, in which his hidden talents are overlooked, he mainly becomes aware of his existence through others. He feels inferior to people like Simon, because as much as he appreciates him being his friend and going out

31

I would like to remind the reader of my claim made in Part I that the male confessional novel is related to the traditional Bildungsroman one of whose sub-genre is the artist novel (Künstlerroman) which usually features a young man who is exploring his creative potential and struggling to get recognised as an artist.

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for a drink every now and then, he resents his success.32 He harbours the same sort of resentment for Alice’s partner and ex-lovers. However, despite his feeling inadequate, there are a few people he feels superior to. There is for instance Martina, his one-night stand. She is in love with Will but he cannot reciprocate her feelings. He is nonetheless aware of the fact that she is a kind and loving person and therefore does not wish to hurt her. On the other hand, it is hard to get rid of the feeling that he actually takes some joy in showing her that he does not need her, which the following extract illustrates quite accurately: ‘I didn’t know you’d phoned earlier.’ I lied, trying with all my strength to sound surprised. ‘I don’t think the answering machine is working. I’m really sorry.’ ‘It’s okay,’ she said, hushing my apologies, ‘it’s not your fault. I’m sure you’ll have been too busy making new friends to call me back until the weekend. It must be so exciting, Will. More exciting than anything I could offer you.’ Martina had got into the habit of speaking to me like that – putting herself down in order, I think, to elevate me even higher in her esteem – from the moment I’d kissed her. It was a manipulative trick which pathetic people, myself included, used to make the object of their affections say something nice about them. Martina wasn’t fishing for compliments – her earnestness was such that I just knew she was one of those people who meant every word they said and never said anything they didn’t mean. (64f)

What is interesting about this extract is the emphasis on Martina’s self-deprecation, something that Will is very good at himself, but more in terms of confession, i.e. him confiding in the reader. When he talks to fictional characters in the novel such as Simon, he always tries to elevate himself. In his confessional passages, he always puts himself down to the point where it becomes almost unbearable for the reader. Therefore, although not as obviously as in the novel by David Baddiel to which we turn later, My Legendary Girlfriend, to a certain extent, displays some remarkable traits of narrative self-reference – the novel is written in the same style as the one Will observes in ‘pathetic’ people. The other person Will feels superior to is his younger brother Tom. There is a rather large age gap between the two, and Will uses his brother to boost his masculinity:

32

This observation regarding jealousy in male friendships does not only apply to My Legendary Girlfriend but is of a more general significance. Most male protagonists in the male confessional novel feel bitter about another man’s success.

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Tom and I weren’t exactly close. It was only in the last couple of years that I’d even considered him part of the human race. There were eight years separating us: what my parents had been thinking I don’t know. Maybe he was a mistake. Even so, recently he’d turned into a reasonably personable mistake. […] When he was born, I was determined to let him know who was boss and spent the next few years trying to discover more and more ingenious ways to make him cry, like stealing his dummy, pulling faces at his cot, telling him he had an allergy to ice-cream which would make him choke to death […] I ignored him and set about finding a topic of conversation that he wouldn’t be quite so cheery about. ‘How are your A-levels?’ Tom tutted loudly. ‘Oh them,’ he said absent-mindedly. ‘They’re alright, I suppose.’ He had his heart set on going to Oxford, I think, because Amanda, his hippy chick best friend/potential love interest, had applied there. My mother had called me up at the start of the week and told me the results of his mocks, which to put it kindly, weren’t exactly the kind of grades that got you into premier league educational establishments. (254ff)

Despite being a grown up man, Will still takes pleasure in teasing his younger brother, i.e. picking on his weaknesses. However, as much as Will likes provoking Tom, in a strange way, he also feels responsible for him. So when Tom asks him what he has been up to, he tries to make himself more interesting by constructing a story about having been out for a drink with his mates: It wasn’t that I hadn’t learned the lesson that lying was neither big nor clever, I had. Very much so. But as Tom’s big brother, and quite possible the only stabilising influence in a family that was falling apart around his ears, I felt a responsibility to be someone he could look up to; possibly even aspire to be, just as Simon’s older brother Trevor had been when Simon and I were growing up. (255)

Will’s lie is of course not a completely unselfish act as he is trying to construct the person he would like to be: fascinating, intriguing and surrounded by equally interesting people. It is rather striking, however, how Will only ever pretends to be somebody else in the company of male friends whereas he is willing to show his true self when he is with women (except for Martina). He seems to think that pretending to be somebody else in a single-sex, male context adds to his good reputation and boosts his masculinity. Furthermore he believes that such behaviour contributes to holding up a good example to other males, such as his younger brother. Will draws on different masculinity script which in his view suits the situation best and is most likely to convince other people of a secure identity he does not possess.

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Whereas he desires his masculinity to be reaffirmed in his single-sex encounter, he uses a different masculinity script when he is with women, displaying some distinctive New Man traits in order to trigger their sympathy. This clear distinction he makes in terms of gender and discourse also shows in the way he chooses to make confessions. Throughout the book, his confessional narrative is directed to four different addressees. The biggest part of his confession consists of his first person narrative addressed to the anonymous reader. In terms of dialogue, there are three target audiences which are his friend Alice, Kate, the former tenant of his flat, and Barbara White, the presenter of The Barbara White Show, a phone-in radio programme where people can seek advice concerning their personal problems. So far I have argued that Will’s problem of not being able to move on in his life is rooted in three different, but interrelated problems; his obsession with the past, his cultivation of self-pity and his inferiority complex. I am now going to discuss how he enters into dialogue with the three women mentioned because each of them plays an important role in overcoming his problems and thus proffers the process of maturation.

The girl on the phone

The first incisive turning point occurs on Friday night when Will receives a telephone call from Kate, the former tenant of his flat. She has previously left messages on the answering machine, sounding rather upset. Apparently, she is supposed to receive a cheque from her last employer who does not have her new address wherefore she is anxious to find out whether Will has seen an envelope for her. Will checks the mail and indeed discovers a letter addressed to her. Kate is very much relieved and they start chatting. Their telephone conversation is conducted in a very juvenile manner, trying to guess their names and respective age. With Kate being only nineteen, Will at twenty-six feels very grown-up and masculine. However, he cannot keep up his self-composed manner for long and soon relapses into the habit of feeling sorry for himself and tells Kate about the misery he is in because his girlfriend left him three years ago. Kate is very sympathetic and confides that she has been left, too. Their conversation shifts to a discussion about their philosophies of life, realising that they both like quoting from books and films. Will is very pleased and would like to go on talking forever, telling Kate his whole life story and therefore asks her to call him again soon. After their conversation, Will goes over her answers again, concluding that “Kate is definitely an interesting girl” (63). For the first time in the novel, we get to know a slightly more cheerful Will, and

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we can safely predict that Will and Kate will talk again. Indeed, she rings him again on Saturday afternoon. After some light banter, they suddenly hit on the subject of death. Their exchange on death, conceptualised as monologues, are featured in two separate chapters. Kate’s view on death is a rather romantic one as the following excerpt shows: The first thing to work out is exactly how I’m going to die. Sometimes it’s drowning, other times it’s an aeroplane crash, but at the moment it’s dying in any manner at all as long as it’s for someone I love. […] I’m desperate to die for someone I love. That’s all there is to it. […] The important thing is that when I die the person I save lives on because of me. That’s all that matters. (148)

Will can easily relate to Kate’s wish to die for someone because he would have been prepared to die for Aggi, too, arguing that “[t]he only way life can really mean something is if you give it away” (151). So, he too, takes dying for someone or something as a heroic act that retrospectively makes one’s life meaningful. However, he also sees a flaw in this theory: “It’s a shame though because if you do give it away, you don’t get the chance to fully appreciate the splendour of it” (ibid.). Will does not realise that giving your life can only ever be an altruistic act if one does not consider getting the credit for it. However, he believes the ultimate truth lies in the fact that everybody dies eventually. He finishes his elaboration on death as follows: I find it hard enough to deal with twenty-six years of life, so the thought of dealing with an eternity of death fills me with dread. I can barley motivate myself to get out of bed these days. I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t like this at all. (154)

Will conceptualises everything concerning his life and death, his presence and absence, in terms of eternity. This clearly shows how much importance he attaches to his person, also emphasized by the fact that he mistakes his twenty-six years of life as a period long enough to draw ultimate conclusions. His view on life and death is important in so far as he wanted to make Aggi an integral part of both, and now having met Kate, he is tempted to make the same mistake again. After a few more telephone conversations that take place over the weekend, they decide that they are in love with each other and Will gets so carried away by his newly found happiness that he proposes to her. She accepts without thinking twice, and they decide to meet in Brighton the following day. Will calls everyone he knows; his parents, his brother, Alice, even Simon and Martina. During his talk with Simon, the latter reveals that

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he has been in love, too but he broke up the relationship and only now realises that this particular woman would have been the one. To Will’s complete surprise and shock, Simon’s lover was also called Kate. After a while, it begins to dawn on him that it might be ‘his’ Kate because Simon’s description of his lost love curiously corresponds to what Kate told him about her ex boyfriend. In an attack of panic, Will calls The Barbara White Show, a phone-in radio show, and tells the presenter as well as everybody else who happens to be listening to his ludicrous story about getting married to somebody he has only know for forty-eight hours and whom he has not actually met in person yet. At the end of the slot dedicated to Will’s story, Barbara White asks him why he wants to marry ‘this girl’: “Because she’s made me realise that I can move on. I can finally live my life and think about the future” (316). Barbara White does the only reasonable thing one might possible do after hearing Will’s extraordinary story and absurd plan, and advises him to carefully reconsider his idea of marrying a girl he has only ever spoken to on the phone on the grounds that: ‘When you’re on the phone you can be someone different. You can flirt and have fun, secure in the knowledge that you don’t have to meet this person face to face.’ ‘It’s not like that’, I protested. ‘I’m not saying it is, Will. But what I am saying is that you have to check that it’s not. Can I give you some advice? Try and work out whether you’ve really been you on the phone or whether you’ve been the you you wish you were. The girl at the end of the phone is in love with the person she spoke to. But will she be in love with you?’ (317, emphasis in original)

The advice Barbara White gives seems rather banal at first. However, it draws attention to the fact that Will’s confessional narrative is dominated by his attempt at constructing his identity, i.e. by the search for his self on the basis of the relationship he has with a significant other. At the beginning of the novel, he defines himself completely with regard to whom he used to be, that is when he was still in the relationship with his legendary girlfriend. Let us for a moment stay with the title of the book, My Legendary Girlfriend. The term ‘legendary’ refers to something extraordinary that happened in the past. However, Will had already called Aggi his legendary girlfriend when they were still together. In a way, when he decided that she was his legendary girlfriend, he already anticipated the end of their relationship and started constructing his identity on the future possibility of losing her. With hindsight, he is who he is because of what he was when he was still together with Aggi. In the phase of transition around which the novel spans, Will is desperately searching for another possible, future

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legendary person on whom he can model his identity. While talking to Kate on the telephone, as Barbara White points out correctly, he pretends to be this new self. He is what he is because he talks to somebody who does not know his former self and gives her the illusion that he is in fact somebody else. Will, in terms of what he is, at the moment of meeting Kate, has nothing to fall back on except his memories of Aggi. Aggi represents the past while Kate represents the future. However, the present is still without any purpose, for Will has a blurred vision of what is really taking place, i.e. that things are happening here and now. First he exclusively lived in the past, hankering after Aggi and feeling sorry for himself, and after having ‘met’ Kate on the telephone, he makes the same mistake again: he projects his happiness on an imaginary future with Kate.

A visit from the past

One night, completely unexpectedly, Aggi turns up at Will’s doorstep. She has come to tell him off because he phoned her out of the blue after three years. After all the time he has been fantasizing about what it might feel like to see her again, he cannot believe it is finally happening. After her sermon, insisting that he must leave her alone in future, he asks her about Simon. The two of them had a short fling when Aggi and Will were still together. Upon this simple but painful question, Aggi changes her composure, admits to having had an affair with Simon because she thought that she and Will were not going anywhere. And then she kissed me. All at once the universe seemed to make sense. The weight of the world was no longer on my shoulders. This was the feeling that I’d been pining for all this time, and yes it was worth the wait. I couldn’t kiss her fast enough. […] I pulled away from her in shock. ‘I can’t do this. […] I can’t cheat on Kate.’ (326)

In only a very brief moment, we witness Will relapsing into his usual pattern, thinking getting back together with Aggi is the only good thing that could possibly happen to him. However, he very quickly changes his mind when he remembers his imminent date with Kate. Will explains to Aggi who Kate is and that they are engaged to be married. Aggi is convinced that he has lost his mind and replies coldly: [D]on’t insult my intelligence with your pathetic stories. I knew you were bitter but I didn’t know it ran this deep. […] I suppose it’s what I deserve. Well,

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the score’s even now. I’ll never have to feel guilty about sleeping with Simon again and you get your imaginary girlfriend. (327)

She puts her finger on Will’s weak point – he does not know Kate; he does not even know what she looks like yet. And still he is adamant he will marry her. Will’s personal relationships do not actually exist, Aggi being his legendary girlfriend while Kate is his imaginary one. He has constructed his identity on unreal romantic entanglements he has had in the past and might have in the future. Will has not embraced maturity yet, but at least the visit from Aggi has once and for all cured him of the ghost of the past. He is convinced that he can definitely move on now, leaving the past behind, and he is determined to go to Brighton the following day, to finally meet Kate. When he is at Victoria station, however, he cannot bring himself to embark on the train. He cannot forget what Simon told him about Kate, and how devastated she was that Simon left her when they first spoke on the phone. He calls her and asks her if her ex-boyfriend wanted her back, whether she would give him a second chance. Kate tries to reassure Will that she loves him and that her ex would never come back anyway. At the end, Will tells her that he knows who Simon is and how much Simon regretted that he had left her. He gives Kate Simon’s telephone number, hangs up and breaks down in tears.

She has been there all along

In only a few hours, Will has got rid of the past and has turned his back on the unreliability of an imaginary, future happiness. He has stayed in London not because he thought that the love between him and Kate would never work, but because he wanted to do the right thing and play matchmaker between Simon and Kate. He acted on impulse: going to Brighton felt wrong; telling Kate about Simon felt right. Even though he is devastated, he thinks he has done the right thing. He probably has, even though not for the right reasons. Will goes to work to teach a class on Wuthering Heights. As it turns out, not only his students are meant to learn something, but Will is going to be taught a lesson as well. He thought that Aggi was responsible for who he was. After talking to Kate over the weekend, he became convinced that she could help him construct a new identity. Being completely preoccupied with past and future, he did not realise that the one person who helped him most to come to terms with who he was and how to get through life was in fact his best friend, Alice; Alice has always been there – she is a person of the present.

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Will asks his students which kind of love is more worthy, the one Kitty Wyatt feels for Heathcliff or the one she feels for Linton, and one of his more gifted students agitatedly launches into a speech on how it is not only a question of falling in love but most of all a question of falling in love with the right person upon which Will has a momentous epiphany: ‘The right person’ I yelled aloud, thinking back to my conversation with Kate. ‘You’re right, Julie. It’s not just about being in love. It’s about being in love with the right person! The right person was there all the time. She was there all the time!’ (344)

It is rather telling that Will, as an English teacher, needs one of his students to illustrate how literature can be used as a resource to make sense of one’s own life. By pretending to be someone else to most people and by living either in an idealized past or imaginary future, Will had to get through the long and painful process of getting over Aggi by talking to Kate and appearing to be somebody else in order to find his true self, his true identity. Even though he has never actually met Kate, she was crucial to his process of self-realisation. Because of the fact that Alice has always been there, he subconsciously took her as well as her effect on his identity for granted but never actually gave her the consideration she should have deserved. So when Alice and Will eventually get together at the end of the novel. Alice first has doubts whether Will has got over Aggi entirely, but Will reassures her: ‘Sometimes, you’re as divorced from sanity as I am,’ I began mock chastising her. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. You are the standard. Before Aggi there was you. She had to fit your standard. I know I thought Aggi was the The One but I was wrong. You were The Original One. She was The Wrong One. And now you’re here.’ (347, emphases in original)

To sum up, the issue at the very heart of My Legendary Girlfriend is about fitting in with the right people. What is really interesting in this particular case is the fact that Will was kept prisoner by the past and could not envisage the present, let alone picture the future until he met Kate with whom he wanted to construct the future on an imaginary basis. While he was actually aware of his problem but lacked the tools to unhinge his past, he should have gone even further back in his personal history and identity construction process. He was afraid of his past and totally possessed by it. At the same time he wanted to get rid off it but did not realise the key to his problem was not getting rid off

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the recent past but letting in the present perfect, in both a grammatical and figurative sense. If we recall the telephone conversation Will and Kate have at one point during the weekend on how they think they would like to die and how death figures in their lives generally, Kate makes the point that she would like to die for someone she loves. Will approves of her reasoning, being convinced that he would have been prepared to give his life for Aggi. When Will and Kate declare their love for each other and make plans for their future, Kate actually says that she knows she is in love because she would be prepared to die for Will. However, they are not aware of the paradox the idea of dying for someone entails because as Derrida (1995) maintains, the gift of death is more complex that its romantic depiction in the novel might suggest. Derrida traces the relationship between religion and responsibility.33 Responsibility is always the responsibility to the other, a response to the other. He asks in how far dying for another can be regarded as a gift to the other: “What is the relation between se donner la mort and sacrifice; between putting oneself to death and dying for another? What are the relations among sacrifice, suicide and the economy of this gift?” (1995: 10). Derrida concludes that one cannot offer anybody the gift of death since it is impossible to die somebody else’s death. We are all on a path towards death, and everybody has got to meet their own personal fate when the time has come. One can die in place of somebody else, but it would still be one’s own death. Therefore, the gift of death is no gift at all; it is the movement of the gift that renounces itself. The metaphor of the ultimate love in terms of the gift of death has outlived its significance in the course of the novel because at the end Will discovers that the gift of life might be more powerful and more worth giving and living for.

SLEEPLESS

IN

LONDON

IN

TIME

FOR

BED

The author David Baddiel is an acclaimed British comedian and TV presenter and is most famous for his double-act with Frank Skinner. Time for Bed (1997) is his first novel. He has written two more novels, Whatever Love Means (1999) and Secret Purposes (2004). On the surface of things, Time for Bed seems to fit the genre of the male confessional novel perfectly. It is a first person narrative about the formation process and the coming to terms with life of Gabriel Jacoby. Like some of the other protagonists, Gabriel has not got a proper job. Apart from the occasional article he writes for his 33

For the relationship between the gift of death and friendship, see also Derrida’s The Work of Mourning (2001).

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brother’s sports magazine, he is out of work. He is single and shares a house with his friend and flat-mate Nick, a schizophrenic windowcleaner. Gabriel wastes his time pondering on the meaning of life and death. However, he differs from the other male confessional antiheroes inasmuch as he does not wait for the big break-through, the ultimate conversion that would bring his life back on track. He thinks he is doomed, and that the two main problems he is faced with and which prevent him from improving his life cannot be changed anyway: he is in love with his brother’s wife, Alice, and he suffers from insomnia. These two problems are closely interlinked, i.e. pose the classic chicken-or-egg-problem; he does not get any sleep because he is too busy thinking about Alice, and because he is constantly thinking about her he cannot go to sleep. He is obsessed with Alice and with being an insomniac, and as he has suffered from both ‘diseases’ for a long time, they seem to be incurable. Since he believes that he is stuck with these two problems forever, he attempts to get rid of them by trying to fall in love with Alice’s sister and by trying out all sorts of pills, ear plugs, blindfolds, even hypnosis, to cure his insomnia. Despite all his efforts, the reader cannot help but believe that Gabriel does not really want to get rid of his problems, and the more the novel progresses, the more half-hearted and futile his attempts come across. Gabriel builds his identity around these two obsessions, and curing them would inevitably mean bereaving him of his sense of self. He differs from the typical protagonist of a male confessional novel because he does not like pubs and he is all finger and thumbs when it comes to DIY-jobs and mending things. When his car breaks down in the first part of the novel, he neither has a clue what the problem might be nor what arrangements to make in order to get the car moved. In other words, he does not display the typical male assertiveness and masculine behaviour we would expect from the main character of a ladlit or male confessional novel. Another vital part of Gabriel’s identity involves the fact that he is Jewish, which also makes him stand apart from other male confessors because his identity is crucially marked by questions of ethnicity. His Jewishness does not influence him greatly in any orthodox sense, but he uses it as an excuse whenever he thinks he is lacking in masculine security. Gabriel is never short of an explanation, no matter what happens to him, and if things go wrong, he more often than not believes that he is being punished for something. When his cat bites his foot, when his car breaks down in the middle of the road, when a frog jumps out of the curry he has prepared for Dina on their first date, he is convinced that there must be some reason why these things happen to him. He even goes as far as to believe that when he takes a nap during the day, he is bound to be punished with even more sleepless

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hours during the night. When he fails to behave in a socially adequate manner, he blames his Jewishness. There are, however, a number of similarities Time for Bed shares with other male confessional novels. One entails the importance of the role the female characters play with regard to the maturation progress the male protagonist undergoes. In Time for Bed, there are three women who influence Gabriel’s life. There is Alice, Gabriel’s sisterin-law with whom he has been in love ever since he first met her. Then there is Dina, her sister, who has spent some considerable time in America and with whom Gabriel decides to fall in love even before he has actually met her because he expects her to resemble Alice wherefore she could be a good substitute. And finally there is Fran, his flatmate Nick’s best friend. Fran and Nick are both social outsiders because of their inept behaviour, and when Nick has to be taken to a psychiatric clinic, Fran seems just as crazy and in need of treatment as Nick. Generally speaking, madness plays a crucial part in Time for Bed. In contrast to the other novels discussed so far, the question of fitting in is dealt with in a rather different manner. The question of making the right choices, like getting oneself a good career and the woman for life, is consciously reflected on through obsessional behaviour. In short, in Time for Bed it seems as if the there is no choice at all. Like some of the other male protagonists, Gabriel is very aware of time, especially of how difficult it is to live in the present without worrying about the past or the future. He does not get any rest at night, and these long wakeful hours not only give him plenty of time to think, but they also make him painfully aware of how slowly time passes. He is afraid of life, and like Will in My Legendary Girlfriend or Rob in High Fidelity, even more afraid of death. Time for Bed is also a very self-conscious book. It contains a lot of cultural references, including not only the cultural domain it itself belongs to, but also the socio-cultural life of the 1990s in general, postmodernism, poststructuralism, art versus non-art etc. Baddiel’s novel received very good reviews on amazon.uk; only three out of twenty-seven readers thought it was below average, and those readers claimed that they did not like Baddiel’s humour.34 One reader attributes the alleged weaknesses of the novel to the fact that it was Baddiel’s first attempt at novel writing; another one added that the book is full of clichés, concluding that “Nick Hornby he ain’t”. Quite a few readers, about thirty-five percent, thought that they could easily relate to the book, either because of similar experiences or because Baddiel’s novel is realistic:

34

Cf. www.amazon.co.uk/review/product/0349113556.

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His observations are so adept it can be quite scary. David Baddiel quite clearly is one of life’s great observationists. An entertaining read that everyone can relate to. The storyline is fastpaced, true to life and at times laugh-out-loud funny. I was impressed by Baddiel’s knowledge of insomnia and unrequited love, both of which I have suffered from.

Time for Bed is clearly being categorised as a typical ladlit novel and often gets compared to other books of the genre or the sitcom Men Behaving Badly. Having read a fair amount of Tony Parsons and Nick Hornby’s work, I can honestly say that David Baddiel is on a (sic) par with [them], if not sometimes better. This is definitely one for the blokes. This is Men Behaving Badly meets Bridget Jones’ Diary. For all those who thought Nick Hornby was an author, read this. […] Without doubt the funniest novel of the 90s. Although [Baddiel] would put Men Behaving Badly’s Neil Morrissey and Martin Clunes to shame on the subject of football and pornography there are some very touching sentiment (sic) towards relationships and desires.

The publisher of Time for Bed was also very aware of the novel’s generic adherence because both Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons were asked to write one of the blurbs: One of the best things I have ever read about the nature of mad, obsessive love…funny, sad and horribly, painfully true (Tony Parsons).35 Time for Bed is as funny and clever as one would expect but is tender too – with his first novel David Baddiel goes straight into the first eleven of young contemporary British novelists (Nick Hornby).36

As it seems, the male confessional novel authors praise each other concerning their mutual interest in the troubled, male psyche of the 1990s and thus confirm that this shared concern amounts to what we might call the structure of feeling of that decade. Even the Times Literary Supplement approved of the novel, claiming it was “[t]he lyrical side of laddism”.37

35 36 37

Cf. Baddiel 1996. Ditto. Ditto.

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Plot Synopsis

Gabriel Jacoby suffers from two things that seem to completely dictate his life: he is in love with his brother’s wife and he is an insomniac. He is out of work and occasionally writes a column for his brother’s sports magazine. There is not much happening in Time for Bed. Apart from the long sequences in which Gabriel ponders on the meaning of life and his shattered self, his hopeless love for his brother’s wife, how he could temporarily defeat his insomnia, the action is triggered off by the arrival of Alice’s sister Dina. Before she actually makes an appearance, Gabriel comes to the conclusion that she might look like her sister and therefore make a good second best object of his desire. During a telephone conversation with his mother, he even mentions Dina's name because his mother likes to think that Gabriel has finally found his match. His mother imparts the information about Dina to Gabriel’s Jewish grandmother who lives in a home and hopes that her second grandson might get married to a Jewish woman eventually – her elder grandson defeated a similar hope by marrying a non-Jewish woman. When Gabriel finally meets Dina, he finds out that she only vaguely resembles her sister, but he nevertheless tries to convince her to go on a date. At first, it all goes horribly wrong, and when he pretends that they are engaged to be married in order to trick the Green Flag man into towing away his car which broke down on a journey they took together, Dina loses her temper and tells Gabriel that the reason why she came back to England has to do with her disappointment in men in the first place and that she has no intention of getting involved again, he thinks that his efforts have been in vain. However, they continue to spend time together because of their family circumstances. Dina also helps him out when they discover Gabriel’s flatmate Nick hovering naked in a wheelie-bin by insisting on taking him to a psychiatric clinic. At this point, the third female character is introduced. At the hospital, Nick calls his friend Fran, who herself is slightly deranged. Gabriel is convinced they both need help and their presence makes him think over the boundaries between sanity and madness. Fran turns out to be Jewish, and because Ben, Gabriel’s brother, as we learn towards the end of a novel, goes trough a period of identity reconstruction and search for true Jewishness, he starts an affair with her. Gabriel is not quite sure whether he should be angry with Ben because he cannot understand how one could possibly cheat on Alice or whether he should gladly step into the gap Ben might leave. This revelation marks the turning point in the novel, emphasized by the fact that Ben confesses to his brother about being unfaithful at their grandmother’s funeral. Before this revelation threatens to bring things to a premature conclusion however, Dina takes Gabriel to

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see a friend of hers who is into hypnotism and who may cure Gabriel of his insomnia. He finds it hard to let loose but eventually, he falls into a trance which is longer than Dina and her friend make him believe afterwards, and as it turns out at the end of the novel, during which he mentioned Alice’s name. Dina does not tell Gabriel that she knows why Gabriel fell for her in the first place. Her motives are not completely altruistic either since she herself is dependent on Alice in the sense that the two of them entertain a kind of love-hate relationship, and Dina decided to go out with Gabriel simply to annoy her sister. Another turning point ensues when Dina finds out that she is pregnant. Gabriel cannot make up his mind whether he prefers her to have the child or an abortion, and when she tells him that she will not have it, he is partly disappointed. When Gabriel demands to know why she does not want to go through with it, Dina tells him what he said during the trance. Dina also informs him that she will go back to America and stay there for good. The novel ends with Nick turning up at Alice’s doorstep. He insists that he wants Alice to know the truth, but not the one as Gabriel fears about her husband’s infidelity, but about Gabriel’s secret love for her. When the secret is out, Gabriel goes to America to look for Dina. On the plane, he hands over his overnight-kit, including earplugs and a blindfold to a fellow passenger because he believes that his insomnia is now a thing of the past. Insomnia as a source of identity

In order to gain an insight into how Gabriel constructs his identity, let us consider the problem of insomnia and how far it is crucial to Gabriel’s self-image. After his name, he thinks his insomnia is the most crucial marker of his identity. At least this is who he introduces himself to the reader at the very beginning of the novel: Hi, Gabriel Jacoby, Insomniac – but we all need our negative hallmarks of identity. I don’t mean self-deprecation – that’s just knots in the pattern of awkwardness – but a real maladjustment, a big fuck-off flaw, a therapeutic black hole through which we can present ourselves with the subtext I am interesting, dangerous and romantic. However: this one – at the end of the day, it’s just not worth the trouble (emphasis in original).38

What is particularly interesting about this opening is not just the fact that Gabriel is an insomniac and how we immediately are prone to think that we are going to hear a lot more about this on the pages that 38

Baddiel 1997: 1, subsequent page references will be given in the main text.

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follow, but how the narrative draws attention to itself. Gabriel’s introduction is almost classic if we consider the formula of the male confessional novel – we get to know him and his problem straight away, but through the way insomnia is described, i.e. as interesting, dangerous and romantic subtext, we also get the idea that the novel itself is interesting, dangerous and romantic, and the insomnia might stand for the reason that the book might keep us awake all night because it is so good. The subtext of the narrative suggests that we are embarking on a fascinating reading experience. Like obsessive reading when one simply cannot let go of a book until one has read it to the end, insomnia has a lot to do with being unable to let go or give in. Gabriel cannot go to sleep because he is afraid what his unconscious might have in store for him. In Time for Bed, losing oneself is rather double-edged. On the one hand, it implies escapism into the realm of romance and popular culture as Gabriel says himself commenting on the different sorts of films, on the other hand the act of losing oneself is denied because of sleep deprevation. Gabriel’s predicament is already summed up by the title of the book. Time for Bed can just mean bedtime, but it may also refer to the period when one loses consciousness and delivers oneself to uncontrollable activities the brain might perform while the body is at rest. On a more specific level, it might also mean to go to bed with someone, either with a purely sexual motive, or else forming a long-term relationship in which one regularly shares the bed with one’s partner. On a more abstract level, Time for Bed might also designate the time to forget. Since Gabriel has an ambiguous relationship to both time – and as we will see later – to the act of forgetting, he substitutes the latter by retreating to films that make him weep. He is unable to cry at himself, and therefore looks for surrogate emotions. ‘Time for bed’ is also a typical phrase used by parents with their children when they have had enough of them, or when they have finished reading a story aloud. Furthermore, it is supposed to ring a bell with Baddiel’s generation who probably watched The Magic Roundabout and Jackanory when they were children. Both programmes were broadcast in the late 1960s and early 1970s and used ‘time for bed’ as their closing phrase.39 In the following, I am going to have a closer look at Gabriel’s insomnia. He never actually gives a possible reason why he thinks he suffers from insomnia, and even though as the novel proceeds, we may or may not connect it to him being secretly in love with his sisterin-law, the problem is never overtly dealt with in these terms. Quite to the contrary, Gabriel gives much more thought to his not being able to 39

I am indebted to Peter Burleigh for drawing my attention to the children’s programmes.

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sleep when something out of the ordinary happens, for example when he actually manages to sleep for a few hours or when falling asleep seems even more difficult than usual. He seems to think that he is punished for something: I don’t often sleep during the day, even though it’s often easier than at night, because my insomnia gets so outraged at the fact that I’ve nicked some sleep from behind its back, it completely cancels out any time I’ve got owing to me for the night ahead. So I’ll regret it later, no doubt, when I’m trampolining the mattress with restlessness, but, hey, you only live once. (99)

So instead of worrying what might be the reason why he cannot go to sleep in the first place, he seems to believe that there is a reason when it gets worse. In doing so, Gabriel is deferring the meaning of insomnia. Instead of asking himself what significance insomnia has in his life and why he began to suffer from, he tries to figure out what any variation of the very same problem might mean. This way of way of evading the immediate signification obviously has something to do with guilt. Gabriel feels guilty when he “nicks some sleep from behind its back” and thinks he is being punished for it. On the other hand, however, his insomnia provides him with a perfect excuse whenever he cannot function ‘normally’. He can excuse himself when he gets up late, when he has umpteen cups of coffee a day to keep him awake, and most importantly, from not doing a proper job. His insomnia defines him entirely; he is because of his insomnia. But here again, there is a rather striking paradox in the narrative. On the one hand Gabriel’s insomnia prevents him from doing those things that could give him an identity, on the other hand it provides him with an identity, as becomes clear on the opening page when he introduces himself as Gabriel the Insomniac. Let us briefly consider the psychological reasons for insomnia. According to Julia Nelson and Allison Harvey, excessive presleep cognitive activity may cause insomnia, especially when emotional images are translated into verbal thought (2002: 665). Gabriel’s sleepwake rhythm is completely upside down for he sleeps at odd hours and is awake during the night. Therefore, he does not have a proper presleep phase as he is always in presleep. He constantly reflects on why he cannot go to sleep, and meticulously registers how many hours, even minutes he can actually sleep. When he does not ponder on his sleep problem, his brain is busy processing the fact that he is in love with his brother’s wife. In other words, Gabriel’s brain never gets a rest, and even though he does not do any proper work, his obsessions exhaust him. He is in a permanent state between sleep and wake-

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fulness, and as he is deprived of a decent night’s rest during which he might have a dream, he is somehow always in a wakeful realm of dreams. His sense of reality is therefore muddled up. But because he does not do anything apart from asking himself why he is in love with his brother’s wife and why he suffers from insomnia, they are the only things that constitute his sense of self. Consequently, he cannot live without out them for he would lose his identity. The tension that arises between the absurdity of the situation Gabriel is in and the seriousness he obviously attaches to his person is responsible for the humour for which Time for Bed has been praised by critics and readers alike. Additionally and in view to what I will comment on below, the following might be worth considering. Gabriel’s obsessions with himself replace his need for work because his obsessions become a form of work. As I have made clear at the beginning of my thesis, the authors of the male confessional novel are sometimes referred to as cynical young men of the 1990s and are thus supposed to form an analogy – or contrast – to the Angry Young Men of the 1950s. However, whereas the latter expressed an explicit protest against and critique of the contemporary economic and political context, the cynical young men of the 1990s express their critique more implicitly and transfer their protest on to the personal and psychological level, by which they reflect a different structure of feeling that was prevalent in the 1990s. Their self-obsession contributes to the novels’ humour wherefore the novels of the cynical young men are perceived as ‘funny’; an attribute that has seldom been attached to the novels and plays of the Angry Young Men of the 1950s.

Cultural self-reflexivity

As I already mentioned, Time for Bed is a highly self-reflective book. Apart from Gabriel’s self-reflections concerning his insomnia and his love life, there are other such incidences where the narrative clearly refers to itself and to the act of reading, to literature and art in general. In one particular episode when Gabriel and Dina go out to borrow a video, they have an argument about which film to take out. Gabriel is in favour of something weepy and romantic, whereas Dina clearly prefers art films: She’s right, it is a protest against art films. Because art films are all about making the viewer more aware of themselves, themselves in the act of watching a film, or some other such post-structuralist nonsense; whereas great cinema is all about losing the self, that’s why – videos aside – it happens in a large, dark arena, hundreds of small I’s swallowed up by the big screen. And the greatest loss of self is tears – serious crying, really uncon-

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trollable weeping at the breakdown of love or restored happiness or death of a fictional character, someone who deeply is not yourself. It’s quite different from crying at one’s own misfortune, or at starving people on the news – the self cannot be lost in those tears, because it is, in one way or another, responsible. Crying in films is a giant, freely-given I-relinquishment; sometimes I can feel myself being syringed out of my eyes in bucketloads. (204, italics in original)

This is an interesting passage because it makes us aware that like the example of the film Gabriel gives us, this theory might apply to novels as well, in fact to the very book we are reading. It is not quite clear whether we are supposed to think Time for Bed is an artistic novel – it draws attention to itself, particularly in this passage – or whether we are supposed to lose ourselves in the narrative and cry at Gabriel’s misfortunes. This is clearly a moment of undecidability. At the same time, it raises questions of responsibility. The act of reading a book or watching a film makes an appeal to our responsibility. Here it is necessary to make clear what is understood by responsibility. As Derrida puts it, being responsible comprises first of all the act of responding. If we say yes to somebody or something we actually say yes, yes, because the very act of responding is an affirmative act already (cf. Derrida 1984). Therefore, as soon as we feel addressed, we already respond. It is our responsibility to respond. What Gabriel probably means by his use of responsibility takes the moral implication one step further. There is however, a difference between feeling responsible when one cries at ones misfortunes or at what is transmitted to us by the news, probably what might be best summed up as self-pity and guilt. Now these two feelings are both addressed towards the self, and are both associated with shame. Whereas guilt, as in the above example, stems from the fact that the self is either a) powerless to improve matters or b) feels it should do something but cannot bring itself to do it; in the case of self-pity the self is put into question as such. The problem of responsibility is rather complex, and Gabriel does not make any differentiation whatsoever, or put it more crudely, he does not want to respond, he wants to lose himself. However, he is trapped in an impasse here since Gabriel’s main problem is that he cannot lose himself. The problem of being a Jewish New Man

Gabriel’s repertoire of excuses is not exhausted by his insomnia; the other excuse that comes in handy whenever he has to justify what he is or what he does is being Jewish. Even though Gabriel does not actually practice Jewish religious rituals, whenever he thinks he does or

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says something out of the ordinary and people draw attention to his behaviour, he puts it down to his Jewish upbringing. He does not like pubs, and having grown up in a culture where the local pub is supposed to be part of one’s identity, he realises that not liking pubs maybe considered as rather strange: Dina wanted to go to the pub. “Where?” I said hazily. “The Pub. You know. Your local.” Again the possibility of the quilted smoking-jacket floated into view. I’m afraid, my dear, I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about. “I don’t have a local. I never go to the pub.” “You never go to the pub?” “I’m Jewish.” “Will you stop using that excuse for everything!” “But it actually is an excuse for everything!” (157, italics in original)

Gabriel does not fit in with the mainstream culture in which he has grown up, and his Jewish background provides him with an excuse every time he becomes aware of himself being different. Clearly, he does not comply with what the average British male of his age is supposed to like. He even blames the pub for being responsible for the three worst things about Britain: “Violence, terrible food and shutting down at eleven thirty – they all stem from a culture based on the pub” (158). He claims to not even like beer, to which Dina replies: “Oh, don’t be such poof!”, which obviously puts Gabriel’s masculinity under threat. However, he has already taken away part of the argument’s force by claiming that the reason he is different in this respect as well is because he is Jewish, and then he appeals to the changing gender roles: “I thought you were meant to be P –” (ibid.). The references are here made to the so-called New Man-phenomenon. A New Man does not have to assert his masculinity in terms of stereotypical male behaviour but by showing an interest in fashion, personal hygiene, and soft drinks or cocktails rather than beer. Gabriel does not refer to this new male movement very often, and there are things which are important in his life that are usually associated with typical male behaviour such as his interest in football. Yet, Gabriel is not that easily pigeonholed. His identity is stitched up by different cultural preferences and interests which he does not seem to be aware of. He does not differentiate between the different parts that make up his heterogeneous identity; he lumps them all together. Part of the reason why he cannot account for the different traits of his personality has to do with the fact that he is reluctant to lose himself other than in films. He is afraid of what he might find underneath, which at the same time is also the reason why he is not able to sleep.

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Obsessed with time

Another thing that is inextricably linked to Gabriel’s being unaware of his parcelled identity is his paradoxical relationship with time. On the one hand, he is very much aware of time, particularly when he is lying awake into the small hours and wishes that time would pass without him registering every single minute; on the other hand he wants to be in control of time. Last night, I struggled for over two hours against insomnia’s secondary tumour, known medically as early morning wakefulness. This, an addition to my night-timetable that first developed about five years ago, normally kicks in with menaces around 7:00, although not always, as it works on a kind of satanic flexi-time: 7:00 is based on getting up at my normal time of later than ten, but if I have to get up at say, 8:00, the wake-up call will then come around 5:00 – if I have to get up at 6:00 it will come at 3:00 – and so on and so forth, my body clock, which hates my body, cleverly readjusting around my alarm clock. (48)

We get the impression that Gabriel truly believes insomnia is a cruel invention to make his life a misery. Moreover, it almost sounds as if it was an especially malicious sort in Gabriel’s case because it actually plots to give him a hard time and punishes him when he tries to outwit its mechanism. However, here again it becomes clear that Gabriel has more or less accepted his fate, and his narrative on how insomnia works is of a rather cynical nature. Things, including time, are out of order – or to use a Shakespearean term, out of joint – but Gabriel clearly prefers philosophising about them to changing them. His inertia partly results from the fact that he feels tired all the time.40 It is Dina who draws attention to how much his sense of time is out of order. What is most interesting about the following excerpt is the fact that again a different trait of Gabriel’s identity is made responsible for his dysfunction, namely that he was born in New York, and Dina thinks that he might suffer from an incurable and eternal jetlag: “Right. How far behind is New York? In time.” “I don’t know.” “Hey,” says Alice. “Yeah. Five hours.” This is not dawning on me. “So?” “So…” says Dina, with the force of someone whose point is at last in their sights, “that’s how

40

In contrast to Frankie Blue in White City Blue (cf. next chapter) who is tired of his life not in the sense that he wants to end it but in terms of routines, habits, friends and relationships, Gabriel does not actively seek a change – his tiredness is of a more literal sense.

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much your body clock’s out of joint. Presumably it was set, originally, for American time, when you were a baby – and for some reason, got stuck like that. Five hours behind.” (57)

As ludicrous as Dina’s speculation might seem, it nevertheless rightly locates Gabriel’s main problem. For Gabriel, time is out of joint; things do not seem right; he lives in a time in which he cannot be accommodated; his dislike for pubs being just one example. Gabriel does not go along with contemporary culture, his opinion about contemporary pop music is that you might as well dance to your car alarm; he does not care for contemporary art etc. It seems as if all the accumulated hours he could not get to sleep have somehow prevented him from moving on. The phrase “'the time is out of joint”, reminiscent of Hamlet’s Denmark, not only refers to time as such. The physical reference of being out of joint implies a specific dislocation as well. Time and space cannot be distinguished anymore; their boundaries become blurred. Gabriel is displaced; his body clock prevents him from going with the time, in both its literal and metaphorical sense.41 The only certainty Gabriel has as far as time is concerned is that your own personal body clock has to stop eventually; it cannot run riot forever, and the more the novel progresses, the more he becomes aware of his own mortality. As in the novels I discussed earlier, mortality is an important topic and crops up time and again. Gabriel often thinks about the meaning of specific words that are crucial to come to terms with the fact that human life is finite. Therefore, he does not like the word never: I hate never. Never’s a real problem for me. I once thought about getting rid of the Dolomite. I was gonna splash out, get an Austin Metro automatic. The cheque-book was on the table, the dealer nearly had me: then he made his mistake. ‘Of course, once you drive an automatic, you’ll never go back to manual.’ The Biro froze in my fingers. Never. There’s no going back. This will be the last time. Suddenly, I saw myself speeding down a long, floodlit tunnel toward death in an automatic. ‘Hey, isn’t this fantastic, I don’t even have to change gear on my way to the grave.’ As I went through the glass revolving door, I telepathised the flummoxed salesman: never say never again. (68, emphasis in original)

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Furthermore, Hamlet’s phrase also carries an ideological message; things are not as they used to be; the natural order of being has been infected by corruption. In a sense, this applies to Gabriel’s situation, too (and probably to all of the protagonists’ in the male confessional novel) as he also resents the ‘modern’ world which is corrupted by capitalism and the cultural industries. ‘The phrase is also used by Derrida in The Spectres of Marx (1993b).

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Like Rob in High Fidelity who ponders on the meaning of the word “yet”, Gabriel seems to be equally obsessed with “never”. If he cannot even put up with the fact that driving a new, automatic car may change him to an extent that he would never consider going back to manual again, it makes us think what sort of change he could possibly live up to. However, Gabriel seems to work on the assumption that as long as no major changes occur, things stay the same. In other words, he believes in the reiteration of things. His sleeping pattern, i.e. insomnia does not change, and neither does his passion for his brother’s wife. His life somehow consists of countless variations on the same theme, the variations basically relying on how many hours of sleep he can squeeze in per night and how well he gets through an evening with Ben and Alice. Even though the narrative makes us believe that Gabriel leads a rather sad life, he at the same time seems to be enjoying it to a certain extent. He is settled in his unsettledness and not really desperate for a change. His acceptance of his fate and his attitude towards women and life in general are inextricably linked to what he assumes to be the ‘cultural mood of the 1990s’. This typical feeling that dominated the cultural discourses of the 1990s includes a strange mix between nostalgia and depreciation for the recent past as well as a feeling of inertia, of not going anywhere, of being trapped in what must be the logical consequence of the 1980s. The following excerpts give an insight into how Gabriel feels in terms of contemporary culture: I’m not much fussed about drugs anyway, but I’m considerably less fussed about drug stories. I mean, I’m not averse to the odd altered state now and again, but nothing seems more shit, unoriginal and fundamentally 1981 to me than long anecdotes about how out of your tree you were on Saturday night, how you ate forty-five Dime bars, how the police stopped you for driving too slowly, and how it was so funny. (60) She breathed a huge sigh of relief. ‘Thank goodness for that. I thought you had AIDS.’ Great, I thought, do I look that fucking bad? But as she explained: a guy she has sex with four years ago suddenly rings her out of the blue, says we must met up, he’s got things he has to say to her. What else was she supposed to think? Love in the Nineties: it’s paranoid. (67)

Both excerpts show that different sorts of escapisms of the past such as for example casual sexual affairs and drug abuse cannot offer the same satisfaction any more. First of all there is a health risk, and second, at least as far as drugs such as marihuana are concerned, they are not fashionable anymore. Therefore, the escape routes the 1990s offer seem to be far more homogenous than those of the previous decades.

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Whereas the 1970s and 1980s were marked by sub-cultural practices, including a whole variety of fashion and music styles etc., in the 1990 the cultural exhaustion of these practices seems to have had an effect on those people who were not quite old enough to have gone through the revolutionary cultural changes that took place in the late 1960s and 1970s, but who old enough to get acquainted with the sort of hedonism that was dominant in the 1980s. Time for Bed, even more explicitly than the novels discussed previously, thematizes the cultural boredom and fatigue the generation of late-twenty-or-thirty-somethings of the 1990s apparently had to face. Furthermore, since the consequences of uncontrolled sexual indulgence and drug abuse are no longer unknown and pose a serious threat to life, the topic of mortality has also become more prominent. In the following, I am going to sketch out Gabriel’s process of formation for he is a different character at the end of the novel. There are three incisive events or turning points that trigger a change: the arrival of Dina, Alice’s sister with whom Gabriel starts a relationship, the death of his grandmother and his brother’s confession at her funeral, and Dina’s pregnancy. I am going discuss these events in chronological order to emphasize the process Gabriel goes through.

The arrival of the other

When Gabriel meets Dina for the first time, he is most of all concerned with comparing her to Alice. This is how he introduces her to the reader: Take whatever picture you’ve got of Alice so far and run it through a pixillator – widen the nostrils two millimetres, blue the eyes, short and blonde-dye the hair, round out the cheeks slightly, curve the corners of the mouth down six degrees: that’s Dina. (50f)

Gabriel is very good at processing data and taking in details very quickly. It soon becomes clear that Dina is the less than perfect copy of her sister, as the wider nostrils, the slightly rounder cheeks in the above description already indicate. He continues: Enticingly, her face betrays less complacency than Alice’s. She is not so emotionally sure, I think. Her eyes are a shallow blue, like a rock pool you wouldn’t chance diving straight into. The lashes are vulnerably long. Her nose looks ever so slightly squashy, as if there is no bone in the tip. Her lips are not entirely symmetrical: the top left hand section is fuller than its opposite number on the right. There is, devastatingly for me, just the mer-

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est hint of Jolene-bleached down underneath her nostrils, and again on both sides of her mouth. Her cheeks are round and full. She has a faint scar reaching from the top of her forehead to just above her right temple. (55)

Dina very quickly loses the potential attraction she could have had as Alice’s copy – insofar as she represents the other of the other. Whether her being different from her sister makes it easier or more difficult for Gabriel to embark on an intimate relationship with her does not become clear. On the one hand, he seems to be so obsessed with the very idea that it does not come as a surprise to the reader when they start going out together, whereas on the other, he does not really seem keen to do so – it just happens. However, his relationship with Dina does most certainly have an immense impact on Gabriel because first, it is the closest he can get to being intimate with Alice, and secondly, it takes his mind off Alice; if not completely, then at least a bit. On their first proper date, Gabriel takes her to a football match. It is probably not Dina’s most favourite pastime, but she agrees all the same. They get stuck in a traffic jam, and to make matters worse, Gabriel’s car breaks down. He has no clue as to what might have caused the problem, and as it turns out, Dina knows much more about cars than he does. When the Green Flag man arrives to pick them up, he pretends to be Dina’s fiancé because it is she who is a member with Green Flag. She gets very angry and refuses to seem him again, but when he apologizes later, she is willing to give him a second chance. Dina is a very strong character; she is not afraid to speak her mind and to use language that is not exactly ladylike. In this respect, she differs from her rather conventional sister. I venture to suggest that it is this self-confidence that makes her stand out from Alice’s shadow and which finally convinces Gabriel that her otherness is peculiarly attractive. He projects the desire he has nurtured for Alice on to her. She is Alice’s replacement, she is her supplement, in the truest sense of the word because she not only substitutes her but also offers something more, something different. It is this difference that keeps Gabriel tied to her, and it is probably also the reason why he follows her to America at the end of the book.

Getting rid of the Jewish inheritance

As I mentioned before, to Gabriel, his Jewishness often serves as a good enough reason for making excuses and apologies. Whenever something goes wrong, he blames his Jewishness. Neither his parents nor he himself are orthodox practitioners of their faith; his brother Ben

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is the only member of the family who frequents the synagogue regularly. It is Gabriel’s grandmother, however, who embodies the Jacoby family’s Jewish background. Gabriel is very fond of her, not least because she is the epitome of their roots. She cherishes her GermanJewish background and speaks with a heavy German accent and is called ‘Mutti’ rather than ‘Gran’ or ‘Grandma’ by her grandsons. It is quite striking, however, that it is a woman who represents the Jewish heredity as the rabbinic tradition is heavily invested by masculinity and masculinism. Harry Brod argues that Jewish masculinity is a very complex issue because it is influenced by sexism from both within its own culture which supports male dominance and from the outside, the hegemonic culture that not only promotes patriarchal norms but also anti-Semitism. Consequently, “[a]lthough it gives men more power from the standpoint of the internal dynamics of Jewish culture, it ultimately disempowers them relative to the hegemonic culture, because sexism is a principal means by which Jewish culture internalises hegemonic anti-Semitism and turns it against itself” (1994: 91). Even though anti-Semitism is not an explicit topic in Time for Bed, it can be argued that ‘otherness’ is experienced in relation to the fear of being perceived as not fitting into the social order. Gabriel’s grandmother is most anxious that Gabriel marries a Jewish woman as Ben has already betrayed their family in that respect. When she hears humours about Gabriel having a girlfriend, she writes in a letter: “Mummy tells me you have started seeing a young lady. Mazaltov! At long last! Jewish?” (107). Gabriel would like to please his grandmother, and when he visits her and is confronted by the same question again, he alters Dina’s background for her sake and answers in the positive, justifying to himself and the reader: “Oh well. If it ever happens, I’ll teach her some Yiddish. And say her dad was one of the Ethiopian Jews – what are they called? Oh yeah, Falashas” (118). Gabriel jokingly plays with his Jewish background, exploiting it to make him appear more complex, to excuse his faults and ‘otherness’ and, as narrator, to amuse the reader. Gabriel does not fit in, but the reason for this is grounded in his reluctance to take responsibility. His Jewish background serves as a temporary measure to explain his ineptness. In contrast, his brother Ben suffers from a more troubled identity with regard to his Jewishness. At the age of thirty, he starts frequenting the synagogue again and starts an affair with Fran, Nick’s Jewish friend. Whether he commits adultery with a Jewish woman to cleanse his body because he feels ashamed of being married to a non-Jewish woman or whether he feels that he has to stick to his ‘own kind’ for fear of discrimination, does not become clear. The fact is that the Jewish background of the Jacoby family renders the problem of masculinity and the question of fitting in more complex.

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Gabriel is completely shocked when Ben confesses his affair. First, he has always believed that Alice and Ben were the perfect couple, secondly because he is in love with Alice and therefore cannot possibly understand how his brother can be unfaithful to this wonderful woman, and third because he thinks Fran is as weird as Nick and therefore the most unlikely mistress he can think of. The reason Ben confesses his affair at their grandmother’s funeral could be twofold. On the one hand, at funerals, people’s emotions are easily stirred because they have to say farewell to a beloved person wherefore Ben might feel compelled to confide in his brother with whom he is rather close. On the other hand, their grandmother was the last person in the Jacoby family who was really proud of being Jewish and wholeheartedly cherished her background. Therefore, one could assume that Ben believes that he has to replace her in order to uphold the Jewish tradition in the family. What he is most certainly concerned with is that their Jewish family tradition survives: My wife isn’t Jewish. I never thought that’d be a problem when we got married. But suddenly, it was. And then you started going out with Dina. Like seriously. […] And I thought: that’s it for the Jewish Jacobys. That’s the end of the line.” (271)

Whichever reading might be more adequate is not of prime importance here but Ben’s attitude shows that he was hoping that at least Gabriel would marry a Jewish woman to make sure that the Jewish family lineage continues. Even though Gabriel is surprised at Ben’s traditional mindset, he is more upset that Alice has been cheated on. Secondly, he is not quite sure whether he should encourage Ben in his extra-marital adventure in order to maybe claim Alice for himself. On the other hand, though, Gabriel’s identity rested to a large degree on being in love with his brother’s wife who of course he could never have, his personal life story would not make sense anymore if Alice and Ben broke up. In fact, being in love with Alice is a bit like the inability to rest at night – two tragedies that cannot be changed but together operate as a temporary measure to reinforce his identity. Procrastination versus procreation

The third event that discombobulates Gabriel tremendously is Dina’s pregnancy. He is out of his depth and remains clueless as to how to react. He accompanies her to the clinic where Dina is supposed to have a scan, paradoxically because she fears the pain she has had were a sign of infertility. When the doctor tells her that she is nine or ten weeks pregnant, she is incredulous.

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As upset as Gabriel is at the news, by the time Dina informs him that she is not going to keep the baby, he is upset at her denial, too: “A part of me dies” (303). Like Will in My Legendary Girlfriend who certainly does not want to father Martina’s baby, he nevertheless feels a bit disappointed when she tells him that she is not pregnant after all. Having impregnated a woman equals having planted ones seed successfully, i.e. created something new. Both men feel deprived of the manly pride they could take in the procreative act. Gabriel wants to know why Dina does not want to go through with the pregnancy, whereupon she replies: “Because you are in love with my sister” (303). Apparently, Gabriel told her about his secret when he was under hypnosis, a treatment Dina talked him into to get rid of his insomnia. Gabriel thought he was only gone for a split-second, but Dina informs him that he was under hypnosis for over an hour. He cannot believe the hypnotist could have tricked him to such an extent: “What did she do, put me in some kind of confessional coma?” (305). This is what Gabriel the character of the book asks in astonishment. Strangely, it is exactly what Gabriel the narrator has been doing throughout the book: confessing, not in his sleep or under hypnosis, but as a supplement for sleep. I would argue that the title of the book, Time for Bed, suggests that the narrative can only be maintained because Gabriel cannot sleep. Otherwise, he would not be compelled to tell his story in the first place. Gabriel’s puzzled question is a clever self-reflexive ploy that resolves the enigmatic nature of Gabriel’s predicament – in his sleep; he was able to confess the love that dare not speak its name. In short, the treatment cured him of his insomnia as well as of his secret love even though he was not aware of it at the time. I would like to emphasize the meaning of the secret because it plays a vital role, and its significance is easily overlooked. It makes again sense to draw on Derrida, who conceptualises the secret with regard to ‘understanding the other’, claiming that [i]f I am to share something, to communicate, objectify, thematize, the condition is that there be something non-thematizable, non-objectifiable, nonsharable. And this ‘something’ is an absolute secret, it is the ab-solutum itself in the etymological sense of the term, i.e., that which is cut off from any bond, detached, and which cannot itself find; it is the condition of any bond but it cannot bind itself to anything – this is the absolute, and if there is something absolute it is secret. (2001: 57, original emphasis)

This is a very political claim to make because it ensures autonomy. Transferred to the personal level of an individual, the maintenance of the secret guarantees personal freedom. The secret is grounded in

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something that cannot be shared, and even if an attempt is made to reveal a secret, its true nature cannot be exposed. This reasoning also applies to Gabriel’s situation. On the one hand his secret was about to be exposed and hence his personal autonomy attacked when he was under hypnosis, but the true nature of the secret, i.e. why he is secretly in love with Alice, can never be explained. On the other hand though, in a paradoxical sense, while his freedom was under threat, it also partly freed him from the weight of the secret because he communicated to the other, even though he was not conscious of it at the time. Dina has a secret and confession to make on her part, too. She admits having always been jealous of her sister, and when Alice warned her about getting involved with Gabriel, she decided to get involved with him purely out of spite. She could not have anticipated the feelings they would develop for each other afterwards. She too, yields her secret, but only partly, because the very fact that they fell in love with each other despite the unreliability of their initial motives constitutes a new secret. In conclusion, both Dina and Gabriel wanted to get involved with each other because of Alice – either to substitute her or to annoy her. Because they started going out together and Ben thought that was the ultimate decline of the Jacoby family, he started an affair to reestablish his Jewish roots. Alice, without being aware of it, initiated a whole series of actions without actually being personally involved in any of them. She is also the reason why Dina finally leaves Gabriel and goes back to America. During their last conversation, she says: You know what you’re in love with, Gabriel? Missed opportunity. That’s what Alice is to you. A permanent missed opportunity. You’re only able to love what might have been. (308)

Dina puts her finger right in Gabriel’s wound, the one that prevents him from going to sleep. He is never tired because he is too busy contemplating what might have been if he had met Alice before Ben, what might have happened if he could have been open about his love for Alice. At the very end of the novel, Gabriel visits Ben and Alice’s house with the fixed intent of letting Alice know that Ben has been unfaithful. Just when he is about to tell her, Alice informs him that she is pregnant whereupon he loses the courage to tell her. Then the doorbell goes and Nick is at the doorstep and tells Alice that Gabriel is in love with her and that he has been since he first met her. Gabriel admits that Nick’s allegation is true, adding: What can I do? You met my brother first. That’s just a chance, isn’t it – probably because of nothing – a walk in the park, a party you decided to go

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to after all… and you met him. If you’d gone somewhere else, you might have met me. (342)

Naturally, Alice is shocked, but Gabriel tells her not to worry. For him, it is all over now: “I am tired, very tired” (343, emphasis in original). With everything said, his secret revealed, he is tired of being in love with Alice and hence can move on in his life, and finally, go to sleep. The book ends with Gabriel sitting on a plane to America, handing over his blindfold and earplugs to the passenger sitting next to him. Gabriel is completely cured now, travelling west and moving on in his life, seeking out Dina to give their relationship a second chance. In the course of the novel, he has undergone a rather complex journey already during which he freed himself of his insomnia and secret love for his brother’s wife. Both of these problems acted as obstacles on the road to maturity. As I have shown, Gabriel’s cultural background, his Jewishness, added a further layer to the complexity of his problems, and how a series of events marked the decisive turning points, which enabled the process of maturation. When he is on the plane to America to find Dina, he does not need his props, i.e. earplugs and blindfolds, any more, and he hands them over to a fellow passenger: “Would you mind”, he says, pointing to my lap, “if I had that?” I look down. Inside the polythene bag where the earphones came from is a small plastic case, unzipped to reveal a blindfold, all black and taut and unworn, and two foam earplugs. “Only Louise – my wife – she has trouble sleeping if there’s any light at all in the room, so I always try and steal a blindfold or two from the airplane for her.” I look back at him; behind the fat neighbourliness of his face I sense a certain exhaustion, the result no doubt of so many nights spent soothing Louise. I look back down again, and then out of the window. There it is. The Antarctic of the sky. “Sure”, I say, handing him the entire plastic bag. (346)

This sort of semi-open ending is rather typical of the male confessional novel. Even though Gabriel has made a choice, it is left open whether it was the right one or not. He could have stayed in England and hoped that Alice would leave her husband because of his betrayal and eventually opted for him, Gabriel. However, the gesture of handing over his overnight-kit also marks a new beginning, the time of sleepless nights are over. He is ready to make a fresh start without questioning the implications of his choice in the first place. Gabriel has made both a connection and a commitment, and even though the reader does not get to know whether he will be successful

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in finding Dina, we know that at least he might be on the right track now, having made an attempt at partly yielding his secret. Time for Bed is much more than a classic ladlit book. It makes visible the complex relationship between ethnicity, masculinity and the question of belonging and thus shows that contrary to the feminist assumption that the male confessional novel fuelled the anti-feminist atmosphere that allegedly was prevailing during the 1990s, the crisis of masculinity is too complex to be understood as a unified phenomenon. So far I have focused on the salient topic of obsession in the British male confessional novel of the 1990s, arguing that the protagonists are faced by a paradox in the sense that they need to give up their obsessions in order to get what they need but without their obsession they would have nothing left to rely on; giving them up would result in giving up their identity, too.42 I have shown in the course of the narrative, they nevertheless manage to partly solve their problems. This process of formation or maturation, however, is never initiated by themselves, but either by outer circumstances, or even more importantly, by the female characters that supposedly play a more marginal role in the novels. Without them, the male confessional novel would not deserve the label late modern or postmodern Bildungsroman. Furthermore, by letting the male protagonists confess their inadequacies in relation to their female counterparts, the male confessional novel makes men visible in the sense that they become the marked gender.

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Another example that fits the category of the obsessed male confessor perfectly is Keith Lowe’s Tunnel Vision (2001). It tells the story of a London Underground fanatic who accepts a bet to travel the entire Underground in one day. To make the undertaking even more daring, he has to complete the bet on the eve of his wedding day. Naturally, things go wrong, and the male protagonist undergoes a rather traumatic journey during which he learns that taking risks may involve losing everything. As it says on the back cover of the book, Tunnel Vision is „[a] touching and funny debut novel, full of insight into why men have obsessions and women tolerate them.“

S T R U C T U R E S O F N O N -C O M MI T M E N T S Commitment phobic men are tortured souls full of FEAR. They are in a constant state of emotional conflict because of their negative irrational beliefs about love, commitment and relationships. In relationships they create great confusion, havoc, pain, and anguish as their behaviours are often insensitive, unpredictable and bizarre. (Jane Roder)

Men are more often than not reluctant to commit themselves. At least his is what numerous publications in the media and self-help book market suggest. This stereotypical shortcoming is discussed in scholarly publications, too. Stephen Whitehead for example contends: There is a commonly held view in many societies that men ‘cannot do’ relationships as effectively as women. That is, men are seen to lack the emotional tools, empathy, sensitivity, (self-)understanding, indeed maturity, necessary to enable a committed relationship on equal terms with loved ones and friends. In sum, masculinity may be useful for hunting, competition and climbing the career ladder, but it falls short when it comes to facilitating and enabling the emotional labour required to sustain a relationship. (2001: 156)

Whereas women search for a permanent partner and are ready to settle down once they think they have found what they have been looking for, men prefer to delay the decision to commit themselves in case somebody more suitable comes along.1 According to Whitehead, however, it is very likely that for both men and women the notions of permanence and lasting commitment become increasingly temporary in the 21st century (2002: 161). This assumption is based on the fact that marriage is in decline, and that 1

Cf. Pease 2001; Gray 1993 and http://lifestyle.iloveindia.com/lounge/ men-with-commitment-issues-679.html.

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most people prefer to stay single longer before they commit themselves to a permanent partnership or marriage. Whitehead concludes that maybe “friendships will come to provide the most constancy for individuals and, thus, the possibilities for social change, particularly in an age when increasing numbers of women and men are choosing singledom not coupledom” (ibid.). In this chapter, I am going to concern myself with two male confessional novels in which commitment, or the lack of it, is of particular interest. In the first novel, White City Blue by Tim Lott, there is a specific reason why the protagonist is afraid of committing himself, i.e. of getting get married; he fears he might lose his best friends. In short, he believes that he cannot be married and continue to entertain same-sex friendships. In Mr Commitment by Mike Gayle, the reasons are more obfuscated. The protagonist first accepts his girlfriend’s proposal and then has second thoughts which result in a temporary separation of the lovers. He undergoes some sort of romantic pilgrimage during which he comes to realise that the fear of commitment is more in his head than his heart. In order to shed some light on the causes of the procrastination of commitment, I will draw on Derrida’s concepts of the substitute and the pharmakon and thus show how the protagonists replace true commitment with surrogate relationships such as for example same-sex friendship in White City Blue. Secondly, I will come back to the discussion of identity construction. Specifically, I will argue that in our age of uncertainty, the lack of an inherent stability of the self in conjunction with the diversity and fluidity of identities means that new narratives of self and belonging are called for. As such narratives are fictive in terms of both fiction as writing and fiction as a surrogate for realism and stability, I contend that narrative fiction is a good source to make sense of the ontological insecurity the man in crisis is faced with. By doing so, I clearly subscribe to the postmodern preference of privileging narrative knowledge over scientific knowledge, including my contention that scholarly discourse is marked by and brings about narrative knowledge rather than scientific knowledge (cf. Whitehead 2002: 168). With regard to the question of identity construction, it will become clear that the crisis of masculinity has different faces, and that the inadequacy men have been accused of, has many causes. Both men and women are exposed to a multitude of gender scripts, and women also struggle to build up a unified gender identity. While this is neither necessary nor desirable, a sound modern relationship still relies on the performance of a stable identity script with regard to both partners. In the second novel, Mr Commitment, we will see that the main female character confuses different gender scripts and thus profoundly adds to the complexity of mixed-sex relationships.

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As in the previous chapter, I will focus on the process of maturation the protagonists undergo and examine this process helps them overcome their predicament. Whereas in the preceding chapter maturation was achieved in terms of overcoming obsessions, we are here confronted with the problem of overcoming the fear of commitment.

FRIENDS

VERSUS W IFE IN

WHITE CITY BLUE

White City Blue by Tim Lott was published in 1999 and won the 1999 Whitbread Novel Award. It is Lott’s first novel, after publishing The Scent of Dried Roses (1996), a poignant and touching account of his mother’s depression and eventual suicide and the social stigma attached to mental illness. Since White City Blue, Lott has published four more novels, Rumours of a Hurricane (2002), The Love Secrets of Don Juan (2003), The Seymour Tapes (2005) and Fearless (2007).2 Lott has often been compared to Nick Hornby, Mike Gayle and Tony Parsons. Even though he only wrote two novels that can be clearly identified as male confessional (the second one being The Love Secrets of Don Juan, 2001) – he nevertheless is considered to be one of the most popular writers of ladlit. One reader review not only pays tribute to this fact, but also draws on football terminology to capture the tradition within which White City Blue plays a major role: White City Blue is the best book I have read for years. It is real European Cup winning stuff compared to the solid Premiership performance of Nick Hornby, Jonathan Coe’s first division Rotters’ Club and Mike Gayle’s second division Turning Thirty. Like an earlier reviewer, I want to rush up to people in the street, grab them by the lapels and force them to read White City Blue. It is a bloke book, the antithesis to chick lit, and a realistic depiction of male relationships. The novel’s essential brilliance resides in the fact that it is a compulsive page turner but, like the original Star Trek, it deals with the deepest human issues.3

Apparently, the accuracy of White City Blue, to this particular reader, seems so striking that he wants the book to become compulsory reading for everyone. White City Blue is the novel that has the highest percentage of identification; out of fifty-two reviews, thirty (seventythree percent) claim that they either identify with the male protagonist or that they know people who are like Frankie Blue or his friends. It 2 3

Cf. www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth241. This review as well as those quoted later in this chapter are taken from www.amazon.co.uk/review/product/0140266496.

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becomes obvious that as with High Fidelity or My Legendary Girlfriend, readers can relate to the book on the basis of their everyday experience: It doesn’t matter that the characters are often unpleasant – they are plausible and it is Lott’s particular gift that he always manages to make his reader feel involved with what happens to them. I thought the author’s evocation of west London was stunningly accurate. His characters […] were complicated and accurate descriptions of people I know, and people I grew up with. [I]t paints a stunningly honest picture about the transition into male adulthood (The author is spot on in pointing out it actually takes place a lot later than we think it does!) [It] brought a smile to my face whilst still being realistic. It also manages to portray exactly the tensions and emotions that we’ve all probably experienced […]. This is a terrific account of male friendship and the ties of habit which keep us together long after we cease to have much in common. A fascinating study of the male psyche at the turn of the millennium. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that dives so deeply and successfully into the world of men in their late twenties. The attraction for me […] was the uncanny symmetry Frankie “the Fib” Blue’s character had to my own.

White City Blue seems to be so popular because it successfully thematizes the pleasures and pains of friendship as the following excerpt exemplifies. White City Blue – It is funny and recaptures exactly what it was like to be young and in a group of male friends, and how the dynamics of those powerful friendships change as we grew up. It is poignant and sad, but uplifting at the same time. It is life-affirming and positive to know that many of us have these very close bonds and feelings and experiences and that we all have to move on grow up. It is also a bit of a nostalgia trip.4

In view of the analysis that will follow below, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to some recurring keywords mentioned in the above excerpts such as male friendship, male adulthood and male psyche. These are of particular interest because they are connected and cover similar problem areas. Same-sex friendship in some strange way, 4

This is a response I got to the questionnaire I circulated in 2005.

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seems to prevent men from reaching maturity or adulthood which again has an effect on how they relate to the opposite sex and how misunderstandings occur between men and women. Furthermore, male friendship and homosocial bonding furthers laddish behaviour for there is a tendency that men in a same-sex environment feel compelled to reaffirm their masculinity by hyper-masculine or sexist behaviour.5 As Whitehead (drawing on Seidler) contends, “men’s complicity in sexist or homophobic behaviour arises not from their core sexuality, but from a desire not to be excluded from male groups; not to be cast out and declared ‘not a male/man, like us’” (Whitehead 2002: 166). In short, the performance of aggressive and reactionary masculine behaviour is grounded in the fear of exclusion. The problem of inadequacy and of not fitting in as discussed in Part I does not only crop up in heterosexual relationships, but likewise in same-sex male friendships. A large number of readers on amazon.uk agree that White City Blue is both realistic and funny. The humour resides in the tension between the protagonist’s behaviour and his evaluation of it. In other words, he is fully aware that he does not really live up to the expectations his girlfriend has in terms of what a fulfilling relationship is supposed to be and as to how he should change in order to improve the chances of having a fulfilling relationship. What is important to note with respect to the readers’ appreciation of this tension is that they themselves engage in a confessional narrative. By admitting that they were reminded of their own inadequacies – or were even made to realize they had inadequacies in the first place – implies that they do not only comply with what they have read but with the way it is written. In this sense, my claim made in Part I that confessional writing can be both read as an accusation and an apology is also applicable to its readers. As friendship seems to be the most salient topic in White City Blue, I will pay particular attention to how male friendship functions as a substitute for a heterosexual relationship and how male friends and female partner seem to be treated as mutually exclusive options throughout a large part of the book.

5

Homosocial bonding or homosociality is the sociological term to refer to male friendship. I understand homosocial bonding as a more intense form of male friendship, often bearing playful overtones of same-sex attraction that is neither conscious nor intended. Crucial to homosocial bonding is that it has both a physical as well as a symbolic connotation (Kimmel and Aronson 2003: 396).

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Plot synopsis

White City Blue is the story of Frankie Blue, a thirty-year-old estate agent who lives in the White City area in London. Unlike most other protagonists of the male confessional novel, he seems to be happy enough with his profession and his current job situation. He likes selling property; it makes him feel powerful and provides him with chance to prey on people’s lives. Apart from selling flats and flirting with women, Frankie does three other things: He meets his best mates Colin, Tony and Nodge, goes drinking, and watches football, especially his favourite team, QPR (Queens Park Rangers). In this sense, Frankie is a proper lad. He has known his three best mates since they were at school together. They mean everything to him even though he cannot actually think of any reasonable explanation why this should be the case. Occasionally, he even feels that he has to get rid of them because they prevent him from a number of things such as having a happy relationship with his fiancée and with getting on in life, i.e. with having a future. Frankie’s friends are all rather different: Tony, the slick hairdresser has Sicilian roots but gives his best to be more English than anyone else. He has always been the leader of the gang, and as a child, he used to be a real bully. As he grows more mature, he adopts a more subtle manner to manipulate people. He is funny and charming, but a bit temperamental, and he does not have any scruples against taking advantage of people, including his friends. Nodge, whose real name is Jon, is a semi-intellectual taxi driver. Apart from Frankie, he is the cleverest of the gang. He does not talk much, never loses his temper and does not get easily intimidated, not even by Tony. Lastly, there is Colin, whose nickname is ‘tortoise’ which sums him up rather nicely. As the offspring of an alcoholic father and a manic depressive mother, Colin finds it hard to fit in, he is in fact what the others call a ‘misfit’. He is the most cautious and sensitive of the four. He still lives with his mother because she is ill and also a bit mad. Looking after her prevents him from taking on a regular job. Being a computer nerd, he takes on the odd job from computer companies, working from home. He is Frankie’s oldest friend, but the one he is most ashamed of because he is in his eyes, a loser. At the age of thirty, Frankie gets hit by a premature midlife crisis and suddenly becomes weary of his life. He feels that he does everything out of habit, including hanging out with his friends, and therefore wants a change. The change so desperately sought suddenly arrives in the shape of Veronica Tree, a pathologist who wants to buy a flat. With a mixture of professionalism, male patronizing and flirting, he manages to impress her, and they start going out together. After six months, he asks her to marry him, which she accepts. The most difficult problem Frankie now faces is to tell his three friends about the

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impending nuptials. The moment never seems right, and when he is together with them, he oscillates between wondering why he has not given them up a long time ago and why he should give up his mates for his wife-to-be at all. Giving them up will be inevitable because Frankie is convinced that mates and marriage do not mix. When he finally musters the courage to put them in the picture, they do not accuse him of being a traitor as he had feared, but somehow perfunctorily congratulate him while making the point that the 14 August will still be taken seriously, the day they always celebrate in memory of the legendary 14 August 1984 when they got drunk, tried out cocaine, bathed in a children’s pool and were chased around London by a whole group of taxi drivers because they damaged the rear window of one of them. To the four of them, the 14 August 1984 epitomizes the ultimate experience of having fun together and of being invincible as a group of male friends. Unfortunately, Veronica’s birthday turns out to be on 14 August as well, and now Frankie must decide between spending the day, as always, with his mates or with Veronica because she threatens to leave him if he gives preference to his mates. For fear of losing face in front of his friends, he chooses in favour of them. But everything goes wrong; they fall out over a game of golf in a way that reconciliation seems to be out of the question. As a consequence, at the end of that important day, Frankie finds himself all alone, without either friends or fiancée. Because he does not know how to deal with loneliness, he throws himself into his work. Thanks to an encounter with an old man who had already once visited him to look for a flat, he suddenly remembers how he has sworn never to be alone and seeks out his friends, one after the other. He manages to make up with two of them, Colin and Nodge, the third one, Tony, gets crossed out for good. The novel ends with Frankie getting married to Veronica after all, and he tries to believe that he has done the right thing.

Male friendship and the construction of identity

At the beginning of the novel, the main protagonist Frankie has manoeuvred himself into an impasse that makes decision taking impossible. The way he has constructed his identity does not allow him to go for the change he so clearly wants to happen because that would ultimately erase the foundation on which he has built his sense of self. White City Blue differs from the novels discussed so far in the way the protagonist’s progress can be traced. As the biggest part of the novel is concerned with Frankie and his friends and the circumstances in which he has first befriended them, there is literally speaking, not much space for Frankie’s maturation process. However, instead of undergoing a number of little disturbing moments or incidents, Frankie

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is struck by a huge blow when he suddenly loses all his friends and his fiancée on the same day. This truly unsettles him and makes him change the perspective from which he views both same-sex friendship and a mixed sex relationship. On the surface of things, White City Blue is above all a book about friendship. At the age of thirty, Frankie tries to figure out what exactly his three best friends mean to him. On the one hand, he could not envisage a life without them; on the other hand, they seem to have become redundant, holding him back from moving on in life. The following excerpt gives a good insight of what homosocial bonding might mean: The Bush Ranger erupts. Nodge has his arms round me, Tony gives me a kiss, and Colin is dancing ecstatically. All the faces in the pub have lit up and for that one brief second, for the tremendous moment, we all love each other with a sodium-burning intensity. At these rare and wonderful times, to be a mate, to have your mates – there’s nothing better. Lager spills on the floor, overturned in the ecstasy. Up on the screen, they’re doing the same, five team members in blue and white shorts hugging and kissing in perfect joy. (27)

Frankie and his friends have supported the same football team, QPR (Queen Park Rangers), ever since they were kids and it is still a ritual to watch games together at their local pub. When their team take the lead or win against all odds, this seems to be the ultimate experience of joy, giving them a sense of supporting the right thing, and what is more, a sense of belonging. They never feel as close as when they can cheer together at the good outcome of a football match or commiserate over a lost game. Apart from displaying the sort of behaviour that sums up laddishness at its most poignant, the excerpt quoted also throws light on how Frankie and his mates actually experience their being together. Their mutual interest in football gives them a reason to spend time together. They feel at ease; they belong to the same community. They speak the same language; they use the same vernacular. However, if we have a closer look at how Frankie recounts this incident, we are likely to suspect that these moments do not happen too often. Phrases like “for that one brief second”, or “at these rare moments” are testimony to a certain sadness if not premature nostalgia. He is sad for these moments of feeling perfect together are so rare. The bonding between Frankie and his friends is the foundation that makes this sort of joyful experience possible, and it seems, as if their clinging to their being mates is grounded in the very possibility of such a moment, it actually replaces, i.e. supplements the event, the experience of closeness and belonging. Therefore, the chance of experi-

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encing becomes more powerful than the experience itself in terms of how Frankie justifies their friendship and their mutual sense of belonging. On the one hand, the mutual experience supplements their everyday life with a pleasurable moment, but on the other replaces the possibility of excitement and hence annuls it at the same time.6 In other words, the pleasure and excitement are marked by differance;7 they differ in time and space, they do not coincide, and they are deferred, they are at the same time present and absent.8 This general feeling of disquiet estranges Frankie from his friends. When he penetrates the subject of friendship and belonging a bit further, his friends suddenly turn into a hindrance that prevents him from experiencing the present: It’s not that I don’t like them, it’s just that they’re there simply because they’ve always been there. Like I say, life’s a matter of habit. They’re accumulated history. One way or another they hold you up, they remind you who you are, insist on who it is you remain. That can be irritating too. Old friends can be like deadwood, like one of those petrified forests. You have to fight your way through, not in order to get anywhere, just to stay in the present, just to not get dragged back in the past. (39)

Even though he holds on to his friends because they stand for the possibility of experiencing an ultimate sense of belonging and thus together forge the basis on which he builds his identity, Frankie nevertheless feels that his friends also hold him back. They are a habit that prevents him from moving on. They epitomize the past, a border he must cross to get access to the present and the future. It is in this contradiction between his friends being the source of belonging but at the same time preventing him from actually experiencing the present where the narrative is trapped in an aporia, an impasse that exposes Frankie’s paralysis. Apart from their mutual support for QPR, they share little else. As Frankie observes at the beginning of the novel: 6

7 8

The mutual experience refers to their shared sense of belonging which constitutes this moment of intensity, but which is never talked about. It is more like a tacit agreement that which makes their friendship worthwhile. Cf. Derrida 1973. For a brief account on Derrida’s use of différance see also Wolfreys (1998: 64ff.). This excerpt also exemplifies what I called the possibility of iterability. The ordinariness of such an event implies that it might be repeated at any time. On the other hand, however, the joy experienced is overshadowed by the transitory nature of the event. Also, the doubt that it may not be re-experienced can also be read as an indicator of mortality. As Derrida puts it: “Life will have been so short’: this means that one always dies in an untimely way” (1993: 49).

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QPR are perhaps the last subject that truly binds us together – or at least that we are prepared to discuss. No, not quite the last subject. Although I don’t know whether our references to sex count as discussions. They can be, I suppose. For instance, now Tony is starting one of his pesting stories. He always says that he can pest a woman into bed, and he can. I’ve copested with him sometimes. (58)

As we can see, Frankie and his mates display the sort of behaviour associated with New Laddism. They go to the pub, drink a lot and talk about football and sex. In contrast to the other male confessional novel in my corpus, White City Blue is the only one where there is no juggling between the New Man and the New Lad-script, at least as far as the main protagonist is concerned. One qualification has to be made, though. Two of the friends, Colin and Nodge, do not really behave in this laddish way nor do they join in when Frankie and Tony discuss women in a really sexist, if not misogynist way. The pesting story Frankie refers to in the extract above ends by the woman being upset because Tony cannot remember her name: “I just can’t recall it. And you know. These things matter to a doris” (59). Tony calls all women ‘doris’ which shows his low esteem for his sexual partners for they are never more than that. Frankie tries to tune in with Tony’s misogynist conduct because he thinks it is ‘cool’ and ‘what lads do’. When he tries to justify to Nodge his decision to get married, he rounds off his reasoning by saying: “She’s lovely, Veronica, she’ll make a good doris. She’s kind, loves me. She’s intelligent and warm.” I try to resist saying the next thing, but I can’t. It’s so deeply ingrained. Reflexive. “And a terrific shag.” You have to do that from time to time. Drop in a joke, something that establishes that you’re blokes together, that you each possess cocks, that you’re not getting too serious, not for too long. (159)

Frankie feels forced to justify if not to apologise for why he is getting married; the gender identity invested by aggressive masculinity and laddishness that he usually performs in a single sex context does not easily accommodate his plan to get married. Confession there takes place on another level, it is not just a generic property of the male confessional novel as it were, it also ensues in the dialogue between the protagonists; whereas he apologises for being a lad to the reader, he apologises for not being one to the characters in the book. But let me come back to Frankie’s predicament of seeking a change while hanging on to what he knows best. The change arrives when Veronica enters his life:

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After all, I was thirty years old – and there was a sense of this life fraying at the edges, smelling just slightly of decay, on the turn. She seemed ideal to… renew my world, so to speak, or to help me remake it into something not necessarily better, but different. Something with its own special tortures and irritations and boredoms and ringing, mocking laughter. (18)

The reason for seeking this change apparently does not so much lie in the fact that he wants a better life, but a different one because he has become bored with his routines and rituals. He is looking for a variation of the theme, but a variation radical enough to grant him access to the future: […] I was getting weary of Colin, Nodge, and Tony, and football, and the next kind of ethnic restaurant, and five-a-side, and pints and E and chop and drinking games and pulling and carrying on pretending that it was the best thing there was or could be, and that anything else was a lame compromise. I was weary of myself. (ibid, italics in original)

What we see here is that Frankie is tired of his life in terms of what lads do. He does not want to go on identifying with his friends, football, drink, the occasional buzz of drugs etc. On the other hand, it is what he has always done; it is what gives him an identity. There again we get the sense of an impasse: how can one change one’s identity if the identity is based exactly on what we want to change? Does this mean one has to lose one’s identity? Even though his choice of metaphoric language to describe his friends as “deadwood” is far from positive, they nevertheless seem to keep him alive – they are his pharmakon, the remedy, which keeps him alive, and the poison that prevents him from moving on. In Dissemination (1972), Derrida traces the meaning assigned to ‘pharmakon’ in Plato’s dialogues. Pharmakon may likewise mean poison or remedy, and according to Derrida, this problem is not just one of translation but marks a moment of undecidability. The word pharmakon is undecidable because it is overdetermined. Plato’s endeavours to free the term from its ambiguity are in vain because his example, writing, is first ascribed the power of restoring the memory where it is later condemned as poisoning the truth. According to Derrida, this is however not a simple contradiction but a structural necessity which turns the dichotomy internal/external upside down because writing is an external tool to take effect on internal memory and therefore becomes despite its external nature internal itself. A similar stance is taken in “…That Dangerous Supplement…” where Derrida comments on the way Rousseau uses the word “supplement”. As in Dissemination, the essay is supposed to break down

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the dichotomy between speech and writing in which the first has been always been favoured in the Western philosophical tradition. By his minute and painstaking readings of these texts, Derrida shows how speech is a form of writing itself because there is no such thing as a pure form of speaking – it is always different from itself.9 What makes the supplement a most interesting concept is that like the pharmakon, it designates two different things. A supplement can be understood either as a substitution in the sense that A replaces B, or else as a supplement in the sense as we understand for instance a literary supplement of a newspaper, in other words, A adds something to B.10 Frankie’s problem is rooted in the sort of undecidability the pharmakon implies. His lack of confidence with regard to his gender identity and philosophy of life are at the same time remedied and poisoned by the presence of his friends. He uses them to feel secure, but they also contaminate his relationship with Veronica. Whereas he thinks he understands what matters to his friends, he more often than not is at a loss when Veronica makes an effort to explain how she perceives the world. As mentioned before, Frankie and his friends speak the same language, at least they think they do, and their being together is grounded in following the same rules, which are part of their game: There are lots of rules in our relationship. I still haven’t been able to work them all out. Because, the rules are something else you can’t acknowledge. You can’t acknowledge anything actually. If you’ve got something to say, you have to say it through the Game. Or one of the games that add up to the Game. (62)

It does not become clear what the “Game” actually consists of. They feel they all play the same game, but if they have to pin down the rules of the game, they cannot do it. To put it differently, the game becomes different from itself; it is at the same time present and absent. It leaves a mark on their behaviour, on their conversations; they stick to some-

9

10

In order to spell out the perfection of speech, one again has to rely on the medium of writing, as does Rousseau in his Essay on the Origin of Languages or Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics. Derrida explains the two meanings of supplement as follows: “For the concept of the supplement […] harbors within itself two significations whose cohabitation is as strange as it is necessary. The supplement adds itself; it is a surplus, plenitude, enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It cumulates and accumulates presence. […] But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place of; if it fills, it is as one fills a void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence” (1992: 83).

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thing that is not actually there.11 On the other hand, when Frankie and Veronica decide to get married and draw up a guest list, Frankie suddenly feels out of his depth because his fiancée seems to have a totally different concept of friendship, and what is more, a different way of talking about and categorizing her friends: For a start there are friends you don’t like. I’ve got plenty of those. Then there are friends you do like, but never bother to see. Then there are the ones you really like a lot, but can’t stand their partners. There are those you just have out of habit and can’t shake off. There’s the ones you’re friends with not because you like them, but because they’re very good-looking or popular and it’s kind of cool to be their friend. Trophy friends. (46f)

The list goes on and on, and Frankie is utterly bewildered by the categories of friends Veronica is putting forward. He feels at a loss, because his three mates all belong in the category of friends you have out of habit. As he himself concludes after an evening out: “Perhaps that’s why I’m frightened of telling about Veronica. Because they’re where I fit. They help hold me up, they’re my history” (33, emphasis in original).12 Furthermore, this extract shows how Frankie is outside Veronica’s world, he is a stranger in a realm where he does not understand the language spoken. In this context, I want to refer to Derrida’s recent work in which he addresses more general questions such as politics, migration, law, ethics and the question of being foreign because in my view, his reasoning can be useful to make sense of the above gender differences. In Of Hospitality/No Hospitality (2002) he elaborates on the difference between the actual conditions of hospitality on the one hand and radical or absolute hospitality on the other. Radical hospitality remains impossible because it designates a hospitality without questioning on the host’s part. On the contrary, it should be the foreigner who asks the first question and not the host. From our common social and political practice we do know however that it is the other way round, it is the host who demands to know where the foreigner comes from and what motives he or she might have for staying on foreign soil. According to Derrida, “[t]he question of hospitality begins when

11

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If we draw an analogy to performance theory, we can claim that they – Frankie and his friends – assume they all join in in the same performance but are not actually sure what their part includes. The script is unclear and subject to re-interpretation. Like Rob in High Fidelity, Frankie is very one-dimensional when it comes defining himself. Whereas Rob thinks he belongs with his records, Frankie is convinced that he only fits in with his three best friends.

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we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language before welcoming him to our country” (2002: 15). Frankie and Veronica are trapped in the paradox of hospitality here. In order to open up to the other, in this case to either representative of the opposite sex, the rules that govern each community should be explained to the other party in order to accommodate them as new arrivals, to give them a place. However, each community is governed by a different set of rules that makes hospitality in a general sense rather impossible. There can be no absolute hospitality as a general law if it is contaminated by laws that dictate the behaviour within the realm the stranger is supposed to be welcomed to. The stranger cannot count on being given a place because there is a law that grants him this right. Or as Derrida puts it: “The Law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice as rights” (2002: 25). He furthermore points out that “[w]e will always be threatened by this dilemma between, on the one hand, unconditional hospitality that dispenses with law, duty, or even politics, and, on the other hand, hospitality circumscribed by law and duty” (2002: 133). In order to give each other a place in their own realm, Frankie and Veronica should be able to speak the language of the other. This however, makes an unconditional accommodation impossible. Language is hospitality, but because it stretches the possibilities to its limits, hospitality is present and absent at the same time. Because Frankie and Veronica cannot make sense of the way their significant other conceptualises friendship (which is a form of hospitality), they cannot grant each other unconditional hospitality.

Habit versus habitus

Now let us go back to Frankie and his dilemma with his friends. The reason Frankie feels at ease with them is because he thinks he fits in. He has a place where he belongs. He knows the rules according to which their friendship functions. His friends are his habit. It is probably necessary to stay with the notion of habit for a bit longer because it is one of the key themes of White City Blue and tells us a lot how Frankie establishes his identity. When Frankie thinks about getting married and how difficult it will be to make his friends understand why he has made such a decision, not matter whether it will actually change their friendship, he dismisses his fear of telling them by saying “they are just a habit”. Habit, derived from the Latin word habitus, means ‘home’. The home is the place where you feel safe, the place where you are bound to fit in. And this fitting in is actually that Frankie is after because his biggest fear is to be considered a misfit.

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So therefore it seems rather paradoxical that he undermines what he actually wants to achieve.13 Habitus, however, has another meaning, too. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu uses the term as part of a terminology that he appropriated for his theory of social practice. Habitus for Bourdieu means “a durable, transposable system of definitions” acquired by a human being during its socialization (1993: 134). In the early formative years, a child acquires what Bourdieu terms the primary habitus, comprising the practices of his/her family. As soon as s/he goes to school, the primary habitus is challenged by a secondary; the tertiary habitus consequentially describes the one through which the norms and values acquired qua adult professional and private life, i.e. job, friendships and relationships etc. The habitus is both structured and structuring. It is however, as Bourdieu never tires of emphasizing, generative rather than fixed: a basis from which endless improvisations can derive because the individual enters new fields at particular stages in his/her life that may influence the habitus. The habitus allows certain choices to be made that are at the same time possible because of and restrained by the habitus. This concept of habitus with its relative stable values is of course what in everyday language is referred to as habit. However, what is not included in a common understanding of habit in the sense of habitus, is the relative openness, the possibility by which our habitus may change our habits, for example if we enter into a new romantic relationship or start a new job. In White City Blue, Frankie has a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards his habitus as well as his habits. His habits are peopled by his friends – he defines habit not in terms of what he does, but what who he associates himself with. Thus habit becomes heteronymous. Or put it differently, Frankie confounds habit with habitus, taking the latter unconsciously too literally by peopling it with his friends and thus creating a home where he takes refuge in times when he does not know who he is and what life has in store for him. By sticking to his habits, Frankie closes off the possibility a habitus provides, in terms of making choices and linked to that, making changes. Frankie seeks change by standing still, a journey without displacement, an acknowledgement of the future to come while clinging to the past, moving forwards by putting on the brakes.

13

If however, we follow Freud’s theory of the uncanny, we could argue that it is precisely the paradox that inhabits the word ‘home’, i.e. that it has always been not only a place of safety but of dark secrets as well, that prevents Frankie from settling down, i.e. from finding his ‘proper’ home.

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The future past and the unlikelihood of repeated happiness

This sort of paradox also becomes visible when Frankie ponders the question of life, how you treasure a few rare moments which in fact seem memorable and call for commemoration, the experience they shared on 14 August 1984. There, as well as in the pub episode to which I referred earlier, in a very short moment he realises how beautiful this feeling of being together and being close is. As soon as you think about it, it has already passed: the present is already past. Nothing could ever be this perfect again, I knew, and this moment would slide away into other moments, moments full of imperfection and indifference and low boredom. The sensation of loss pierced me like a slaughterhouse bolt; suddenly I could see myself years in the future, looking back on this day, wondering what had happened to this shining moment and why it had never happened again. (198)

What is most striking about this episode is not just that Frankie becomes aware that the moment has passed as soon as he realises how unique it is, but he already crosses out the possibility that it might happen again. He already pictures himself in the future, looking back and wondering why it will not have happened again. The tense he uses is actually the future perfect and not the past perfect because he thinks about it in the present. On the other hand, this thinking in the future past and wondering why it had not happened again, also indicates that there might be (have been) a possibility of repetition. The possibility is upheld because of its unlikelihood, the possibility is different from itself one might say, and so is the habit, because it implies being at home, fitting in, in short, having an identity, as well as being a burden. It stands for the sine qua non, the very condition for life, but at the same time for being an obstacle to get on in life. As soon as we become aware of how something is magnificent, great, memorable, we are instantly remembering it. As shown above, the legendary 14 August, even on the day itself, is already a thing of the past that needs remembering. When they talk about the fantastic day they had on 14 August 1984, Tony says: We need to remember what things can be. You leave school, you get a job, and you get a girlfriend. All the shit starts to hit you all the… necessity. Before you know it, you’re all dumbed up, like poor old Tappy. Then it’s the city of the dead, and… bing. All fucked up. Too late. The thing is to remember. To have a way of reminding yourself. (206)

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When they decide to have a commemoration each year in order to remind each other what things can be, Colin says: “Remembering’s what counts.” This remark is in as far interesting as it may very easily read as “Remembering what counts”. However, by shifting the verbal force on the apostrophised “is”, it is no longer the event as such which is important, i.e. what counts, but the act of remembering itself.14

Remember the past to prevent the future

The act of remembering is a very important issue in White City Blue. Whenever Frankie tries to make sense of the present, he dips into the past. When he comes to the conclusion that he does not really know why Tony, Nodge and Colin are his best friends, he provides us with a long narrative relating how he met and befriended them. The act that triggers this reminiscing about his schoolboy days is Veronica’s intervention with regard to which friends they should invite to their wedding. When Frankie narrows down the friends he would like to have around him on this important occasion to the three untouchables, Veronica is surprised because she does not believe that what bonds them is true friendship or affection: Listen, let me tell you something. Because I’m good at this sort of thing. You don’t like Tony and he doesn’t like you. I can’t imagine why you’re friends at all. You feel sorry for Colin and he resents you for it. The only one who’s a real friend is Nodge, I think. He cares about you. I don’t know why him in particular. It’s true, though. But you’ve let him down somehow. (51)

Veronica sees right through people, she takes them apart. Given the fact she is a pathologist by profession, makes the whole dissecting even more uncanny. As we will learn at the end of the novel, she has hit the nail on the head regarding all of them, but probably most in the case of Nodge who turns out to be homosexual and having nurtured a secret love for Frankie ever since they went to school together. As we will see, the homosexual subtext is part of the reason why Frankie entertains such an ambiguous relationship with his friends. Like Rob in High Fidelity, Frankie visits the past in order to understand the present. While Rob sought out his ex-girlfriends to find out what went wrong with his past relationships, Frankie tries to shed some light on why he cannot let go of his friends even though he does not seem to like them very much and therefore should be perfectly 14

Like in the excerpt taken from the beginning of the novel, we are here again reminded of the fact that we are on a path to death. The use of the word “remember” already anticipates the service for the dead.

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able to abandon them in order to start a new life with his fiancée and future wife. The present day narrative is thus interrupted by a series of chapters in which Frankie tries to remember how he first got to know his friends. He starts with Colin whose nickname is the tortoise because he is introvert and prefers to hide when the others put their masculinity on display. He is literal-minded, does not make any jokes but is often the butt of them. In short, Colin does not really fit in and more often than not, it seems his friends simply tolerate him because he does not pose any threat to them. When they play golf on their 14 August 1998event, they let him have a free shot: “Colin does an air shot, missing the ball completely, and we let him have another go for free. He is going to lose anyway” (219). Frankie only considers Tony and Nodge as real rivals in the game: “I don’t care about Colin, because I know he isn’t going to win anyway, and even if he does, it doesn’t matter” (ibid.). Colin does not share his friends’ masculinity script; he is too weak and to sensitive to pose a real threat to their male prowess and competitiveness. As a teenager, Frankie somehow felt responsible for Colin. Neither of them fitted in with the cool gang led by Tony, but Frankie was clever, got his B-grades without any effort at all and was good at football, whereas Colin was only good at mathematics. Frankie sums up their capabilities as follows: […] I was a natural A student who was too lazy to make the grades, and was happy to drift along with the same Bs that Colin had worked so industriously and single-mindedly to achieve. […] Facts, interpretations, remembering – it was like breathing to me, while Colin struggled and wrestled with his own limitations. (103)

Frankie’s reasons to be friends with Colin are ambiguous. On the one hand he feels that neither of them belong to the in-crowd and believes this reason enough to stick together, on the other hand he feels superior to Colin both in terms of physical strength and academic achievement. Another reason why he used to regard Colin as his best friend when he was a teenager is because they both liked to play the same games and stuck to the rules and because they could enjoy silence together. Frankie considers silence as intimacy that is not allowed in adult life because it is commonly acknowledged to be embarrassing: But for Colin and me, silence was our currency, all the different kinds of it. Excited silence, anticipatory silence, glum silence, angry silence, concentrated silence. We saw then what we have now lost – that the words didn’t matter, that words were screens behind which to hide. We had our si-

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lences. We lived in them like the fish we saw darting in the grey pools at the edges of the beach as we searched for red crabs and starfish and jellyfish. (102)

As teenagers, Colin and Frankie shared the same kind of games, rules, and rituals. To them, silence was meaningful, expressing feelings, language only a tool to hide them. When they get older, Colin finds it hard to adopt a more adult attitude to life and stays hidden in the tortoise shell of childhood. In the present day narrative, Frankie pays Colin a visit because he has ruined his computer and Colin is supposed to fix it. He scans Colin’s room which is scattered with football paraphernalia, graphic novels and comics and thus comes to the conclusion: “What is obvious suddenly occurs to me with a strange freshness: I am in a child’s room” (92). Colin has resisted growing up. He still lives with his mother, and the only sense of achievement he occasionally gets is from his the odd, temporary job he does as an IT expert. Colin lives in a virtual world and, as Frankie also finds out during his visit in Colin’s house, harbours some strange sexual preferences, getting all excited when a teenage porn star pops up on his screen: “Colin giggles, and jigs about in his office chair, rotating it twenty-five degrees one way, then fifty degrees the other, then back again. He is in his element here, among his darker impulses and domestic electricity” (93). It becomes clear from the above that Frankie feels both protective of and superior to Colin. They go a long way back, and Colin has been there for a very long time, he is part of Frankie’s past of which he cannot rid himself. But there is another reason for Frankie’s affections towards Colin. As can be read easily on the surface of White City Blue, it deals with same sex friendship and homosocial bonding. The subtext, however, suggests a more homoerotic nature of what the four male protagonists share, at least some of them. To come back to the case of Colin, this is how Frankie describes him with hindsight: Baby-face Colin. I wish I’d kissed him, before it was too late, before we were both self-conscious, grown. In my memory, I hold him in my arms and crush his bony, delicate body to mine. Colin, with his furrowing brow, the steady flick, flick, flick. We would stand and watch sycamore helicopters fall from the trees, capture them, and try and make them land on a spot on the ground. We would share Blackjacks and Fruit Salads, we would spill white Sherbet Dabs on our shorts. (100)

Frankie used to feel a deep affection for Colin, an affection that borders on the homoerotic, though. He is undoubtedly aware of the fact

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that kissing Colin as a grown, heterosexual man is out of the question. He nevertheless wishes he had kissed him before they were old enough to put too much stigma to such a display of affection. Colin fostered similar feelings for Frankie when they were kids. Being the weaker of the two, he used to look up to Frankie, he admired him. His admiration, however, also bore overtones of romance, as becomes apparent in the following excerpt from Frankie’s narrative on their childhood friendship. As ten-year-old pupils, they were asked by their arts teacher to paint a picture on the theme of love. After the lesson, Frankie sneaks back to have a look at Colin’s picture: Staring at the picture, I began to understand what had made Knocker [the teacher] pause. Despite the spills of paint and the botched perspective, the flatness […], there was some odd radiance about the picture. It was something to do with the figures, not the background. Although badly drawn, there was something mysterious about them. A pale halo surrounded them in a slightly more dilute whiteness than the rest of the beach, as if they were enclosed in their own private air. Their faces were indistinct, but their expressions were meant to indicate joy […]. One of the faces, the brownhaired boy’s, was blurred, indistinct. The other – the blond’s – was, in contrast, drawn with bold exact lines, delineating, eyes, mouth, nose etc. I knew at once that it was meant to be me – although it looked nothing like me, Colin hadn’t the skill – and yet I didn’t understand why I was clear and Colin was blurred. Only years later did it occur to me that Colin could not see himself and used me as a kind of mirror, or sounding board. A lifeline, even, to the outside world. (109)

Reminiscing about their past, Frankie now understands what Colin felt for him – he was in love with him. It was an indistinct, blurred feeling, just as the blotchiness of the picture suggests. Colin was embarrassed of what he had painted: “Even at ten years old, you have learned that expressions of love – for boys, at least – are ridiculous, sissy, dopey. What possessed him to paint it I couldn’t imagine – it was like taking his clothes off in public” (ibid.). Even though it does not become very clear how far the boys’ affection for each other was in fact mutual – Frankie’s was probably more in love with the idea of Colin being dependent on him – but without any doubt, there was something between the two that went beyond simple friendship. The pattern of Frankie and Colin’s friendship alters at the end of the book, first with the row they have during their 14 August event when Colin discovers that Frankie cheated at golf and reproaches him for it, and at the very end when Frankie seeks him out and realises that Colin has found a new best friend, one who does not let him down. Colin has become a devout Christian and

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claims that Jesus is his best friend now. In short, he does not need Frankie anymore, either as his mirror or as a shield behind which he hides himself. Frankie is utterly bewildered by Colin’s conversion but somehow realises that Colin always has been different from the others. It becomes obvious that their friendship will never be the same again. After Colin, Frankie tries to remember how he befriended Tony, the coolest of their gang, the one who emanates true masculinity. Even as a boy, Tony was admired for his tough, masculine behaviour. He was also a bully who tormented those who were weaker than him, such as Colin. As Frankie wanted to fit in, i.e. to be one of Tony’s gang, he tried to get his attention even though he did not agree with how Tony treated those around him. Tony comes from an Italian background – his real name being Antonio Diamonte, in the anglicised version Tony Diamond. Tony felt ashamed of his Italian inheritance and therefore tried to destroy whoever made fun of his roots. One of his victims was their black, South African teacher who sometimes tried to imitate an Italian accent. In a cruel act of revenge, Tony provoked the teacher to ask him the name of the Diamonte family’s pet dog whose name was Nigger. When Tony uttered the name, the teacher of course thought it was addressed to him and slaps him for which he ultimately loses his job. When the headmaster asked Frankie whether he thought Tony provoked the scene intentionally, he performs the part of the naïve schoolboy and denies Tony’s malicious intentions. This act earns him Tony’s friendship and the nickname Frank the Fib. Frankie felt attracted to Tony even though it was a completely different attraction than the one he felt for Colin for whom he felt tenderness and true affection. He felt attracted to Tony because of his good looks and his cool, detached behaviour: He was good looking, funny, clever. A tall, heavily built boy, with very short hair and those lazy eyes that moved very slowly around the room, pausing to assess. Olive skin. Big full lips. Languorous, slow and graceful. Eyes edged with frost behind their warmth. His uniform carefully customized – trousers taken in, blazer nipped and tucked, beautiful crisp linen shirts. (136)15

This is not the sort of description a heterosexual man, sure of his sexual orientation, is supposed to give of another man – the homoerotic subtext is pushing to the fore and lays bare the attraction Frankie feels 15

Frankie’s description of Tony comes close to what Veronica calls a trophy friend. Frankie is not aware of how this tag actually applies to how he perceives Tony.

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for Tony. It is more than a description; it is the way Frankie is looking at Tony, the male gaze, noticing details such as the colour of his skin the fullness of his lips. With Tony, Frankie’s attraction is directed at his appearance, and even though at the beginning of the novel he claims Tony is actually his best mate because ‘he’s a laugh’ and ‘makes things happen’ (25), the affection he feels for Tony does not run as deep as with Colin, or with Nodge to whom I will turn shortly. It therefore does not come as a surprise to the reader when at the end of the novel Tony is the only one with whom he does not make up after their big fall-out at the golf club. He seeks them out one by one – another parallel to High Fidelity – but he does not even talk to Tony because he rummages in the drawers in Tony’s office where he is supposed to wait for him and finds some official papers according to which insolvency proceedings have been taken against Tony. Frankie sneaks out of the shop, and witnesses how Tony is shouting at one of his assistants because she commissioned the wrong type of shampoo. He is very abusive, and completely loses his grip: I see his face from this hiding place, clearly, as if for the first time. I see that it is, in fact, not good-looking at all. It is violent, and ugly and stupid. I see that Tony is not a wind-up merchant, an expert at irony, the player of a game. Tony is nothing, a vacuum that has acquired a series of useful gestures. (258)

This is how Diamond Tony gets dethroned, pushed off the pedestal Frankie had him put on for almost two decades. He had always been attracted to him for his good looks and the way he always got what he wanted wherefore it did not take more than a glimpse at the proceeding papers and Tony’s outrage he witnessed to destroy his admiration for good; the realisation that Tony was neither good looking nor professional made him into what Frankie could not stand him to be, a fake. Deep down he has always known this, but he always outweighed Tony’s weakness with the attraction he felt for him until the ultimate unmasking moment at the end of the novel. The friendship with Nodge is again different from either the one with Colin or Tony because he neither stirs Frankie’s protection instinct nor triggers his appeal for the strong and masculine. Nodge is neither weak nor handsome, he always speaks his mind, is kind and fair, never loses his countenance, has a ‘mordant sense of humour’ (162) and ‘was always for the underdog’ (163). Nodge is therefore in a league of his own. According to Frankie, Nodge has changed more than the other two, though:

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Like I say, he was different then. Softer. He’s kind, Nodge. I often forget that, for some reason. You wouldn’t guess it. He hides it, like everything else nowadays. He was flamboyant then. I remember he had a big alpaca red sweater, some corn-coloured trousers and an early crude version of training shoes. There was something exotic in him that has since become concentrated all in the gestures and rituals of his cigarette smoking, leaving his remaindered self washed of tone. (162)

Frankie is not aware yet why Nodge prefers holding back his emotions – the reason for his behaviour is only revealed at end of the novel. There are three things that intrigue Frankie of which he becomes aware when he spends an afternoon with Nodge and his nieces in the park: Nodge’s gloomy nature (he is not a great talker and always gives monosyllabic answers), his kindness (becoming apparent in the way he treats his nieces) and, most of all, the way he smokes. There again, Frankie’s potential for admiration becomes obvious: His movements are precise; his cigarette smoking elegant – one could almost say beautiful, were it not a ridiculous thing to say. His hands are delicate, with long thin fingers quite in contrast to his imploded steamedpudding face. (156)

Frankie’s observational skills and preference for details not only reveal his admiration for his friends, but also make him a rather trustworthy narrator. The reader gets to know his friends rather well, and thanks to Frankie’s precise description, we can picture them, as in this instance, Frankie and Nodge sitting in the park, Nodge puffing away on his cigarettes. Nodge is probably the one that is the least conspicuous of the three friends, because as Frankie observes, he does not show his true feelings. But also with Nodge there is a homoerotic subtext. Frankie does not know of Nodge’s inclination until the end, but to the attentive reader this becomes obvious earlier on when Frankie tells us about how he and Nodge once had to share Frankie’s bed because they got drunk and poisoned themselves by eating poppy seeds for hallucinatory effects. Neither of them was able to move anymore and Nodge had to stay at Frankie’s. When Frankie woke up the following morning, he found himself in Nodge’s arms, his genitals being touched by him. In a teenage flight of panic and embarrassment, he leaves the flat without waking up Nodge and waits until he has gone home. They never mention the incident again until at the very end of the novel when Nodge admits on their 14 August outing to being homosexual and later confesses his secret love for Frankie.

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As with Tony and Colin, he seeks him out after their row. He takes a ride in his taxi and they talk through the intercom. Frankie wants to know why Nodge never said anything about being a homosexual, to which Nodge answers that he wanted to fit in. Anyway, it would have meant the end of everything. It did mean the end of everything. You, me, Colin, Tony, 14 August, everything. And pink ain’t the Rangers colours. No. I couldn’t tell anyone. Particularly not you. (263)

Needless to say that Frankie wants to know why Nodge could not tell him. The answer rather unsettles him, not only because Nodge reminds him of the fact that he once slept with Nodge’s ex-girlfriend, Ruth, but because he was not jealous for Ruth, but because for Frankie. I wanted to… be more than your friend, ever since that night at your house. You remember. The Morning Glory. […] And that’s the way it’s been. You think we’ve been close. We’ve always been close. But I’ve been much closer than you think. (264)

Just as with Colin and Tony, Frankie has to learn that Nodge was not the friend he thought he was. Whereas the friendship with Colin was marked by a love-hate relationship on Colin’s part and the one with Tony by Frankie’s superficial admiration for his tough, masculine behaviour, his friendship with Nodge does not tie in with the male bondaging rules either – Nodge transgressed them by a desire that cannot be accommodated in a same sex friendship among heterosexual men. In short, none of Frankie’s friends are who he thought they were wherefore he has to re-allocate them a different role in his life. Tony gets erased as a friend for good, Colin has replaced him in his function as best friend by Jesus, and Nodge stays his friend but probably can never become as close as he once was because they each perform a different masculinity script. In conclusion, White City Blue is far from being a simple story about love and friendship. It raises questions of time and being, about the relationship between past, present and future, and about the impossibility of making the perfect choice. The very moment a decision is made, all other possibilities are ruled out, erased so to speak. More importantly, it is about the construction of friendship and how male friendship functions as a substitute for a fulfilling heterosexual relationship. Only when Frankie pushes his friends from their pedestals – an act he does not commit voluntarily but is forced to do due to circumstance – is he able to make a commitment to his future wife. At the beginning of the novel he conceptualises commitment as the oppo-

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site of freedom. He considered being with his friends as being free whereas being in a long-term relationship meant giving up this freedom. Little by little, he realised that it was his friends who kept him entrapped but he was not aware of the true reasons why he could not let go of them. As my reading of the homoerotic subtext of the novel has shown, he did not stick to his friends because he subscribed to the heterosexual gender script of the lad, but because he was entangled with each of them in a homoerotic relationship even though it was either unconscious, as in the case of Colin and Tony, or kept secret on the other’s part, as in the case of Nodge. Whichever reading we prefer, White City Blue denies the possibility of a harmonious co-existence between intense male friendship and heterosexual relationships. Therefore, White City Blue, in a sense, emphasizes, or rather reminds us of the fact that nothing is except under erasure. Against the background of the outlined crisis of masculinity, the impasse or aporia, i.e. the impossibility of change or choice due to a co-existence of old and new structures in gender relations at the same time offer new models for male identity but are also marked by incompatibility, i.e. male identity becomes undecidable.

PROCRASTINATING

MARRIAGE IN

MR COMMITMENT

Mike Gayle’s second novel, Mr Commitment, is like its predecessor, a ‘romantic’ example of the male confessional novel. Like My Legendary Girlfriend, it ends on a rather conciliatory note, and it is most definitely of a more romantic and positive nature than the novels previously discussed. Mike Gayle’s novels have become very popular probably because they combine classic characteristics of the male confessional novel and the romantic touch known from women’s romantic novels and chicklit. It is this feature that divides the readers into two camps – those who appreciate the discussion of romance from a male perspective and those who discard it for its predictability and stereotypical depiction of men and woman. Consequently, the reviews range from total identification to complete rejection as the following examples illustrate: Mr. Commitment gives the reader a hilarious yet touching view of relationships from the male perspective. The book captures the modern dilemma of so many couples. If ever a novel was true to life, then Mike Gayle’s Mr Commitment has to be it. What a true to life encounter it was, I felt as though Mike was describing my partner.

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Everyone can relate to this book – [it] brings out all the home truths that often scare us. [I]t felt like the author was spying on me. This book had me cringing from page one onwards. [T]he author was more interested in trying to paint a picture of himself as some kind of heroic ‘new man’ than actually telling a decent story. The characters have no substance, the outcome is completely predictable. Women are fluffy bunnies who only care about getting married, right? And men are car, beer and football-obsessed nerds who are terrified of commitment, right? If you believe all that then you might enjoy this trivial novel.16

It cannot be denied that Gayle’s novel draws on a number of stereotypes. However, it should not be forgotten that, to some extent at least, stereotypes are a generic ingredient of the male confessional novel for they form part of a discourse that goes beyond the last page of the book. If there is something like a crisis of masculinity, in order to analyse it, stereotypes cannot altogether be dismissed. When confronted with the accusation that the characters in Mr Commitment are all stereotypes, Gayle answered: I don’t really care. Characters in Mr Commitment do all sorts of things. Some that conform to stereotypes and some that don’t. Anyway, the thing I really like about Mr Commitment is that I think it’s actually more a book about people than men and women – people who get it wrong and their attempts to get it right. The greatest compliment I received for the book was from a female reader who said that having read Mr Commitment she could see how being a commitment-phobe (at least from Duffy’s point of view) made a lot of sense.17

Gayle’s justification rests on the contention that the book is about people and their problems, and despite the fact that he did not really address the problem of stereotypes in his answer, it nevertheless raises an important issue that will be under discussion in my analysis. A crisis such as the protagonists undergoes in the book, i.e. that he cannot commit himself to getting married must be seen within the wider context of the masculinity crisis that allegedly took place during the 1990s. Such crises do not arise in a vacuum, they are to be seen as the contemporary reaction to something in the sense that they articulate the structure of feeling of that time. It is therefore interesting to con16 17

Cf. www.amazon.co.uk/review/product/0340718269. www.mikegayle.co.uk/mr_comm_qa.html.

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sider which elements further such a crisis, and as I will argue, it can be put down to a certain amount of insecurity on the woman’s part, too. For a long time, women used to be the inscrutable and hence marked gender whereas men were considered to be straightforward and easily understood; in the male confessional novel these roles are reversed. By confessing their inadequacies, the male narrative voice makes itself the subject of critical investigation and hence into the marked gender. It is important to take seriously the point made by the reader above. He claims that Gayle’s novel insinuates that all women are ‘fluffy bunnies who only care about getting married’, which is more than a rejection of stereotypes. It raises once again the question of how a heterosexual relationship functions on the basis of carefully negotiated gender scripts. Plot synopsis

Benjamin Duffy is a stand-up comedian who does the occasional gig at a small club, but in order to pay his bills, he has been temping for a data research company for over three years. He shares a flat with his friend Dan, another stand-up comedian, and he goes to the local pub with Dan and his brother-in-law Charlie on a regular basis. He has a steady girlfriend, Mel, with whom he has been going out for four years and who he thinks is the one. When Mel asks him to marry her, his life changes dramatically. Even though he accepts her proposal and actually believes Mel is the only woman he could ever be with, he does not feel ready for the big step, the ultimate commitment, yet. Mel insists on taking a trip to IKEA to choose the furniture for their future flat, an act which for Duffy epitomizes the most frightening side of coupledom and togetherness. They fall out over a wardrobe Mel wants to buy and one thing leads to another, and when Mel asks Duffy whether he actually wants to go through with their getting married, he cannot bring himself to answer her in the positive. Consequently, Mel breaks off the engagement because for her, it is either everything or nothing, she does not want to carry on with the relationship as before because she wants to move on and plan the future. After their break-up, Mel and Duffy try to remain friends and see each other occasionally. Mel starts seeing her former boyfriend, Rob again, whereas Duffy meets a TV presenter Alexa who is interested in his work as a stand-up comedian and actually organizes an audition for him. As it turns out, Alexa is not only interested in his work but also in him as a man. They start going out together but Duffy cannot become involved because he is still in love with Mel. When Alexa tells him that he should sort out his relationship with Mel first and also

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informs him that he has not got the job he auditioned for, Duffy considers quitting comedy altogether. Because he has no real objective anymore wherefore he is convinced more than ever that he wants to get Mel back. He goes to her place where a distraught Mel is waiting for him. Her boyfriend has left her and she has found out that she is pregnant. However, she also tells Duffy that he is the father of her child. Despite everything, Mel is still convinced that Duffy cannot commit himself and she does not want him to marry her just because of the child. Everything seems lost and Duffy takes a trip to Paris in order to sort out his life. After two weeks in the French capital, he comes back, accepts an offer from his flatmate and friend to become a stand-up comedian double act and tries to convince Mel that he has changed after all, and that he is now ready to make the commitment. As it turns out, Mel has just been offered a career move and new job in Glasgow. When Duffy proposes to her, she promises to have an answer when she comes back at the weekend. Duffy spends the time he has on his own executing a plan he has drawn up to convince Mel that he is serious about her. He talks her friend and flatmate Julie, who has actually never liked him, into giving him the key to their flat. He buys the IKEA wardrobe and some other things which he thinks are meaningful and help to show Mel that he has turned into Mr Commitment after all. His plan partly fails because he is not Mr DIY and he cannot fix the wardrobe in time, but Mel nevertheless appreciates his efforts and understands that he is serious about her. They get married and the novel ends with their baby daughter Ella Elvis Duffy being born. Different meaning making strategies – different degrees of commitment

As has become clear while discussing My Legendary Girlfriend, Mike Gayle’s novels exploit the romantic side at the expense of what might be considered the more ‘classic’ ingredients of the ladlit novel. In other words, the emphasis is on the maturation process which is most articulated in the dialogues the protagonist engages in with various other characters and his inner monologues as opposed to the men’s talk at the pub. Even though Duffy has a small circle of male friends with whom he regularly meets up at the local pub and with whom he discusses life, love and women, he does not display the sort of behaviour that is associated with New Laddism. Like Will in My Legendary Girlfriend, Duffy more likely fits the category of the New Man. However, the recurrent topic of trying to move on and seeking a future is as prominent in Mr Commitment as in the novels previously discussed. In Mr Commitment, Duffy’s girlfriend Mel is future-

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oriented, whereas Duffy is the one who is trapped between the wish to change and yet to retain things as they are. Like Frankie Blue in White City Blue and Rob in High Fidelity, he realises that he can only make things better if he changes first, but he lacks the knowledge as to how to improve himself. He just hopes for the best and that things will fall into place. The main difference between Mel and Duffy is that whereas he still believes in the power of words, she needs proof that they really mean what they are supposed to mean. After having proposed to Duffy at the beginning of the novel while he had simply hoped for a nice evening in with a Chinese takeaway and an episode of Star Trek, she makes it clear to him that she will not wait forever for him to make up his mind. She wants him to act whereas Duffy thinks it is enough to resort to the power of words: I said the only thing I could think of which was ‘I love you.’ These words had always helped me out in the past, and now more than ever I needed them to work their magic. I needed them to stop this situation from getting out of hand. ‘You can say that you love me, but do you mean it? I dare you. I dare you to show me that you love me.’ Then she started crying. Or more accurately she started to try not to cry and failed abysmally. Each and every tear was a tear of resentment. She didn’t want them shed for me. She didn’t want them wasted. Instinctively I wanted to put my arms around her and tell her everything was going to be all right, but I couldn’t because frighteningly, for the first time since we started going out, I wasn’t sure everything was. Without looking at me, Mel picked up the remote, switched the TV back on and disappeared to her bedroom. As the closing credits for Star Trek gradually appeared on the screen, I sighed and switched it off again.18

It seems as if Mel was fighting against the infinite deferral of meaning and is seeking the ultimate significance of language as it were; the essence of the words ‘I love you’. She fears that they might mean something different in Duffy’s case, and she wants him to pin them down to their intended meaning. In other words, she wants Duffy to lend the speech act ‘I love you’ a perlocutionary force in the sense that she wishes him to act upon his declaration, to promise to love her forever. Duffy, on the other hand, views the words as a useful tool to express his optimism in the sense that things will be alright without necessarily trying to pin down the words to their exact meaning or launch a performative speech act. He understands ‘I love you’ as a simple constative. He seems quite comfortable with the possibility that their meaning might be deferred, that one signifier might replace another,

18

Gayle 1999: 12; subsequent page numbers will be given in the main text.

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whereas Mel does not want to abandon her quest for the ultimate signified. The same sort of difference between Mel’s search for fixed meaning and Duffy’s being evasive becomes clear in the next episode that marks a turning point in the narrative. After their engagement has been pronounced and made public, Mel wants to start building their future by buying new furniture. She talks Duffy into going to IKEA, a place Duffy abhors. Duffy explains Mel’s shopping philosophy like this: Shopping to her wasn’t a means to an end – it was an end itself. She was on a spiritual journey, searching for that elusive something or something that would help her to make sense of the world and her place in it. Why she needed me to join her on this journey I failed to understand, but I was there, and we were getting married so I opted to make the most of it. (94, italics in original)

Duffy is fully aware of their different ways of looking at things and of making meaning of the world and their selves. Whereas Mel wants to finalise things, Duffy is constantly procrastinating, deferring them. He cannot make up his mind whether he wants things to be fixed, a weakness which Mel puts this down to him having not grown up yet. So when Duffy refuses to buy the wardrobe Mel really wants, she realises that he is not ready yet. ‘It’s time you grew up and realised you’re not a kid any more. You can’t keep acting like you’re a teenager. […] This isn’t working, is it?’ she said quietly. She refused to look at me. ‘You don’t really want to get married, Duff. I know you don’t. You want your life to carry on just the same. […] Look me in the eyes and answer this question. Do you really, well and truly with your whole heart, want to get married?’ I met her gaze briefly and looked away. ‘There’s my answer,’ she said, sniffling back her tears. ‘I’d guessed there was something wrong but I wasn’t sure until now.’ I wanted desperately to be able to lie. To say, ‘Yes, I do want to get married,’ but I couldn’t. My newly installed conscience wouldn’t let me. I loved her. I wanted to be with her. But I did not want to be married. At least not now. Not yet. (98f)

Here we have a fine example of the importance of the word ‘yet’. Duffy is not against marriage in general, he just does not want to get married yet. He does love Mel and wants to spend his life with her, but he cannot make the official commitment yet. He is procrastinating, playing for time. Even though he considers Mel to be the one, there is still the chance that there might be others as well. He hangs on to the

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possibility of her being the right partner for him, but if he had to fully commit himself to monogamy, she would lose that status because if someone has to be singled out, that only happens in relation to others. If this difference is eroded, then choosing does not make sense anymore – the act of choosing never simply is; as soon as a decision is taken, the possible alternatives against which the decision has been weighed are erased. In short, one could claim that Mel represents the structuralist approach to language an meaning, whereas Duffy is caught in the web of poststructural undecidability. Hence he is reluctant to settle for fixed meaning, and his identity is likewise unfixed.

Male anxiety and female pragmatism

Duffy is by no means the only man in the novel who has problems when it comes to commitment. His brother-in-law Charlie is terrified by the idea that he might become a father soon. Even though he has committed himself in as far as he got married to Vernie, Duffy’s sister, he does not want to add a further change that involves commitment to his life: ‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie. ‘I mean, it’s not like I don’t want to have kids: a little girl to play footie with, a little boy to hate me when he’s a teenager, but you know…’ His answer trailed off. I nodded sympathetically. ‘Thing is, the minute we have kids that’ll be it – everything will change. Nothing will be the same. No more just the two of us. No more throwing a couple of bags into the back of the car and clearing off somewhere for the weekend. No more sitting in the Haversham with you and Dan. No more… I don’t know… no more fun. It’ll be nappies and feeding times… and breast pumps… and bright green baby poo… and getting up in the middle of the night… and baby seats… and mum and dad coming to see us every other weekend… and pushchairs… and then one day she’ll want another baby because one’s never enough. […] I think at the end of the day if I’m truthful I have to say that I’m just absolutely terrified by the thought of being a dad. I’m not ready.’ (70)

Despite the fact that Charlie has taken one step more than either Dan or Duffy, he is not ready for the next one. He is terrified of the possible new arrival because it would change his rituals which are a fundamental part of his identity. For the time being, he does not want things to change, not yet. ‘When do you think we’ll be ready?’ said Charlie. Simultaneously we looked at each other, shrugged a simple ‘Dunno’ and ran up the hill to catch up

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with Mel and Vernie. For days after my conversation with Charlie I couldn’t shake the feeling that he, Dan and I were some sort of metaphor for every malaise that had ever affected the modern male. It would only be a matter of time before the women in our lives swapped our real names for American Indian ones: He-whose-sperm-is-his-own; He-who-must-be-single; and He-who-loves-his-girlfriend-but-is-scared-of-marriage.19 It really was only a matter of time.

Duffy and his friends are aware that they do not fulfil their partners’ expectations; they are not ready to give up their freedom nor to take on the sort of responsibility that comes with marriage and fatherhood. They also recognise their predicament to be one that affects a whole generation of young men and reckon that their female partners would not put up with their behaviour forever. Both Duffy and Charlie are in a relationship with a headstrong woman. Vernie and Mel meet their male partners on an equal level and are not easily bossed around. We do not learn anything about Charlie and Vernie’s courtship, but the text suggests that Vernie, although she is married, seems to be the more independent of the two women. Despite the fact that Mel is a pronounced feminist (she proposes to Duffy and not the other way round and she gives a speech at their wedding at the end of the book even though women are traditionally not supposed to do this) she hangs on to a rather residual concept of marriage. Furthermore, she engages in a whole range of things that are associated with (stereo)typical feminine behaviour – she has a complex concept of shopping, she ritually reads women’s magazines and engages in endless discussions about relationship problems. In this sense, she shares Duffy’s uncertainty about which gender script to subscribe to and performs a mixture of the emancipated feminist and the traditional woman. On the other hand, despite her romantic nature, Mel is the more pragmatic and realistic of the two. And as the novel suggests, it is with regard to this sense of realism that Duffy has to undergo a maturation process to which I will shortly turn. Duffy’s main problem is that he can only keep Mel if he changes. He feels betrayed or let down because he truly believes that he is happy with things as they are. However, he is unable to communicate this because women speak another language, or as Mel puts it, men lack the ability to talk altogether: ‘What is it with men? Why can’t they talk? Do you learn this at some strange boy school? Do you have your vocal cords removed at birth?’ ‘No,’ I said. Thankfully she laughed this time. So I told her more about my past 19

Reference is here made to the film Dances with the wolves starring Kevin Costner (1991).

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even though I felt incredibly uncomfortable doing it. I knew it was a good sign – that she was interested in me – but I couldn’t help thinking all this talk of failed relationships was somehow tempting fate. (129f)

Duffy does not feel comfortable talking about his past, about his feelings or his fears and anxieties. He fears that there might be consequences. It seems as if the very fact of articulating one’s feeling might change them. In a way, Duffy without being aware of it puts his finger on the most important poststructuralist insight into language. Language is not a mirror. It cannot be used to map out our emotional landscape by putting labels, i.e. concepts and words to our feelings. Words can never capture what we really mean, meaning is deferred and therefore might be erased and lost in the process. Therefore, Duffy prefers talk without consequences. He enjoys discussing popular culture issues with his friends, such as whether Batman could beat Spiderman in a straight fight, which Woody Allen film is supposed to be the best, and why Lassie is an all time classic. I loved it – what I was experiencing at that very second. To me it was what life was all about; having a laugh and hanging out with my mates. It was the easy life incarnate. It was the way things were meant to be. (114)

To Duffy and his friends, hanging out at the pub, having a laugh and discussing their categories and lists of films, sitcoms and heroes of the kingdom of popular culture means escaping ‘real life’. Apart from deciding which system is most appropriate to categorise films, series and sitcoms etc., there is nothing serious about their conversations. Real life is shut out, and decisions such as whether to get married or whether to have children seem to belong to a different world. However, Duffy cannot escape his decisions forever, and after having confessed that he and Mel are not getting married and that she has actually left him, he breaks down and starts to cry. All my tears did was point out the obvious – that whatever I did to avoid or escape it, real life would ultimately rear its ugly head. Everyone around the table knew real life existed – we also knew that was why after Stone Age man invented the wheel, the very next thing he did was invent the pub. (119, my emphasis)

‘Real life’ is about the future, reproduction and innovation, the realm Duffy, his flatmate and brother in law find themselves comfortable in is about the past, repetition and reiteration. The predicament all of the male protagonists of the novel find themselves in may be pinned downed to their unreflected attitude to-

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wards what they call ‘real life’. On the one hand, they all go along with the concept that the essence of the ultimate signified cannot be designated, or at least is deferred. On the other hand, they seem to believe that ‘real life’ exists out there somewhere, outside the safety of their closed circle of friends drinking and having a laugh at the local pub which is supposed to grant them a place where they can be relieved of the seriousness of everyday life. However, they fail to see that both their so-called ‘real life’ as well as their space of leisure and freedom are constructions of their own. In both realms they act out their masculine identities by means of conversational rules. They have multiple roles, such as employees, partners and husbands, and friends. They seem to be under the impression that the first two belong to ‘real life’ whereas the third belongs to a realm outside ‘real life’. The difference between their roles acted out in ‘real life’ and at the pub differ in as far as the former is dominated by rules they think they have no real influence on, whereas in the case of the latter, their roles as mates fooling each other are of their own making. In this respect, Duffy is not so different from Rob in High Fidelity, who is also dumped by his girlfriend because he does not want things to change and clings to the realm whose rules he himself has set up. The rules of real professionalism, domesticity and relationships are made by forces they cannot influence, and it seems that they cannot take responsibility for something that is not of their own making. But this is only part of the picture. The women in Mr Commitment are just as wrong as their male counterparts in the sense that they take real life as an essentialist category that cannot be escaped. From a pragmatic point of view, such an attitude may be justified. However, it is doubtful whether in the long run they will succeed in upholding their unstable identity script. Mel, for example, is not aware of the fact that she is far from being clear about what gender script she subscribes to because she merges traits of both residual and emergent female gender scripts.

Commitment without commitment

Duffy’s maturation process starts without him noticing it. He is so dedicated to the idea that he is afraid of marriage that he does not realise that this fear is actually vanishing. He performs his commitment phobia out of sheer principle and is not aware that the barriers that initially prevented him from committing himself are breaking down eventually; he is committed to staying the same. Even when things change, there is always a way to pretend life is invariable and pepetual. After Mel and Duffy have split up, they try to stay, or rather become friends. Whereas for Mel this marks a new phase in their rela-

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tionship, Duffy only pretends to make an effort and hopes that his articulated willingness to be friends ultimately convinces Mel that he has matured and changed and wants him back in the end. He cannot accept the fact that Mel is seeing her former boyfriend again, just as Rob cannot live with the idea that Laura has started dating their exneighbour. Even though they both sort of start seeing somebody else too, it is in both cases more of an act of re-establishing their male selfesteem and pride, a fact Duffy admits more easily than Rob who acts far more ‘laddish’ in this respect. There is yet another similarity between High Fidelity and Mr Commitment. Both Rob and Duffy at some point in the novel embark on an affair with somebody who is successful in their trade, Rob with a musician and Duffy with a TV presenter. Whereas Rob is successful in the sense that he actually has a proper sexual relationship with Marie La Salle, Duffy suffers from impotence. With Alexa, ‘TV’s Hottest Totty’ as she has been called by the press, he never gets beyond the sort of intimate friendship that includes kissing and fondling each other; the sexual act, however, cannot be carried out. Duffy is scared, and on their first date when they get back to Alexa’s flat for ‘coffee’, he locks himself in the bathroom: Alexa was busy in her kitchen actually making coffee, but I knew she was going to become suspicious if I didn’t come out soon. The thing was, I didn’t want to come out. I was prepared to stay in the bathroom until she fell asleep, got bored or tired from showbusiness at the age of sixty. I wasn’t built to sleep with fabulously beautiful women. I was built to sleep with Mel. Not that Mel wasn’t fabulously beautiful, especially when she wore my favourite dress. It’s just this was definitely a case of more being less and Alexa was definitely too much. (190)

Like Rob, Duffy considers himself to be middle-of-the-road, a middleweight. His career has not really been successful, forcing him to stay in the temping job instead of making the big comedy stages of the country. What Rob experiences with Charlie and Marie La Salle, Duffy experiences with Alexa, he feels out of his depth. Being a New Man rather than a New Lad, this has consequences on his sexual performance as he cannot disconnect sex from love. He is not aware of the meaning of his sexual disaster with Alexa and genuinely believes that he suffers from impotence. It is his sister Vernie who immediately divines the true nature of the problem when he asks her for advice: “Well, I think the contents of your boxer shorts are still in love with Mel” (197). Duffy’s traumatic experience with Alexa marks the first turning point in his maturation process. Even though he is not aware of it yet,

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he unconsciously begins to realise that the alternatives to leading a monogamous life with Mel do not prove to be successful because he has already erased them. By still feeling attached to Mel, he is not capable of committing himself to somebody else, even just for one night. As is usually the case in the male confessional novel, turning points are prompted due to something that affects the characters from the outside. In High Fidelity, Laura’s father dies, in My Legendary Girlfriend the former tenant phones out of the blue. In Duffy’s case, it is his inexistent father who makes a sudden appearance. He sends Duffy a letter in which he explains that he would like to meet him. His father left when Duffy was still a baby and he has never actually met his father. The latter does not make this first step on his own account, however. As it later turns out, after having heard of her son’s failed engagement, Duffy’s mother wrote to her ex-husband and implored him to contact his son so Duffy can see that he is nothing like his father. She blamed herself for not having provided a real father for her children, and thinks that because of the missing father figure, Duffy might think that he cannot commit himself either. Even though the incident is probably not as dramatic as the death of Laura’s father in High Fidelity, there is a similarity all the same. Just as Laura turns to Rob in the moment of crisis, Duffy cannot think of anybody else to tell the story about his father except to Mel. This clearly shows that even though both relationships have broken up because they seemed to be going nowhere, when it comes to moments of crisis, the past seems more important than the present, and the fact that their relationships seemed to be going nowhere does not prevent the ex-partners from confiding in each other as far as their pasts are concerned. The difference between High Fidelity and Mr Commitment lies in the fact that whereas in the former the father used to be present, well-known and loved and then dies, i.e. absence replaces presence, in the latter it is the other way round. The fear is created by a sudden reappearance, i.e. presence that suddenly threatens to replace the absence with which Duffy has long learnt to live. In other words, there is a reversal of presence/absence which upsets the status quo to the extent that can only be rebalanced by reworking the past in the present with the aid of someone with whom the protagonists have been intimate in the past. Furthermore, what the partners do in such a moment of crisis is explore the boundaries of their gender and performance script, i.e. the ex-lover has to perform the part of an intimate friend with whom personal problems can be discussed. Duffy has struggled to realise that both parts, the lover and the friend, make a committed relationship worthwhile. Only when he can accept his own unfixed gender identity is he able to commit to Mel whose identity is not as clear-cut as either of them believe.

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Saying yes to the other

In this concluding part on Mr Commitment, I am going to sketch the last stage of Duffy’s formation process. As we have seen above, he has started to be ready to commit himself without noticing it because he was committed to the idea of non-commitment as it were. The problem between Duffy and Mel is mainly grounded in their different meaning making processes. Duffy’s problem differs from Mel’s in terms of pinning down the true meaning of things such as love, life and death. Mel thinks she has a unified concept of those things and hence confuses Duffy because he has not. Melanie represents progress, or rather the belief in progress; she tries to ‘hunt down’ the ultimate meaning of life in a positivist sense, made up of meaningful and fixed signifieds. She insists on the right to take words at their face value, i.e. their socially designated meaning. By doing this, her wish to ‘go somewhere’ is hindered by Duffy who defers the search for the essence of signifieds. The centre she wishes to establish is constantly undermined by her male counterparts shifting the meaning from one signifier to the next, usually by employing the time shifter ‘not yet’. What matters most to people like Duffy is the knowledge that their life is ‘on track’. So when he gets an audition for a job on TV and a date with Alexa, he truly believes that his life is ‘back on track’ and that he can handle the difficult situation with Mel. He decides to give their friendship a chance after all, and he even tells her that he is glad that she gets on so well with Rob, her ‘new’ boyfriend. However, he only does it because he thinks it best for the moment: Mel thought my confession was the most wonderful thing ever – a sign that we were true friends, a sign that I’d matured. To me, however, it was just a sign that I was losing my mind. (179)

Despite everything, Duffy does not truly believe that the concept of friendship is going to work with Mel, and that he acts against his better judgement. He is even aware of the fact what his attempt signifies to Mel – he seems to know what the difference between their meaning making of the world is, but he lacks the knowledge of how to find a way to make their different attitudes work towards the same goal. The interesting thing about Duffy’s deferral technique, however, is that he is not completely comfortable with it either. He feels threatened by those people who attempt to value things with apparently irrevocable meanings, the most frightening of which to him represents marriage. However, Duffy does change after all, and after Melanie challenges him by suggesting that they meet up with their new partners, he realises that he does not feel comfortable with the situation at

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all. He breaks up with Alexa and goes to Melanie’s dinner party on his own, with the firm intention of making a confession and proposing to her. He finds her completely beside herself and in tears. Rob has left her but she has another reason to shed tears because she has found out that she is pregnant by Duffy. This news prevents him from launching into his prepared speech, and to his utter distress, Melanie explains that she cannot bear to see him anymore. She loves him but according to her “[s]ome things just aren’t meant to be” (231). After that awful night, Duffy takes a trip to Paris. He has a terrible time but does a lot of thinking. Without knowing it, he pins down the problem: Unlike Mel, who seemed to have been handed a map and compass of her emotional landscape at birth, I didn’t know what I was capable of, and it felt like I was being punished for my deficiency. (237)

Mel does not have the emotional compass he thinks she has. She just comes across more convincingly than he does. She believes that she knows what she wants but she is not aware of the fact that by performing the part of the independent feminist while claiming that all she wants is to get married does confuse Duffy. She mixes gender scripts and expects him to read her and make sense of her. Even though they never really sort out their communication and performance problem, after his trip to Paris, Duffy does not to feel threatened by signifiers of commitment anymore: But I’d tried being a super stud of seduction and it hadn’t worked, precisely because I was a changed man. In the past, my deepest thoughts used to be about stand-up, music, and women. Thanks to Mel’s influence I’d expanded my repertoire of subjects to include, life, the universe and everything (emphasis mine). Mel was the best girlfriend I could’ve asked for. She was funny, gentle and most of all, loyal. She was one of a kind and I’d nearly blown it for good because I had a problem with all the stuff that seemed to come with the relationship. Like IKEA. Like dinner parties. Like… marriage. The one thing she wanted but the only thing I couldn’t deliver. Well, I could now. (236)

As we have seen in the above examples, Duffy used to distinguish rigorously between real life and what he considered to be his life of leisure with his friends where he could have conversations about things that mattered a lot to them, but nothing about that in their opinion would affect real life. Real life posed the threat to everything, or rather the challenge to make sense of everything, including relationships, life and death, whereas their sessions at the pub represented a ‘sweet nothingness’ in which they could occasionally lose themselves.

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The next step in Duffy’s maturation process takes place at the wedding of Dan’s ex-girlfriend Meena, where Dan leaves after the ceremony and Duffy finds him sitting alone on a bench, lost in thoughts about what might have been if he had not lost Meena. ‘Sorry about… you know.’ ‘No problem,’ I replied, and there we sat, not moving or talking, just sharing a silence – a big, fat empty pause filled with nothingness. I’d forgotten how much of a strain it was constantly to have to translate the world and how I saw it into words for the benefit of those who didn’t understand. It was nice to enjoy a moment when I could just sit back, relax and think about nothing. (257)

Even though Duffy still appreciates this sort of easiness, or nothingness as he calls it, he experiences with his male friends, he seems to have found a way of dealing with the other realm, too, or at least has gained faith in himself to be able to deal with it and does not feel trapped any longer. So when Mel unexpectedly appears at the wedding reception and signals her readiness to talk things over he explains: The reason why I didn’t want to get married when you asked me was because I lacked faith in myself. I thought the minute we got married I’d feel trapped. I just couldn’t get it into my head that marriage wasn’t a conspiracy to hijack my independence. […] I am committed to you because without you nothing makes sense. Without you I’m not even myself. Without you, I’m nothing. (266f)

At the end of the novel, Duffy has realised that his identity is a patchwork; of what he used to be, of what he is now, and of what he may likely be in the future. He has also come to understand that it is made up by different sorts of relationships he has with people, and not just by his circle of male friends. He has understood that one does not necessarily cancel out the other, and that without Mel, he cannot even relate to his friends in the way he used to. He says yes to her, he grants her the sort of hospitality that does not question the host where he or she comes from or what identity concepts he or she is made of. By experimenting with different masculinity scripts, Duffy has found a way to perform in the play in which Mel wants him to be the main protagonist more convincingly. By avoiding commitment he has committed himself without noticing. By deferring meaning, he has finally found a way to make meaning. In this second chapter of the analysis I have concerned myself with the problem of commitment. I have shown how the male protagonists cannot bring themselves to make an ultimate choice and de-

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fer decisions until they are forced to change their habits by their female partners. I have also argued that they are not aware of their multiple gender scripts, and that despite the fact that their female partners play a vital role in their formation progress, they are likely to confuse different gender scripts and thus add to the procrastination themselves.

STRUCTURES OF PROLONGED ADOLESCENCE All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. (John Donne)

In the following, last part of my textual analysis, I am going to concern myself with three books which all thematize the reluctance of growing up and taking responsibility. The protagonists of all three books are trapped in their desire to stay young. They shy away from the responsibility of a mature relationship, and in two cases, from fatherhood. Even though they all display the sort of behaviour we might want to call ‘immature’, they are each individual in the way they nurture their ‘immaturity’. I am going to show how ‘immaturity’ is not really the term that should be applied because it is a highly normative concept and cannot account for the diversity of problems with which the male protagonists in the books struggle. Rather, we should focus on their experienced insecurity that has different sources. In the medical discourse, especially in psychiatry, prolonged adolescence is treated as an abnormality due to lack of a successful identity formation. In traditional psychology, the lack is sometimes explained by the assumption that the individuals who ‘suffer’ from pro-

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longed adolescence have never been able to transcend the oedipal phase.1 I here consider the phenomenon of prolonged adolescence as a manifestation of cultural change. As I have explained in Part I, the plethora of career and lifestyle choices make the conceptualisation of an essential, unified identity impossible; individuals are constantly subject to processes of renegotiating and rearticulating their identities. Hence, the problem of self-fashioning is not a question of a choice that has lifelong consequences, but must be considered a temporary alignment to one or a number of cultural scripts. I read the male confessional novel as a specific articulation of prolonged adolescence against the background of the gender debate, including the New Ladscript that dominated the cultural discourse during the 1990s in Britain. Prolonged adolescence in young males affects the notion of reproduction, the idea of the nuclear family and fatherhood. Therefore, particular emphasis will be placed on what it means to be a father, biological or otherwise. Man and Boy and The Best a Man Can Get represent two specific ways in which fatherhood is experienced. Whereas in the former novel full-time fatherhood becomes the only option the protagonist has, the latter is about one father’s flight from what we might call everyday fatherhood. About a Boy, which I am going to discuss first, is about two other kinds of fatherhoods in the sense that one of the main protagonists pretends to have a son, i.e. invents one at the beginning of the novel and later becomes a kind of surrogate father to the other male protagonist in the novel. Being a father is a form of gender behaviour and specific enactment of masculinity which is socially constructed within a defined social space. As David Morgan argues, “gender is itself partially shaped within family contexts” (2003: 223). By comparing traditional, early modern, late modern and postmodern concepts of family, Morgan exemplifies the shifting interactions between family and gender. He insists that we should understand gender as a process which makes family relationships “an important site where people do gender” (232, my emphasis). By summarising his main argument thus, Morgan suggests a performative understanding of gender, i.e. a similar conception that underlies my project here. I want to put special emphasis on that fact that it also applies to fatherhood as there are different scripts according to which fatherhood can be done. True, there are certain moral imperatives once a man has become a father that do not leave much choice, such as for example to raise, look after and provide for the child. How

1

For a detailed discussion, see Marhon (1999).

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these parental duties are achieved though is a matter of preference and to some degree at least, choice.

MEN

WILL BE BOYS IN

ABOUT

A

BOY

About a Boy, which is Hornby’s second novel, published in 1998, is different from its predecessor and other books of the genre in terms of characterization, narrative voice and the construction of masculinity. First of all, it is one of the few books of the genre that are written in the third person singular. As we have seen, one of the main characteristics of the male confessional novel is its first person narrative, crucial in terms of confession. However, About a Boy is narrated from two different perspectives. One is a thirty-six-year-old man, the other a twelve-year-old boy. By using two different male voices, different in terms of age, experience, preferences and emotional maturity, About a Boy is a book about coming of age, and this is likewise true for both main protagonists. Therefore, the title must not be understood to refer to the boy, Marcus, only. Will, the so-called grown-up male protagonist in the novel, undergoes a transformation that equates to a formation process we would in the traditional sense associate more with that of a male adolescent than a thirty-six-year- old man. However, as I will argue, Will represents the classic hero of the postmodern educational novel. Moreover, as we will see, despite the age gap, the two male protagonists sometimes even seem to swap roles, in the sense that Will, the grown-up man behaves like a boy and Marcus, the twelve-year old like a grown-up man. Like Hornby’s first novel, About a Boy seems to have matched the zeitgeist of the 1990s perfectly, including the debate about men, their crisis and the problem for contemporary men to grow up and adopt an adult lifestyle. Out of seventy-eight reviews analysed, thirty-five claimed to identify with the male protagonist or asserted that they knew someone like Will Freeman. Thus, the level of identification, as in some of the novels discussed previously, is relatively high. Only seven of the seventy-eight reviewers did not like the book, five of whom think that the book is boring; two bemoan the fact that it does not compare to either Fever Pitch or High Fidelity. What also becomes clear if one summarises the negative reviews About a Boy got that most thought Marcus was a more compelling and interesting character than Will, and some readers found Will’s self-indulgence rather tedious. But most readers thought that the book was “funny”, “hilarious” “accurate”, “realistic”, “insightful”, “convincing” – just to name a few attributes the novel was given. It is quite striking how most praising

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reviews draw on both the strong points of the novel being entertaining while pedagogical as well as. Here are a few typical examples of positive reviews:2 For someone who has lived in London and enjoys studying people and their relationships, this cleverly woven convergence of two males and the contemporary society they live in, really becomes familiar territory. It will make you think twice about everyone you know, and wonder what they’re really thinking. You can recognise the characters. Everyone has known someone like them, and some, including me, have been them. […] Hornby got under the skin of the average UK male […]. An enjoyable book that nicely illustrates the mindset of the single man and the growing child. It’s really funny to find out what exactly is wrong about men and how they need to change. A fantastic book worthy of all the plaudits it has received, and not worthy of all the jealous bickering it has attracted from so-called high-brow authors and columnists.

There is almost unanimous agreement that Will Freedman, the 36year-old protagonist, embodies the British immature male of the 1990s. He seems to perfectly fit in with what people thought was a typical phenomenon at the time. As already mentioned, it was generally agreed that the novel was ‘realistic’. Apparently, Hornby again managed to write a story people can relate to and read about somebody who might live next door. What is quite interesting though is that Will Freeman, the adult protagonist, is completely fictitious and created from what Hornby thought might be the average male reading male magazines of the 1990s. This is how he explained the character of Will in our interview: Will I think really came from men’s magazines in a way because when I was writing the novel they hadn’t existed that long, you know Esquire, FHM and things like these, and they always struck me as very strange, these magazines because I couldn’t think of any men who were like the men represented in these magazines because they seem to have a fairly high disposable income, there’s no sense of having family problems, there’s no sense of having boring jobs, they are entirely aspirational. So, really, Will was sort of a composite picture of a kind of person who might actually read these magazines or feel directly spoken to by these magazines which meant in some way that he was not a realistic character but I thought that 2

www.amazon.co.uk/review/product/0140293450

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he might be the only possible kind of person who might who could step from the pages of these magazines. And then there is a sort of cleanness about it, a lack of emotional complications and mess, you know, a clean life in a clean accommodation, these beautiful gadgets, these beautiful suits and they don’t teach you how to deal with life at all. So that was one idea.

In contrast, Marcus is based on a real-life person: Marcus came from teaching. There was one boy I taught who was sort of hyper-articulate and everybody hated him at school. He actually came from a South-African military background and his parents had left the country because they didn’t like the way the country was being run by the blacks, so you can imagine what kind of background he must have come from. I exchanged this culture with the kind of hippie culture and yes, I wanted to write about the question of fitting in.

The questions of fitting in, belonging and being ‘adequate’ play a major role in About a Boy. Hornby juxtaposes the freedom of a thirty-sixyear old who disposes of enough financial means to buy himself the objects and accessories a thirty-something, cool man of the 1990s is supposed to have in order to fit in with a certain stratum of society with that of a twelve-year-old who has no choice other than to adopt the mainstream and malestream culture that is promoted among his peers. Hornby experiments with subcultural lifestyles inasmuch as he exchanges the background that proves to be difficult to adjust to with the conditions of fitting in with another social background. Instead of writing about a boy who grows up exposed to conservatism and racism he chose to thematize the problems of an adolescent who suffers from the rigid belief system imposed by his hippie mother. Hornby is very good at depicting the sorrows and tribulations a male adolescent is struggling with because he has no choice. His latest book, Slam (2007) is about an eighteen-year old skating addict who falls in and out of love and gets his girlfriend pregnant. Hornby’s sensitivity about teenage problems in About a Boy becomes even more apparent when Marcus meets Will, the self-elected loner who nevertheless feels he perfectly fits in with the society he lives in. Hornby explains the juxtaposition of the two main male characters as follows: When I was at school I was very conscious of the fact that I fitted in very well because when you’re interested in music and football it is almost impossible not to fit in. So if you take that away from somebody, all the other skills you have, talents and intelligence, count for nothing at all. So I wanted to find a way to make these characters collide and so I put this mess that is

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Marcus into Will’s clean flat basically. […] There is a “place” in the book where Will says that I’m always accused of being selfish, but why can’t I be selfish when there’s only me? And there was a kind of serious point to that but there is a great pressure for people like that to come forth but no one can come up with a very good idea why they have to have children. There is a very important notion of being mature. One problem Will has is that he cannot shut the door on the world because the world comes through and how ever much he tries to keep the world out it will find a way to get into the flat in some way.

As we can see, Hornby consciously blends real life experiences based on people he knows with contemporary social phenomena he observes. He is very aware of the problems certain types of people struggle with, and he manages to depict a middle-aged man just as realistically as a teenage boy.3

Plot synopsis

Will Freeman views himself as a cool, thirty-something, independent man who is happy about his life. He is the epitome of Cool Britannia, a self-fashioned, hedonistic character that might come straight out of a glossy magazine. He has so far been successful in avoiding a regular job as well as a steady girlfriend, and against the background of the difficulties life in the 1990s poses, he considers this to be an achievement. He does not have to work because his father wrote a Christmas song in the 1930s, which enabled his son to live on the royalties paid by the music industry after he died. Will does not want to commit himself and therefore changes his girlfriends whenever he feels he has tired of one and is seeking a change. When he meets Marcus, an eccentric twelve-year old schoolboy and his mother, his life takes an unexpected turn. Not only does Marcus choose Will to be his friend, he also has to put up with Marcus’s mother, Fiona, a single parent who talks to Marcus as if he was an adult and who lives a rather alternative lifestyle, which includes strict vegetarianism and a preference for pop music of the 1970s. Furthermore, to Will’s astonishment, Fiona does not stir the slightest sexual interest in him. He meets Fiona and Marcus through a friend, Suzie, who he knows from a single parents meeting. Will had a brief but sexually satisfying relationship with a single

3

This particular talent becomes even more obvious in Hornby’s penultimate novel A Long Way Down (2005) where the story is told from the perspective of four completely different characters; a lovelorn, teenage girl, an adulterous TV presenter, a middle-aged mother of a handicapped son and a hippie rock musician.

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mother, and when they split up, he thought he found the perfect way of getting a whole series of pleasing sexual adventures as there must be a lot of single mothers who were just waiting for somebody like him to turn up. In order to be able to join SPAT, a single parent selfhelp group, short for ‘single parents alone together’, he pretends to have a son and a cold-hearted ex-wife who has left them both. When Suzie, their mutual friend, her two-year old daughter, Marcus and Will spend an afternoon together, Fiona stays at home and tries to commit suicide. She survives, but Marcus is traumatised and cannot forgive his mother for wanting to leave him. Marcus decides that ‘two are not enough’ and attempts to get Will interested in his mother. As the narrative progresses, however, he realizes that they are too different and that they could never have a happy relationship. He nevertheless tries to befriend Will himself and turns up at his flat on a regular basis. Marcus has a hard time at school because he wears glasses and funny clothes and does not do any of the things a ‘normal’ kid in the 1990s is supposed to do. He does not like football, believes Kurt Cobain plays for Manchester United and listens to Joni Mitchell. His mother tries to teach him to like things because he likes them and not because everybody else does, but she basically fails to let him lead a kid’s life. Will realizes the problem Marcus is faced with and helps him to become a ‘proper kid’. According to Marcus, Will “knows about things”. Even though both Fiona and Marcus seem rather alien to Will’s comfortable but selfish lifestyle he somehow becomes drawn into their lives. He thinks they are both rather strange and a bit crazy, but Marcus is so persistent about coming round to his flat after school to watch television and tell Will about how he is getting on at school that in the end he gives up and just puts up with him. Without actually being aware of the fact at first he starts to care about Marcus. He buys him a pair of trainers, teaches Marcus about pop music, and even spends Christmas Day with Marcus and his family, including Marcus’s father and his girlfriend and the girlfriend’s mother. Suddenly, Will finds out that the only interesting thing about himself is Marcus. Therefore, when he meets a woman and falls in love with her, he mentions Marcus. Rachel, his object of desire, naturally assumes that Marcus is Will’s son, and even though Will does never actually confirm that he is, neither does he deny it. Rachel has a son herself, and they decide to bring the two boys together to watch The Simpsons. It all goes horribly wrong because Will does not do the things a caring father is supposed to do, and nor does Marcus easily fit in with children of his age. When Ali, Rachel’s son, flies off the handle with what is later revealed as a fit of jealousy, Marcus runs off. They make up later, but Rachel finds out that Marcus is not Will’s son and that he only pretended he was in order to make himself more in-

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teresting. She does not get angry and when Will worries that Fiona might try to commit suicide again and asks Rachel for help, she seems even prepared to talk to Fiona. However, she does not turn up when the three of them arrange to meet, and Will has to confront Fiona on his own. At school, Marcus has become friends with Ellie, a teenage girl three years his elder who is very rebellious and gets herself into trouble all the time. Marcus makes her laugh because of his literalmindedness as well as his naivety about things he is supposed to know. When Marcus’s father has an accident, he wants to see his son. Marcus is angry with him and does not want to go, but Ellie convinces him to go, which he does because she promises to go with him. They set out for Cambridge together, but Ellie gets off the train in the middle of the journey. During their stopover, Ellie discovers the picture of Kurt Cobain in a shop window. Cobain was the singer of Nirvana whom she had always admired and who had died the previous day. Because she thinks the owner of the shop mocks Cobain, she smashes the window, whereupon the police arrive and take them both to the station. Everybody else, including Marcus’s father and his girlfriend, Fiona, Will and Ellie’s mother are summoned to the police station where things get rather dramatic. Marcus accuses his father of selfishness, tells his stepmother to shut up, and Fiona thinks Marcus has been led off the rails because she has not looked after him properly. Ellie for her part is taught a lesson when the proprietor of the shop turns out to be an even greater enthusiast for Kurt Cobain than herself. Will, as a passive onlooker, cannot exactly make sense of what is going on, but he realises that Marcus has turned into a child acting his own age. The novel ends on the conciliatory note that everybody in the book lost something, but by doing so, gained something else: “Will had lost his shell and his cool and his distance, and he felt scared and vulnerable, but he got to be with Rachel; and Fiona had lost a big chunk of Marcus, and she got to stay away from the casualty ward; and Marcus had lost himself, and got to walk home from school with his shoes on” (286).

About weird teenagers and immature men

About a Boy is a book about the coming of age and fitting in. In contrast to the novels discussed previously, however, About a Boy approaches the problem from a rather different perspective. Whereas in White City Blue and High Fidelity it is mainly a question of making the right choices in order to match the social requirements of pursuing a career and having a steady, long-term relationship, About a Boy draws attention to what is considered ‘normal’. Therefore, being dif-

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ferent in About a Boy more often than not means not being normal. In many ways, neither Will nor Marcus are ‘normal’. They are both different from other representatives of their age groups. Will, the socalled grown-up, always puts himself first and does not care about anybody else. He does not work, nor does he seem to know how to establish a long-term relationship. In short, Will is committed to noncommitment. Curiously, we still get the sense that Will fits in with contemporary society; he is very knowledgeable about popular culture and fashion brands and he is very aware of the contemporary social context and zeitgeist. However, despite being aware of what is going around him he does not take much interest in anything else except himself. He does not belong anywhere, but he nevertheless fits in with the broader social fabric by subscribing to the postmodern, hedonistic lifestyle philosophy. He most certainly blends in and does not attract a lot of attention. As for his sense of self and gender identity, Will seems to be very comfortable with his masculinity. In terms of appearance and cultural interests he can probably be described as a typical New Man of the late 1980s; he is well-groomed and follows the latest fashion. He does not have close male friends and does not engage in male bonding activities. As far as his comportment towards women is concerned, however, he comes across as a bit more (new) laddish. He abhors commitment, and he does not want to be with a woman except for having sex. He feels very uncomfortable in the presence of couples with children who cherish their happy family life. Because many people of his age are married and have children he prefers to keep himself to himself. Will Freeman, as his name suggests, is a free man who pursues life according to his own will. But as mentioned before, against the backdrop of British society of the 1990s when the idea of individualism was promoted everywhere, from billboards to lifestyle magazines, he is in good company even though he does not know anyone who is part of the same non-visible community. Will is a rather selfish and shallow person who tricks women into liking him by pretending he can be caring and sympathetic. At some point he realizes that he is becoming more interesting to women when he can come up with a story which is sad and likely to touch their feelings. So when he invents a son, two-year old Ned, he also gives him a mother who has run off and strategically places his sad story in conversations he has with single mothers he wants to get sexually involved with: True, this bad news was entirely fictitious, but there was, he thought, an emotional truth here somewhere, and he could see now that his roleplaying had a previously unsuspected artistic element to it. He was acting,

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yes, but in the noblest, most profound sense of the word. He wasn’t a fraud. He was Robert De Niro.4

Will thinks he is knowledgeable in the art of life; he can turn a rather empty and superficial personality into an artistic character. Even though he pretends, he does so in a worthy manner. This passage is interesting not only to get an insight into one of the main protagonists’ character, but also if one considers the metanarrative level of the novel. By drawing attention to the fictitiousness of Will’s impersonation of a single father the text thematizes its own fictitiousness and its artistic nature. By implication it tells us that making up stories is a good thing as long as it is done in a creative and honourable sort of way. Furthermore, as we will see in the chapter on Man and Boy by Tony Parsons, the passage just quoted also takes up the topic of changing gender relations and alternative family concepts that transgress the idea of the nuclear family as well as the assumption that if things go wrong, it can only be the mother who takes on the burden of parenting. It is no longer only women who end up as single parents; it can also happen to men. It does not matter that in the novel Will only pretends to be a single father. If this sort of family structure did not exist at all, or at least did not crop up in the discourse of gender relations and masculinity, it would probably not be plausible in the narrative either. The text here tackles a topic that has become increasingly more prominent during the last decade, and by weaving it into the plot of the novel it becomes part of the social practice and of intertextual reality. Whereas Will despite his idiosyncrasies somehow matches the zeitgeist of the 1990s, Marcus is a real misfit. He does none of the things a boy of his age is supposed to do; he does not wear the right clothes, does not listen to the right sort of music, does not support a football team, wears funny glasses and has a funny hair-cut and therefore gets picked on by his school mates. He has no idea what a boy his age is supposed to do in order to be ‘cool’ and to earn the respect of his male peers and attract the attention of girls. Marcus does not think in gender-concepts, he subverts them without noticing it. Furthermore, Marcus quite often reacts in strange ways and says things that somehow sound odd from the mouth of a boy his age. Despite the fact that Marcus in many ways seems very eccentric and out of place, he displays a rather grown-up attitude to life. When his mother starts feeling depressed, stays off work and wants Marcus to go out with other people so she can take a break and relax, Marcus does not think that this is the proper way to behave as a parent: “If you can’t look after me 4

Hornby 1999: 44; subsequent page numbers will be given in the main text.

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properly, then you’ll have to find someone else who can” (49). Marcus is very conscious that the idea of the nuclear family unit does not apply to him and his mother. She is not only a single parent; she is also a hippie vegetarian and thus presents a rather anachronistic lifestyle compared to the 1990s cool Britannia vision of life. Fiona seems to have stuck in the 1970s.5 She cannot cope with the demands of contemporary society, let alone with her status as a single mother. Marcus is aware of his mother’s problems, her desire to find a male partner, as well as of her depression. When the two male protagonists meet at a SPAT (single parents alone together) meeting Will has wormed himself into because he has decided to date attractive single mothers who are more committed to their children than to the idea of engaging in a long-term relationship but nevertheless favour the idea of have some romance in their lives, both their lives change. In the following I am going to discuss the pivotal turning points (Fiona’s suicide attempt, the growing ‘friendship’ between Will and Marcus, their falling in love with a someone at the same time, their pretending to be father and son at Will’s girlfriend’sto-be house and the drama that takes place when Marcus goes to visit his real father) which induce a change in both Will and Marcus. Taking responsibility

Marcus is taken to the SPAT meeting, a picnic in the park, by Suzie, a friend of his mother’s because Fiona needs some time to herself. When they take Marcus back to his house, “he put the key in the door and opened it, and a new part of his life began, bang, without any warning at all” (65). As it turns out, Fiona has tried to kill herself by taking an overdose of tranquillizers. Marcus is deeply shocked: [He] had seen some things, mostly on video at other people’s homes. […] But this was the scariest thing he’d ever seen, by a million miles, and he knew the moment he walked in that it was something he’d have to think about forever. (66)

After Fiona’s suicide attempt, Marcus is traumatized and tries to avoid the topic of depression and death, but also wants her to get a grip on herself for his sake. He does not believe her when she says that she feels better “at the moment”: 5

Will is in two minds about Fiona and to which decade she really belongs. He sometimes thinks she is just backward and in a league of her own, then he describes her as “a peculiarly contemporary creation, with her seventies albums, her eighties politics and her nineties foot lotion” (119).

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“At the moment’s no good to me. I can see that you’re better at the moment. You’ve just put the kettle on. But what happens when you’ve finished your tea? What happens when I go back to school? I can’t be here to watch you all the time.” (74)

Marcus forces his mother to act like a responsible grown-up mother in order to be a proper parent to him. But he does not just do it for his own benefit, but somehow realises that it is best for her as well. As we will see later on, Marcus is a very literal-minded child, especially when it comes to ordinary, everyday things and only very slowly learns to deal with irony and cynicism, mainly through Will, but when he fights for his mother to overcome her depression, he can be very acute, even cynical. In order to help his mother to fight her depression and because her suicide attempt has convinced him that two people were not enough to make a family – if one dies, there will only be the one left – he decides to convince Will to go out with his mother. He works really hard, fixes a date with Will and later tells him that his mother will join them. When Will and Fiona struggle to find a conversation topic during lunch, Marcus intervenes: “Don’t just sit there. […] You heard me. Don’t just sit there. Talk to each other” (92). His mother is rather embarrassed and when Marcus insists they talked about something, anything, she replies that she was not really sure that was how conversation happened, whereupon which Marcus answers angrily: “Maybe you should have worked it out by now. You’re old enough” (93). Fiona’s attempted suicide marks a turning point in Will’s life, too. It suddenly dawns on him that he might care for somebody, even some total strangers and people he formerly had no time for like Fiona and her weird son. He agrees to meet Fiona, but later makes clear to Marcus that they could be nothing more than friends. Although he gets along with Fiona, she is not exactly what he considers an attractive, sexy woman: Will knew that Fiona was not his type. For a start, she didn’t look the way he wanted women to look – in fact, he doubted whether looks were important to her at all. He couldn’t be doing with that. People, women and men, had a duty to care, he felt, even if they didn’t have the requisite raw material – unless they weren’t interested in the sexual side of life at all, in which case, fair enough. […] Why didn’t she have a decent hair cut, instead of all that frizz, and why didn’t she wear clothes which looked like they mattered to her? He didn’t get that at all. (95)

Will is far too preoccupied with looks and appearances to feel attracted to Fiona. However, he finds her intriguingly interesting because she has tried to commit suicide – nobody as disturbed as Fiona

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has ever figured in Will’s clean life. As Hornby says himself, “[o]ne problem Will has is that he cannot shut the door on the world because the world comes through and how ever much he tries to deep the world out it will find a way to get into the flat some way.”6 Because Will does not have to work, he has a lot of time to himself to do whatever he pleases, and sometimes he becomes a bit bored. He likes shopping, spending money on clothes, food, magazines and music, driving around in his car while listening to very loud music, and watching TV. Even though he is rather pleased with himself and his life, he is looking for a change, for something to happen that would make his life just a little more exciting. One source of possible excitement of course he sees in the opposite sex. But he also needs a different sort of distraction. He sometimes replies to job advertisements, making up a completely fictitious CV, sent with long letters saying why he would like a specific job. The fact that he never gets a positive answer does not bother him in the least because to him it is just a way to fill his days with some sort of activity.7 Will lives in a vacuum, his life is empty, he cannot tell real life apart from his dreamy, made-up life. He is a hopeless drifter. He avoids reality at all costs, reinvents his curriculum vitae to apply for jobs he has no intention of getting in the first place. He makes himself into a different and better person by taking on the odd charity work, like volunteering for the soup kitchen and by inventing a son in order to join the single parent self-help group. But “it was all a dreamy alternative reality that didn’t touch his real life, whatever that was, at all” (80). In other words, the narrative plays with two different sorts of realities and therefore shows that whatever lifestyle one adopts, it is somehow little more than a construction. The fact remains however, that Will is bored and seeks a change. When he meets Marcus and Fiona, he thinks he could extend his half-hearted attempt at charity a little further: He could take an avuncular interest in them, give their lives a bit of shape and gaiety. He would bond with Marcus, take him somewhere every now and then – to Arsenal, possibly. And perhaps Fiona would like a nice dinner somewhere, or a night out at the theatre. (81)

Will has no real friends, just some acquaintances who come in handy when he wants a night out or make up a guest list for a dinner party:

6 7

Cf. interview in appendix. As we have seen, the typical protagonist of the male confessional novel is bored with life and therefore comes up with a number of strategies to kill time, such as making lists, or in Will’s case, writing job applications.

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He didn’t know how he knew them, because he’d never had colleagues, and he never spoke to girlfriends when they became ex-girlfriends. But he had managed to pick people up along the way – guys who once worked in record shops that he frequented, guys he played football or squash with, guys from a pub quiz team he once belonged to, that kind of thing – and they sort of did the job. They wouldn’t be much use in the unlikely event of some kind of suicidal depression, or the even more unlikely event of a broken heart, but they were pretty good for a game of pool, or a drink and a curry. (79)

He has no family either, and in order to people his life and get some distraction, he is willing to put up with Marcus and Fiona and their friends from the self-help group even though he thinks they are not really in his league: So, there it was then: an enormous, happy, extended family. True, this happy family included an invisible two-year-old, a barmy twelve-year-old and his suicidal mother; but sod’s law dictated that this was just the sort of family you were bound to end up with when you didn’t like families in the first place. (82)

Being a born opportunist, Will soon detects the positive side to his getting to know mad Fiona and weird Marcus because [h]e had this sense that [they] could replace soup kitchens and Media Guardian jobs, possibly forever. He wouldn’t have to do that much, after all – the occasional swordfish steak, the odd visit to a crappy film that he might have gone to anyway. How hard could that be? It was a damn sight easier than trying to force-feed vagrants. (96)

It does not become quite clear whether Will befriends Marcus and Fiona out of sheer self-satisfaction or genuine interest in somebody else’s lives. I would argue that whereas at the beginning it is the former that nurtures his motivation, the more the novel progresses and as Will undergoes a process of maturation and self-exploration, the latter becomes more dominant. When he first gets acquainted more closely with Marcus, the boy seeks him out at home, tells him about his trouble at school and insists on watching TV with Will. Will first tries hard to get rid of him. He has reconciled himself with the idea that there is nothing wrong with the odd act of kindness, but he does not want to be invaded without being asked first:

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When Will had conceived this fantasy and joined SPAT, he had imagined sweet little children, not children who would be able to track him down and come to his house. He had imagined entering their world, but he hadn’t foreseen that they might be able to penetrate his. He was one of life’s visitors; he didn’t want to be visited. (101)

Will does not feel at ease with opening up to others, especially not to people who are different. He is not unlike Marcus’ peers at school – he is afraid of the other, he is afraid of difference that might pollute his clean and closed-off space; he does not grant any kind of hospitality in either the specific Derridean or the more common-sense understanding. Marcus, however, is very persistent, and soon Will realises that Marcus needs something Will is really good at – Marcus does not know how to behave like a boy. Being a middle-aged teenager himself, Will helps Marcus to become a proper kid. He soon “found himself working Marcus’s visits into the fabric of his day” (111). He buys him a fashionable pair of trainers, makes him understand that Joni Mitchell is not the most recent star the world of pop music has produced and makes sure he does not think Kurt Cobain plays for Manchester United. Will cannot help becoming fond of Marcus even though he struggles with Marcus’ literal-mindedness. Marcus has, however, at the age of twelve, already developed a rather philosophical attitude towards life. When Will questions him about why his school mates had chased him back to Will’s place and thrown sweets at him, Marcus answers laconically: I just don’t want to talk about it. Like when I broke my wrist falling off that climbing-frame thing. […] I tried not to think about that. It happened and I wished it hadn’t, but it’s just life, isn’t it? (117)

Marcus is very strong-willed and despite the fact that he knows that he is in many ways different, he does not give up on what he believes. Will presumes that he is laughed at because makes himself ‘visible’, people notice him because he is different; he is too conspicuous: “The trouble is, these kids can see you. You make yourself obvious” (117), and he advises him to change his appearance: “But how about if you wore the same clothes and haircut and glasses as everyone else? You can be as weird as you want on the inside. Just do something about the outside.” (118) So in contrast to Marcus’s mother who does not approve of standardized and ideologically biased mass cultural products, Will teaches him to come to like these things: “The whole idea of this expedition, Marcus, is that you learn how to become a sheep” (120).

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When he gets in trouble, like when he is picked on at school, he just tries to dive into another world, invents things to take his mind off what is happening around him, and thus waits until the danger is over. The problem is that when Marcus tries to ‘vanish’, he becomes even more visible to others. The following example illustrates Marcus’s predicament rather nicely. When he is at a loss and does not know how to behave normally, he sometimes starts to sing, even in the classroom. It goes without saying that this sort of behaviour is not considered to be normal by either his schoolmates or his teachers, and hence Marcus is very often the butt of their jokes. When one of the teachers asks how one could tell if people were mad, Marcus knows that he is going to be laughed at again: Here it comes, he thought. Here it comes. This is it. “If they sing for no reason in class, Miss.” Laughter. But then it all got worse than he’d expected. Everyone turned round and looked at him; he looked at Ms Maguire, but she had this big forced grin on and she wouldn’t catch his eye. “OK, that’s one way of telling, yes. You’d think that someone who does that would be a little potty. But leaving Marcus out of it for a moment…” More laughter. He knew what she was doing and why, and he hated her. (24)

Even though Marcus cannot make sense of his own strange behaviour, that has no control over it, he is aware of the fact that others find his singing aloud for no particular reason very odd. However, he expects adults to take a different attitude because they are supposed to know better and should refrain from making fun of him. It was bad enough that his classmates laughed at him, but he would not have expected the same sort of betrayal from his teacher. Marcus has a very clear understanding of what to expect from adults, especially teachers and parents, as well as from school children, and despite the fact that he more than often does not comply with these behavioural patterns, he nevertheless expects others to do so. This is probably one of the most striking features about Marcus. On the one hand, he challenges quite a number of normative standards with his odd behaviour; on the other hand he seems to be a good judge when others do not actually comply with what might be circumscribed as the broader ethical framework of adult behaviour; he makes a distinction between what can be expected in general and in a particular case. In this respect I would like to refer back to what de Certeau calls ‘tactics’. In a sense, Marcus creates a space in which he undermines what is commonly assumed to be ‘normal’ behaviour, even though in his case, he does neither do it consciously, nor is he very successful at first sight. In the long run, however, it earns him the label of being ‘special’, which is reason enough

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for Ellie to befriend him and for Will to understand that Marcus has his own talents such as making connections (see further below). Like Marcus, Will has his strategies of how to survive best, too. He works hard at shutting out real life because it is strenuous and puts his comfortable and lazy lifestyle in question And like Marcus’s, his strategies deviate from those commonly displayed by people of his age; Will and Marcus are both devious in some way. But whereas Will considers being devious as cool – he chooses to be like that – Marcus is having a hard time because he is different, partly because that is just the way it is and he displays a number of rather idiosyncratic characteristics and ticks, as the singing in school episode was supposed to demonstrate, partly due to his character and partly to his primary socialisation.

Falling in love is not a matter of age

A second, parallel turning point in the lives of the two main male protagonists ensues in the second part of the novel when they both fall in love, Will with Rachel, another single mother with a 12-year-old son, and Marcus with the infamous 15-year-old punk Ellie at school. In both ‘love stories’, Marcus is being adopted, i.e. being instrumentalised. Will adopts him to make himself more interesting and more eligible to Rachel; Ellie and her friend Zoe adopt Marcus as some kind of a lapdog who is allowed to follow them around despite their notorious reputation. On the one hand, it becomes obvious that Marcus once again is being used by other people but on the other, he also gets something out of the bargain. Ellie and Zoe protect him for the bullies at school, and he gets to spend more time with Will and learns how to behave like a ‘proper’ teenager. Will has serious doubts whether a fifteen-year-old will take great interest in Marcus, at least not one nurtured by romantic motives: “I’ll bet you her boyfriend is twenty-five, drives a Harley Davidson and works as a roadie for some band” (158). But Marcus will not hear of it, not because he truly believes Ellie wants to go out with him – he has not even realised that he is in love with her at that stage – but because he does not think in the same categories as Will does. When Marcus first encounters Ellie, who has a reputation for being notorious, he is not willing to judge her according to her reputation even though he can see that there was something to it: “Even though he was prepared to believe that Ellie had never done anything wrong, ever, he could see why some people might think she had” (145). They meet because they both have been called in by the headmistress, Mrs Morrison; Ellie because she behaved in an inadequate way, Marcus because the new trainers Will bought him have been stolen. As mentioned be-

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fore, Marcus is perfectly capable of differentiating between why people like Ellie have to see the headmistress and why he has to: “He wasn’t someone who wanted to become a truant or a tramp or a murderer or a drug addict. He was just someone who was fed up with Mrs Morrison. There had to be a difference” (149). Marcus’s observation is very acute – he rightfully insists on the liberty to dislike his headmistress and her power and retention regime even though he does not belong to the category of people most likely to suffer from her acts of retribution. He is not one of the invisible sheep nor was he a born rebel – he is just different and wants to be recognised and appreciated for what he was. When Ellie introduces him to Nirvana, he does not particularly like their music at first, but somehow sees why people might like the music: At first, he hadn’t been able to hear anything apart from noise and shouting, but there were some quiet bits, too, and in the end he had been able to make out a tune. He didn’t think he’d ever like it as much as he liked Joni or Bob or Mozart, but he could sort of see why someone like Ellie might like it. (156)

Marcus possesses a very special gift to open up to the unknown, to the ‘other’, even though this other might be assumed to be part of his preadolescent life in the first place. Even though he somehow cuts off his access to the outside world by wearing clothes which do not really make him fit in with the other children of his age, he nevertheless opens up his mind and tries to understand why others might like things he has been told they only liked because they were sheep and did not have an opinion of their own. He is invited to the same party as Ellie and her mother, and Ellie’s mother goes outside with a man upon which Ellie gets angry with her because she thinks her mother is a ‘sad old tart’. This event makes Marcus ponder on the problem of mothers and their possible romantic encounters: He hadn’t seen his mum do anything like that, and he couldn’t imagine that she ever would, but he could see how it might happen to other people’s mums. (193)

Here again, Marcus is capable of making a difference between the general and the particular, or between what he knows from experience and what sort of behaviour might be different and yet conceivable. He opens up to the possibility of encountering an exception to what he believes is right. Nevertheless, he cannot bring himself to act in a similar way wherefore he is laughed at by his peers. But despite his tender

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age, he knows why he has these problems – he does not comply, he makes himself visible. Marcus’s predicament, however, is not grounded in inadequate, male teenage behaviour – he has no concept of masculinity yet nor will he probably ever subscribe to a clear-cut masculine gender-script. He likes Ellie and does not think too much about the problem the gender (or age) difference might cause. He does not judge, does not accept or refuse people based on their appearance and gender behaviour. Marcus is some kind of a rebel without a cause; he is different because it feels right to him. Will, on the other hand, acts according to a carefully scripted gender role. He is susceptible to female charm, knows exactly which ‘type’ arouses his interest and which does not stand a chance at all. Will has never fallen in love before because it does not comply with his concept of freedom and independence. When it happens, he is desperate because he feels he is not interesting enough: One of his problems, he reflected as he was trying to dredge his memory for a single tiny scrap of experience that this woman might regard as worth her momentary contemplation, was that he was reasonably good-looking and reasonably articulate. It gave people the wrong impression […]; at his core he was ugly and monosyllabic. Maybe he should undergo some sort of reverse plastic surgery – something that would rearrange his features so that they were less even, and push his eyes closer together or further apart. Or maybe he should put on an enormous amount of weight […]. (180)

Up to now, it has been good enough for Will to score with his good looks because he was not really interested in people nor did he assume that they were interested in him other than on a very superficial level where looks matter more than character and interests. Being cool is not sufficient anymore, the realisation of which marks a pivotal watershed in Will’s maturation process. Like a teenager who is approaching adulthood and starts to realise that the woman of his dreams will not reject him for an acne scar reminiscent of his puberty, Will starts to understand that he needs more than an attractive physique to make a woman fall in love with him. The only thing that could possibly make him interesting is Marcus. Marcus is Will’s supplement – he substitutes what he has not got, anything that would make him interesting, and he adds something to him; it transforms him from a single man into a single father. So he lies again, pretending that Marcus is his son. Rachel believes him and they agree that they should all meet, Rachel, Will, Marcus and Rachel’s son Ali who is the same age as Marcus.

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Oedipus complexes and half-truths

Before the said meeting takes place, Will confesses to Marcus that Rachel believes he was Will’s son. At first, Marcus is angry with Will for pretending to be his dad and wants to put things straight. Will has always been a good liar – lying is one of the few things he is really good at, and he is convinced that the only way he could possibly get a woman interested in him is by making him interesting, i.e. by telling lies. When Will cannot trick Marcus into doing something he does not understand, he becomes more explicit and confesses: “I fancy this woman, Marcus. I want to go out with her. I’d like her to be my girlfriend” (196), Marcus feels sorry for him and agrees to play the part. During the same discussion, Will asks Marcus whether he wants Ellie to be his girlfriend. When the boy answers in the positive and Will demands to know why, Marcus admits that he did not really know the difference between ‘girlfriend’ and ‘just a friend’. Will tries to explain the difference, saying that you desire to touch someone who you want to be your girlfriend but you would not want to touch a friend. Marcus still does not know how to interpret the Ellie situation – he just does not think in those terms, and I would like to argue that his age is only part of the explanation why not. Marcus works differently; he applies different standards according to which he judges people and elects or disregards them as friends. This is what makes him so intriguing to Will – Marcus is not just a younger version of a ‘man’ – he is also the younger version of a different ‘type of man’. The conclusion Will draws from their conversation reads as follows: The conversation in the video games arcade at least had the virtue of creating a mutuality between them: they had both confessed to something they wanted, and those somethings were, when all was said and done, not entirely dissimilar, even though the someones connected with the somethings evidently were. (199)

Will and Marcus both confided that they desired something – romance in Will’s case, attention and friendship in Marcus’s case. They again strike some kind of a bargain. Marcus agrees to pretend to be Will’s son whereas Will informs Marcus about what relationships and romantic feelings are about. The get-together between Marcus and Will and Rachel and her son Ali goes terribly wrong. Ali is a ‘cool’ and fashionable teenager; he knows about music and video games and is also rather mature and knowledgeable when it comes to love and relationships. Ali could not be more different from Marcus, and it becomes clear to the reader that the two of them are very unlikely to strike up a friendship. To make matters worse, Ali, somewhere stuck between a boy who wants his

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mother’s attention and a young adolescent who has already developed a vivid imagination concerning the facts of life, immediately senses a rival in Will, and he does not want his mother to get involved with him. As suspected, the two boys do not get on at all. Ali threatens Marcus: “I’ll tell you, if your dad goes out with my mum you’re fucking dead” (205). When Marcus informs him that Will is really keen on his mother, he loses his temper and shouts “SHE’S NOT KEEN ON HIM! SHE’S ONLY KEEN ON ME!” (206, emphasis in original). Marcus is completely out of his depth and he walks out on Ali and leaves the house. We could argue that both boys act in a very masculine way with Ali resorting to the Oedipus complex, wanting to kill whoever stands between him and his mother, and Marcus by walking out, leaving the problems behind. What puts Marcus in a completely different position from Ali, though, is that he has been forced to play a part as Will is not his real father whereas Ali is being protective and jealous of his biological mother. Marcus senses that he cannot take on Ali as the latter is aggressive and passionate, whereas Marcus hates violence. Will goes looking for Marcus, finds him and convinces him to go back where Ali is made to apologise. Rachel tries to explain her son’s irrational behaviour. Apparently, Ali had a really hard time with Rachel’s former boyfriend. Rachel and Will continue seeing each other as friends, but this is not enough for Will. However, he begins to realise that he cannot build a relationship on the basis of a lie. When they go out one evening, they have a really strange conversation, bordering on the comic or absurd. Rachel asks him all sorts of questions regarding Marcus, and Will first tries to avoid telling the whole truth by claiming that he is Marcus’s stepfather. The following excerpt illustrates the absurdity of the situation: “So – sorry, I’m being a bit thick here – if you’re not Marcus’s natural father, and you don’t live with him, then, you know, how is he your son?” “Yes, Ha ha. I see what you mean. It must look very confusing from the outside.”[…] “Anyway, tell me about your relationship with Ali. Is it as complicated as mine and Marcus’s”? “No, I slept with his father and nine months later I gave birth, and that’s about it.” […] “Did you ever live with Marcus’s mother?” “Define ‘live with’”? “Did you ever have a spare pair of socks at her house? Or a toothbrush”? (214f)

Will is still completely trapped in his web of lies, and he thinks he can at least partly get away with it by making it sound more complicated than it really was. In contrast, Rachel is very straightforward, imply-

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ing that one either has kids or one has not. But Will’s repertoire of turning lies into half-lies or fibs is soon exhausted, and he then resorts to claiming that he never actually claimed Marcus was his son, Rachel just assumed he was and Will did nothing to tell her otherwise. Rachel sees through him, turning ironic: “ Yeah, right. It’s me who’s the fantasist. I wanted to believe you had a son, so I let my imagination run riot” (216). Rachel actually confirms Will’s suspicion that she thought he was more interesting having a son because he came across as “a sort of blank” (218) until the topic of Marcus came up. But contrary to Will’s fear Rachel is not really angry with him, nor does she think he is a complete ‘blank’ anymore: “Because there is something there. You didn’t make it all up about Marcus. You’re involved, and you care, and you understand him, and you worry about him … So you’re not the guy I thought you were before you brought him up” (218). This marks another pivotal turning point in Will’s development – he has not only decided to ‘do his bit’, ‘a bit of charity work’, but without noticing, he has started to care and to take responsibility. Rachel furthermore tricks him into spending an evening alone with Fiona by not turning up at the pub where all three of them were supposed to meet. Fiona, who has lately been suffering from depression again, pours her heart out and Will is forced to listen. He realises that it is easier than he thought. He does not have to talk himself, just nod at the right moment and look sympathetic. Even though he has no ulterior motive – he does not want to seduce Fiona – he does not mind being a compassionate friend and make her feel better by listening to her stories. Finally, Will has learnt how to be unselfish. In the following section, I am going to have a closer look at the last part of the book where both Marcus and Will learn their final lessons.

The remorse of an absent father and the death of Kurt Cobain

Fiona has been suffering from depression again, but Marcus’s progressing friendship with Ellie has helped him a lot to cope with the negative aspects of his life. One day, Fiona seems less depressed and she informs Marcus that his father who lives in Cambridge wants to see him. First, he is rather reluctant to go and visit his father, but Ellie finally convinces him to go to Cambridge and to tell him what he thinks of him. Ellie volunteers to go with him. On the train, Marcus realises that he does not really want Ellie to be his girlfriend because of her uncouth behaviour, her swearing at people and drinking vodka from the bottle. Ellie has heard of the suicide of her hero, Kurt Cobain, which makes her even more angry and aggressive than usual. At Royston, Ellie suddenly gets off the train and Marcus follows, having

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decided not to go to Cambridge after all. When Ellie spots a picture of Kurt Cobain in a record shop window, she completely loses herself and smashes the window. The police arrive and arrest both Ellie and Marcus. As far as Marcus’s storyline is concerned, this part marks the climax of the novel. It also brings together all the protagonists of the novel, and as in a play when all the characters people the stage in a moment of crisis, everybody turns up at the police station, including Marcus’s father Clive and his girlfriend Lindsay, Fiona and Will. Being upset by the whole situation, Marcus gets really angry with his father when he claims that Marcus probably would not have gone off the rails if Fiona had not left him, to which. Marcus replies: “I suppose you are a useless father, and that doesn’t help a kid very much, but you’d have been a useless father wherever you were living, so I don’t see what difference it makes” (263). While he is waiting for Ellie’s mother in the car, Will has a lucid moment, deciding that “[l]ife was, after all, like air. […] There seemed to be no way of keeping it out, or at a distance, and all he could do for the moment was live it and breathe it” (264). When Katrina, Ellie’s mother finally arrives, they all drive back to London in his car. They discuss the meaning of life, the problems teenage children cause, and Will realises that the atmosphere in the car is not unlike the one he used to experience on school trips when he was a boy – “a heady mix of despair, shared concern, suppressed hysteria, and straightforward team spirit” (266). What is suddenly important to Will though, is that he is part of it, he is right inside it. Furthermore, he also realises that they were all there because they were somehow connected to Marcus: [T]he boy was awkward and weird and the rest of it, but he had this knack of creating bridges wherever he went, and very few adults could do that. Will could never have imagined that he would have been able to walk across to Fiona, but he could now; his relationship with Rachel had been entirely underpinned by Marcus. […] It was kind of ironic that this strange and lonely child could somehow make all these connections, and yet remain so unconnected himself. (267)

In conclusion, I want to maintain that whereas Marcus’s gift lies in being open-minded to the wholly other, it is Will’s gift to make sense of the obvious, such as showing Marcus how to be a proper teenager. Not having grown up himself, Will a) very easily remembers what it was like to be a boy, and b) by keeping up with the latest fashion in clothes, music and popular culture, he turns out to be the only person from whom Marcus can learn how to be ‘normal’.

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As mentioned above, the narrative plays with notions such as inside/outside, general/particular, normal/deviant, reality/fiction, literalmindedness/irony, visible/invisible. What is very interesting though is the fact that the novel undermines the assumption – which has been most radically challenged by Jacques Derrida – that the first term is somehow superior to the latter of the pairs mentioned. In many cases, being deviant or just different, may have the benefit of understanding problems that others might have. Inventing an identity as opposed to living the same one every day may help us to get through difficult and challenging situations without losing face. Being invisible is more comfortable if one prefers to lead a withdrawn lifestyle and to do things that are not usually considered ‘normal’. In other words, About a Boy overturns established behavioural patterns and norms. But it does so by pretending to be a narrative about how to become less deviant. One could therefore argue that there is a clash of discourses. From a pedagogical perspective, one might want to settle for the following. About a Boy teaches how to behave according to one’s age. Marcus learns how to be a boy, and Will, to some extent, realises that as a grown-up person, you have to take responsibility, which entails abandoning the idea of shutting out real life. As the narrative proceeds, he comes to understand that real life contains people who have problems going through life, i.e. that life is made of real stuff: The thing was, Will had spent his whole life avoiding real stuff […] He liked watching real stuff on EastEnders and The Bill, and he liked listening to Joe Strummer and Curtis Mayfield and Kurt Cobain singing about real stuff, but he’d never had real stuff sitting on his sofa before. No wonder, then, that once he’d made it a cup of tea and offered it a biscuit he didn’t really know what to do with it. (112)

Until Will gets to understand how helping people out and opening up to the less ordinary, he thinks that people with problems weigh him down. He is likewise convinced that beautiful, interesting and cheerful people keep him going. Therefore, Fiona spoils the fun: He needed someone buoyant to hang on to; he certainly didn’t need a dead weight like Fiona. He was very sorry, but that was the way things were. And that was the thing about Rachel: she was buoyant. She could keep him afloat. (230)

Like Frankie in White City Blue, at the beginning of About a Boy, Will considers less buoyant people to be dead weight, like some old piece of wood. Unlike in White City Blue however, the rule does not exclusively apply to people the protagonists have known for years, even

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decades, but to people they have only recently met for the first time. Whereas in White City Blue, Frankie feels that his friends prevent him from moving on, Will thinks that people like Fiona pose a danger to his smooth way of life. One of Will’s most severe problems is that he is far more rigid when it comes to applying categories in terms of what he considers normal or out of the ordinary, and in this respect, too, there are some interesting parallels between Marcus and Will. Whereas the former for the first time in his life thinks that he is in love, i.e. a female human is more to him than just a friend, the latter becomes friends with a woman, Fiona, with whom he does not want to become romantically or sexually involved. For Will, the only reason he should make conversation with women in the first place is to entice them to go to bed with him. So when he goes out with Fiona for a drink on his own because Rachel failed to turn up, he is bewildered at his own behaviour: He didn’t want to sleep with Fiona, but he did want her to feel better, and he hadn’t realized that in order to make her feel better he had to act in exactly the same way as if he did want to sleep with her. He didn’t want to think about what that meant. (252)

Will is forced into a different behavioural pattern by eternal forces and thus discovers his more humane side. He is suddenly making connections because Marcus made him reconsider his attitude towards life and towards other people. Marcus forced unlikely connections in cars and police stations and Kurt Cobain did the same thing on international television. It was proof that things weren’t as bad as they thought they were. Will wished he was able to show this proof to Marcus, and to anybody else who might be in need of it. (268)

Making connections thus seems is one of the central themes in the novel. Making connections is only possible if difference is evaluated in a manner that does not make it into an obstacle. At the end of the novel, Will realizes that being hospitable to the radically other, in his case people like Fiona and Marcus, may help him to come to terms with his own identity and masculinity which is not, as he had always assumed, fixed and unchangeable, but instable and rather fluid. As Katrina, Ellie’s mother sums up on their way home from Cambridge, everybody seems to be looking for somebody less different from themselves. Will ponders the problem and comes to the conclusion that he was attracted to Rachel precisely because she was so very different from him, and that looking for somebody less different only

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worked “if you were convinced that being you wasn’t so bad in the first place” (274). Here again the text puts forward a paradox. Will seemed to be utterly pleased with himself for the major part of the narrative. So if he has not changed his mind about his life sketch, he should have found Rachel attractive in the first place. However, he has undergone a transformation which he is only very reluctant to admit. Being different from other people also means being different from oneself, and this is exactly Will’s predicament, which however, he is ready to partly admit at the very end of the novel when he concludes that they all “had to lose things in order to gain other things” (286). Before Will met Fiona and Marcus, he had not been ready to share and exchange things – he only ever wanted to avoid the uncomfortable and challenging bits of life while accumulating the good bits. The narrative has made plausible that such a behaviour would leave him unconnected. Will has turned from an immature, independent and unconnected man into a human being.

SINGLE

FATHERHOOD IN

MAN

AND

BOY

Apart from Hornby’s novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, Man and a Boy by Tony Parsons is probably the most successful book that was published in the male confessional novel market. Like Hornby’s novels, it has been turned into a feature film (Simon Curtis, 2002). In 2002, Parsons published a sequel to Man and Boy called Man and Wife. Man and Boy is similar to, and different from, the previous novels in various ways. It is probably more similar to Gayle’s novels than to Baddiel’s or Hornby’s in that it focuses more explicitly on the romantic aspect and at times challenges the reader’s patience with Harry’s (the main protagonist) self-pity. It features three strong female characters. His wife Gina, his lover Cyd and his mother who play a crucial role with regard to his journey of self-exploration. Man and Boy also features another important male protagonist, Harry’s father whom he has put on a pedestal and admires for his principles and gentlemanly attitudes. As the following excerpt from an interview in The Guardian shows, Parsons himself sees the generic resemblance to Hornby’s novels but emphasizes that his main character is more active than those of Hornby’s: I suggest it has a touch of the Hornbys – accessible, laddishly sensitive, and a ready eye for the film of the novel. He tells me that while he is a big

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fan, unlike Nick Hornby’s characters “Harry is not a thirtysomething waiting for his life to take shape”.8

As the interview suggests, the novel might be autobiographical as Parsons has undergone the same experience as Harry, his main protagonist, in the sense that he had to look after his son on his own after his wife had left him. Even though Parsons denies that the book is about him, he admits that “you paint with the colours you know”.9 He furthermore admits that he shares his protagonist’s nostalgia for the golden age of the nuclear family: I do tend to look back to my parents generation and think wow! What a great way to be, to live with one person for a lifetime, to bring your kids up in these really solid families. My parents gave up a lot to bring me up in the little house on the prairie, and I wasn’t prepared to make those sacrifices, nor was the generation before me and the generation after. If you take that security away from childhood then it’s not the same, and all the old groovers, the Guardian readers, don’t want to hear it.

Man and Boy is basically about the loss of security the nuclear family provides and the fear that results from that loss. Parsons makes a rather interesting remark concerning gender, maintaining that like many men, he was a desperate romantic, while women were pragmatists, accepting that “the roses and Chardonnay eventually turn into the thorns and spilt milk of everyday life.” This observation runs contrary to the stereotypical differences usually made between men and women, asserting that masculinity implies pragmatism whereas romanticism is a typical female trait. Parsons’ observation ties in with the zeitgeist of the 1990s and the assumption that men were in crisis – one claim often made by the representatives of the Men’s Movement that men had lost touch with their ‘true, male selves’. They were bereaved of the initiation rituals that helped young men to form a ‘proper’ sense of masculinity; and that they were confused by the impact of feminism that helped to shape progressive, alternative masculine gender scripts like the New Man.10 It is my contention that the alleged crisis of masculinity is not so much a genuine expression of the gender battle and a response to feminism, but a gendered way to articulate the postmodern phenomenon of unfixed identities. Therefore, I would like to address the prolongation of adolescence, like the fear of commitment and the prob8 “Punk turns new romantic.” The Guardian, June 28, 1999. 9 Ditto. 10 Cf. homepage of the UK Men’s Movement, http://www.ukmm.org.uk/ and the source that inspired it, Bly’s Iron John (1990).

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lem with obsessions, as a distinct problematic of postmodern culture expressed in the male confessional novel of the 1990s. In Man and Boy again, apart from the general motive of prolonged adolescence, we are confronted with topics such as belonging, commitment, relationships, responsibility, real life, absence and presence, and death. Before I turn to discussing the novel, let us have a brief look at how the novel was received by its readers. Man and Boy is no different from the male confessional novels previously discussed in terms of reader identification. Forty-eight percent, i.e. a hundred and one out of two hundred and nine reviews I analysed mention some kind of identification or recognition. The following excerpt from a review shows how especially fathers could relate to Parson’s novel:11 The story line hit home and made me feel as if someone had peaked into my life and took bits and pieces to write about it. I learned a lot about myself, knowing it was not a self-help book, I found myself seeing my own son in a new light.

There are quite a few who strike a similar chord: I felt like the main character Harry was myself. The subject of one-parent families is close to my heart, having come from one and being a single parent myself. Possibly the most accurate commentary on modern families. I’d love my husband to read this book as it is really inspirational and makes you think about your life and make more time for the people around you. I just turned 30 myself. […] I immediately empathised with Harry’s circumstances. I laughed and cried so many times while reading this account of what seemed to be a biography of my life. [It] provides an insight into the mistakes a thirtysomething man makes when it appears he has everything going for him.

As we can see, some readers tend to empathize or even identify with Harry Silver. This again underlines the generic characteristic of the male confessional novel of placing emphasis on realism. Apparently, Harry Silver comes across as a kind of prototype of a male, single father, and people think the story is presented rather realistically. The last excerpt in the list above represents an interesting case as it is very deterministic if not positivistic: This particular reader seems to believe that Harry is not just a plausible representative of modern single fatherhood, but an Everyman of his age group. The phrase ‘the mistakes 11 Cf. www.amazon.co.uk/review/product/0006512135.

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a man makes’ indicates that there is some fundamental, ultimate truth concerning men’s mistakes, i.e. men make the same mistakes because they are men. I am emphasizing this quote because it affirms the claim I made at the beginning of this book that despite all the theoretical reflections on sex, gender and identity, in a common-sense understanding, stereotypes still prevail. When it comes to dealing with everyday problems, people do not open a book on gender relations written by a poststructuralist but rely on some common-sense explanation either based on their own experiences or on what they have read in a popular self-help book. The sources on which people rely to make sense of themselves and others as gendered beings are very difficult to account for, and even if the true essence of somebody’s identity is nothing more than a crutch to walk the shaky ground everyday life provides, the crutch seems to be of rather solid material. There are some critical voices among the reviewers, too. Trying to be Nick Hornby and failing. A second rate Nick Hornby. Although hyped as an upmarket slice of ladlit this novel is in fact as cynical a piece of writing as I’ve read in a long time. There is nothing in this book which gives you anything to think about or work on. I found this book to be moronic, boorish, misogynistic and about as insightful into relationships as the front page of Loaded.

Quite a few readers refer to the alleged similarity between Hornby’s novels and Man and Boy the majority of whom favour Nick Hornby. But there are also some who believe that they are similar in terms of literary quality, and a few think Man and Boy outdoes Hornby’s novels. Whereas it is certainly a matter of literary taste, what becomes obvious from the reviews though, is that most reviewers who prefer Hornby to Parsons do so because the former is wittier and has a finer style. The second thing that becomes obvious is that most readers are aware of the generic resemblance as well as of the ‘genealogy’ of the male confessional novel. The following review entitled: “A bit of a Nick Hornby Facsimile” is a good example: A good book, with enough interest in it to keep one turning the pages, but it’s joining an increasing genre pioneered by Hornby.

As in the other novels discussed, the process of identity construction and change is at the forefront of the narrative, and as in High Fidelity or Time for Bed, the death of a close relative adds to the maturing process. There are quite a few turning points, as for example when

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Gina leaves Harry, when he loses his job, when Pat has an accident, when he falls in love with Cyd, when Gina comes back to claim Pat, and most importantly, when his father dies. Similar to the male protagonists in High Fidelity, My Legendary Girlfriend and Mr Commitment, Harry Silver thinks that he is entitled to one more chance, and when he feels that he is not likely to get it he thinks life is unfair.12 Harry Silver resembles Will Kelly from My Legendary Girlfriend in as far as his self-pity tends to border on the pathetic. It is sometimes difficult to understand how a merely thirtyyear-old man can honestly believe that the best part of his life is over. Secondly, Harry, like most protagonists of the male confessional novel, is trapped in a paradox: he wants to prolong his adolescence while still enjoying the sort of security which the older generation of his parents enjoy because they did not have the chance to put into question their relationship whenever something did not work the way they had hoped for. Harry feels nostalgic for a past he was never part of and envies his parents who are entitled to believe in old-fashioned norms and values, such as the concept of the nuclear family and that a child is supposed to grow up with both parents. In “the lousy modern world” as he calls the British society of the 1990s, these norms and values are outmoded and have been replaced by new concepts of the family according to which single and lone parenthood has been established not as the norm but as something quite common. Last, the maturity which Harry reaches during the narrative, coupled with his acquired wisdom, do not always come across as being very plausible. However, the novel deals with some interesting issues such as new gender relations, single parents and the rights of single fathers. I am going to particularly focus on the events revolving around Harry’s period of single parenthood, how he copes with his son on his own and how he thus turns into a responsible father, and how he struggles with the fact that Gina reclaims Pat when she returns from Japan. A second emphasis will be put on Harry’s relationship with his father and the mourning he has to go through when his father dies of lung cancer.

Plot synopsis

Harry Silver is a thirty-year-old executive producer for a local TV station. He has been married for several years and has a four-year-old son. Turning thirty has been a big deal for Harry, and he is hit by a 12

Being entitled to a second chance is a recurrent topic in the male confessional novel. But despite their self-reflexivity and their awareness of the contingency postmodern culture is marked by, the protagonists do not understand that their lives are subject to the very same contingency, including their first and second chances.

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premature midlife crisis. He feels the good years are all over, that he has lost his youth, and that he is stuck, not going anywhere. Even though he loves his wife and his son, he has a one-night stand with one of his colleagues. He lends his mobile phone to his wife Gina and forgets to claim it back, and his lover leaves a message on the answering machine. After Gina has discovered that her husband has been unfaithful, she packs her bags and leaves him. She herself is from a broken home – her father ran away when she was little – and she believed Harry to be different. She takes their son Pat with her and goes to stay with her father. She has always had an affinity with Japan and the Japanese language, and before they got married she wanted to go to Japan to work as an interpreter. When she gets an offer from an old acquaintance, she jumps at the opportunity and leaves England to work for an international bank in Japan. She leaves her son behind but wants to collect him later when she has found somewhere to stay and has settled down. In the months that follow, Harry experiences what it means to be a single parent. He has to look after Pat all by himself, with the occasional help from his parents. He also loses his job to the woman he had the fling with and becomes a full-time father. At the beginning he struggles because he wants his wife and his old life back. He has to do things he has never done before, while Pat misses his mother and has to put up with a father who can neither cook nor wash his hair. But Harry grows into his new responsibilities and he soon fears the moment when Gina will return and claim her son. He falls in love with an American waitress who has a five-year old daughter and who came to England because she married an Englishman who soon left her for a younger Asian woman. When Harry thinks he has got over Gina he wants to start a new life with Cyd and her daughter Peggy. Cyd is reluctant because like Gina she feels that Harry is the romantic type who cannot cope with the fact that love changes and does not only mean red roses and candlelight dinners, and she fears that he cannot accept her daughter because she is not his own and constantly reminds him of her, Cyd’s past, and of another man. A few months into their relationship she decides to give her husband another chance and leaves Harry. Gina returns to England for good because the Japanese economy is in recession. She is engaged to an American who comes back to England with her. She wants a divorce and her son back. Harry thinks he has become a proper parent and does not want to lose his son. He is prepared to fight for custody, or residency as his solicitor informs him is the politically correct modern term. However, his father gets diagnosed with lung cancer and goes to hospital. Endless months of unbearable suffering, eased by oxygen masks and painkillers follow, and after having seen his beloved grandson for the very last time Harry’s father dies. Harry finds it extremely difficult to cope with the loss be-

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cause he has admired his father even though he has always thought that he cannot live up to his expectations. After the funeral, he realises that his mother copes better than he thought she would, and he learns that to truly love someone also means letting go. Having realised this, he puts his son’s welfare before his own and gives up the fight for custody because he knows how much mother and son love each other. At the wedding of a comedian whose show he used to produce and his former lover, he meets Cyd again and learns that she has left her husband again because it did not work out the second time either. When he looks for her after the wedding, she is gone and he is informed by another guest that she went to airport to catch a plane to the States where she wanted to return for good. He rushes off to the airport. All the planes for America have left, but he suddenly catches sight of Cyd and Peggy who did not go after all and the novel ends on a romantic note with the two of them convinced that giving their relationship another chance is the right thing to do.

Splitting up

At the beginning of the book, Harry makes two crucial mistakes. He lends his mobile phone to his wife Gina and has a one night-stand with a colleague of his. Since he forgets to claim back his mobile from Gina, it is she who listens to the message his lover leaves for him. When Harry gets back that night, Gina has already packed her bags and is ready to leave. She cannot be convinced to stay and is not interested in Harry’s apologies nor his insistence that the fling meant nothing to him; he has abused her trust, and coming from a broken home herself, Gina has completely lost faith in Harry: “You must have known that this is the one thing I could never forgive” (56). She leaves her adulterous husband, but takes refuge with her formerly adulterous father, which again refers to the fact that values are relative. She takes their son, Pat, and goes to stay with her ageing hippie father and his girlfriend. When she gets an offer to work as an interpreter for an American bank in Japan, she leaves England and leaves Pat with Harry, being adamant that she would get him once she has settled in. Despite his sorrow and pain, Harry decides to protect Pat from ‘the lousy modern world’ where people get married, have children, break up again and do not care what consequences their selfish behaviour has on their children: This is how it works, I thought. You break up and your child becomes a kind of castaway, set adrift in a sea of daytime television and ducked responsibilities. Welcome to the lousy modern world where the parent you live with

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is a distant, contemptible figure and the parent you don’t live with feels guilty enough to grant you asylum any time things get too tense at home. But not my boy. Not my Pat. (74)

When Gina first leaves for Japan, Pat’s welfare is not the only reason Harry decides to become a good parent. He wants to prove it to her, to his parents, and most of all, to himself: By the time she came back for our boy, I would be something like a real parent, too. That’s where Gina got it wrong. She thought that she could change but that I would always remain the same. (92)

I would argue, that at this point Harry’s journey of self-discovery has already started even though it may be triggered by not altogether the right reasons. His manly pride is hurt, and he wants to prove to the ‘modern lousy world’, and everybody who approved of it, how he could look after his son all alone. It does not occur to him that he, or rather his immature behaviour, might be to blame for the situation he finds himself in. Up to the point where Gina leaves him. Harry, despite being a loving father, did not know what it means to look after a child full-time. Without having the choice, he is thrown into full-time, single parenthood and suddenly realises what millions of mothers do every day without being given credit for the burden they carry and the job they do: My parents drove Pat home. My mother went around turning on all the lights while my father asked me how work was going. I told him that it was going great. They stayed with Pat while I did our shopping at the local supermarket. It was only a five-minute drive away, but I was gone for quite a while because I was secretly watching all the women I took to be single mothers. I had never even thought about them before, but now I saw that these women were heroes. Real heroes. They were doing it all by themselves. Shopping, cooking, entertaining, everything. They were bringing up their children alone. And I couldn’t even wash Pat’s hair. (80)

With Gina’s departure, all the things that he used to take for granted suddenly become special. When he was lost dealing with his son, she knew what to do. Now he has to find out for himself. Furthermore, single mothers – whom he probably did not give much thought while still in a relationship – not only become suddenly visible to him but are given the status of ‘heroes’. His own private situation forces him to critically assess the contemporary social structures. At the beginning of his new life, alone with his son, Harry still believes or at least

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hopes that his wife will come back. But when she turns up at the house, it is to see their son not him, and to make sure he was looking after Pat properly: I watched them feeling something better than happy. I was sort of glowing inside, believing that my old world had been restored. And then she looked at me – not cold, not angry, just from a great distance, as though she was still somewhere far away and always would be – and my spirits sank. She hadn’t come back for me. She had come back for Pat. […] And I could see that she had come back because she thought I couldn’t do it. She thought I wasn’t up to looking after our child alone while she was away. She thought that I wasn’t a real parent, not the way that she was a real parent. (88f)

Harry is caught somewhere between tradition and what he calls ‘the modern world’. He grew up in a traditional household with an intact relationship, caring parents and traditional gender roles. His father was the head of the family, a proud and honest person, sometimes coming across a bit harsh but generally with a gentle nature. Harry truly believes in the values that he has been taught, that a child should have both parents living with him or her, but his life takes a different turn, and he needs something to blame it on: “These days we have relatives we haven’t even invented names for yet” (189). Harry sees the breakdown of his marriage as a symptom of the ‘modern’ world. There is a pattern for broken homes; there are rules set up according to which single parent families are supposed to function. But despite the ‘modern’ family pattern, the residual tradition is still present because the mother is still considered to be the main child carer, whereas the father is often absent, either because he puts his career before his family or because he has not taken his responsibilities seriously. Therefore, single fathers, being an ‘emergent’ phenomenon in Williams’s terminology, might get admired for what they are doing while at the same time looked upon suspiciously as does the woman in the following excerpt: She saw a man alone with a child and she thought that somehow that must make me better than other men – more kind-hearted, more compassionate, less likely to let a woman down. The new, improved male of the species, biologically programmed for child-caring duties. As if I had planned for my life to work out this way. (87)

Harry has become very self-conscious with regard to masculinity and fatherhood. He does not fit in in any way. And despite the pride he occasionally takes in being a good father, looking after his son all by himself, and despite the fact that his broken marriage is just one

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among many modern relationships, him being a single father makes him feel the odd one out: Young mothers didn’t talk to me. They avoided my eye. They really didn’t want to know. At first I tried to engage some of them in small talk, and they acted as if I had asked them for a blow job. So after a while, I didn’t bother. All those mums smiling sweetly at each other, they really would have preferred it if I weren’t there. It got to the point where I tried to time my arrival at the school gates to the very second when the children were set free. Because I couldn’t stand being around all those young mothers. And they couldn’t stand being around me. […] The women […] in Alice bands had more in common with the women in ankle bracelets than they did with me. The women who were single parents had more in common with the women who had partners than they did with me. At least that’s how they all acted. It was all very English and understated, but there was no denying that the suspicion and embarrassment were always there. There might be understanding and enlightenment for a single father with a little kid out in the working world. But here at the sharp end of parenting, outside those school gates, nobody wanted to know. It was as if Pat and I were reminder of the fragility of all their relationships. (199f)

Even though Harry feels very self-conscious and is therefore prone to exaggeration, his observations are nevertheless quite striking. He is aware that he represents something most people do not want to be reminded of and who suffer from what Bauman terms the difference between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’. Harry does not fit in with what is generally considered to be ‘normal’ wherefore he becomes visible to other people. He reminds them of what they do not want but could happen to them any time – like an illness that could affect anybody at anytime but of which we prefer not constantly being reminded of by too much visibility. Obviously, Harry finds it difficult to reconcile his personal beliefs and values with those of the society he lives in. As already hinted at, his relationship with his father plays a major role. Like the protagonists in the novels previously discussed, Harry finds himself trapped in an aporia. He does not want things to change and likes his little routines and habits, yet at the same time fears that he does not move on. On the one hand, he lives in the past and gets nostalgic when he tries to deal with the present and wonders what the future might have in store for him, on the other hand it is the past that seems to hold him back. He needs a long time to realise that one cannot separate the past from the present and the future. The two incisive incidents, i.e. his looking after Pat on his own and his father’s death make him under-

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stand that one cannot shake off the past. His child will always be part of his wife and his life with her, always in front of his eyes because his son partly looks like her, and he himself is part of his father for the things he believes in are things his father had taught him. He finds it hard to be at the same time different from and similar to his father. In a way, he feels jealous because his father fought in the war and won a medal, and he had values he was ready to fight for. Harry thinks because he belongs to a different generation he has been bereaved of a good cause. In contrast, his father epitomizes a generation who had to fight in order to be happy, a chance Harry feels he has missed because he belongs to a different generation Also, his parents’ marriage has been a good and harmonious one with which he cannot compete: This was my old man at seventy – tough, kind, confident, grinning at his grandson with boundless tenderness. And yet I found myself railing against his DIY competence, his manly efficiency, his absolute certainty that he could bend the world to his will. (158) 13

Harry feels inadequate because his father epitomizes both: manliness because of his innate attitude to take care of things and fix them, and kindness because of the gentle way in which he treats his grandson. Harry loves his father and suffers greatly when he dies. However, he cannot shake off the pangs of jealousy he sometimes feels in the presence of his father: I nodded, but only because I didn’t have the heart to shake my head. What I really thought was that his generation had faced up to its responsibilities in a way that my lot never could. His generation had looked after their children, they had lots of early nights, and if they also had their own home and a fortnight in a caravan in Frinton, they had considered themselves lucky. But my generation had grown up with our own individual little pile of happiness at the top of our shopping list. That’s why we fucked around, fucked off and fucked up with such alarming regularity. My generation wanted perfect lives. Why should our children be any different? My dad had learned early that nobody gets away with a perfect life. (232)

At this point, Harry has still not understood that mapping out one’s personal life against the generation one grew up in is not enough to make sense of one’s insufficiencies and failures. One cannot simply blame every thing that happens on the ‘structure of feeling’ of a generation. There is a difference between the general and the par13

This excerpt also makes clear the distinction between the role of the ‘old’ working class male and the ‘new’ middle class man, or the New Man.

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ticular despite the likelihood there might be a connection somehow.14 Again, Harry feels that he is an oddball. He deems himself a victim of his generation and modern society and he wants to fight battles like his father did. But on the other hand, he wants a perfect life to which he thinks he is entitled. He wants a happy family life and a career. When both go wrong, he is just as angry and disappointed as anyone else of his generation might be. He too takes things for granted, and he does not realise you cannot fight for things you take for granted in the first place. As we have seen in About a Boy the question of a male single parent has been dealt with as a fiction in fiction but has nevertheless told us something about the awkwardness of what it might mean to be a single father is addressed further in Man and Boy. At first sight, it might seem rather natural that Harry should get some compassion from single mothers. However, the contrary is the case with those who are on their own and who are reminded of what it might be like to have a man to help look after the children, and those who are still in a relationship are made aware of the fact that they might face the same fate if their relationships should not work out. Society as a whole is affected by the shifting structures of gender relations, and whereas the concept of the single mother seems to have lost its stigma, single fatherhood is now frowned upon. There is confusion about gender behaviour, and even though the nuclear family as the smallest social unit has been questioned for a couple of decades now, the idea that it works as a sound foundation of people’s lives cannot be exorcised that easily. Harry is aware of the fact that he epitomizes the shallowness of modern love and broken relationships. But despite his insight into the general pattern of single parenthood of which his situation is nothing more than an example, he takes the reaction of the single mothers he meets at the gates of the school rather personally, and he does not want to remind them of a possible male absence in their lives: Standing at those gates, I felt as though I was an ambassador for all the defective males in the world. The men who were never there. The men who had pissed off. The men who couldn’t be trusted around children. Well, fuck the lot of them. I was sick of being treated like the enemy. It wasn’t that I minded being considered an oddball. I expected that. After all, I knew I was an oddball. But I was tired or carrying the can for every faulty man the world. (200)

14

It is interesting to note that Harry, unlike Marcus in About a Boy, cannot differentiate between the general and the particular.

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The paradox lies in the fact that he thinks he reminds people of something of which he actually represents the opposite. In his presence, he reminds the women of an absence. Harry feels inadequate and odd because he neither fits in nor belongs to the world he inhabits even though he is part of it. Man and Boy is in fact a book about presence and absence, most obviously because his wife and Pat’s mother is absent for most of the narrative even though everything reminds him of her presence: Gina was gone and she was everywhere. The house was full of CDs I would never listen to […], books I would never read […] and clothes I would never wear. (98)

He gets rid of everything and for a brief moment, feels how easy it might be to erase somebody’s presence: It’s amazing how quickly you can remove the evidence of someone’s life from a house. It takes so long to put your mark on a home, and so little time to wipe it away. (99)

But despite his attempt at erasing her marks and traces from the house, he soon realises that it does not work in general – Gina will always leave a mark on his life, she will always be present, haunting him, like a ghost. Harry’s main predicament is that he is trapped between two different concepts of gender relationships and division of labour. He admires, respects and sometimes even fears his father, and he thinks that is the way it should be. He remembers how during his youth, fathers were often called upon to frighten children when they were up to some mischief: “Wait until your father gets home”. You don’t hear that threat so much today. How many women actually say, Wait until your father gets home now? Not many. Because these days some fathers never come home. And some fathers are home all the time. (95, emphasis in original)

But Harry does not have this sort of relationship with his son either. He used to get back after work to play with his son, not to punish him. Harry does not realise that he cannot have it both ways; he cannot live in the modern world just taking what he approves of while sticking to what was customary in the ‘good old days’.

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A new love?

The second, big turning point concerning Harry’s maturation process occurs when he meets Cyd Mason who is a waitress at one of his local restaurants. She is American but married to an Englishman with whom she has a daughter. Harry meets her at the restaurant where she works. After Pat’s bike accident, Cyd brings around a takeaway container with his favourite pasta dish. It is striking how Cyd makes a proper appearance in Harry’s life after a string of catastrophes: Gina leaves for Japan, Harry loses his job and Pat has an accident that might have been fatal. Just when the light at the end of the tunnel had slipped out of sight, it resurfaces in the shape of Cyd. Harry likes Cyd’s mix of romance and independence: I like you because you’re strong but you’re not hard. I like it that you don’t take crap from men, but you still left your country for a man because you thought he was the one for you. (146)

They begin seeing more of each other and soon start a proper relationship. Harry falls in love and hopes to begin anew with Cyd. He is very surprised to find out that Pat’s friend Peggy from school is actually Cyd’s daughter – she did not want to introduce them at the beginning to protect her daughter. Harry likes Peggy very much and she often spends time at his house after school. However, her being his lover’s daughter changes everything and he begins to see Peggy in a new light. Prior to the revelation that Cyd is Peggy’s daughter, he was angry with Peggy’s parents. It’s true that I didn’t really know anything about them, apart from the fact that her father was out of the picture and that her mother worked strange hours. But in all the important ways, I felt that I knew everything about them. […] They were typical modern parents. They were incapable of looking after this child. And if there was one thing that I had grown to hate, it was people who bring a kid into the world and figure that the difficult is done. (201)

Ironically, it is Peggy’s mother he falls in love with, and Peggy is not the victim of some unknown, incapable parents anymore, but an emotional obstacle in Harry’s relationship with Cyd. Even though he likes her a lot and they get on well together, he feels envious because he can never become as closely attached to her as a blood relative and Peggy would always prefer her biological father to him. Whereas he himself cannot completely rationalize his awkward feelings about Peggy, Cyd summarises his predicament rather bluntly:

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‘You liked her when she was just the cute little kid who played nicely on the floor of your home. What you don’t like what she’s become now that you’ve started going out with me.’ ‘What’s that?’ I asked her. ‘The reminder of another man’s fuck,’ she said. (221)

Even though Harry makes an effort and at some point even suggests to Cyd that they move in together to be one family, he cannot get rid of his traditional views on families and relationships. He still thinks his parents’ generation did the right thing, whereas everything is out of joint in the ‘modern’ world. He might flirt with the idea of having a patchwork family, but in reality, he could never come to terms with such an alternative concept. Despite being aware that he is a single parent himself, he somehow seems to ignore the fact that Pat and he are just the same as Cyd and Peggy; he does not really consider how Cyd might feel about Pat. Cyd is aware of Harry’s reluctance to admit that the traditional nuclear family has ceased to be the standard norm it once was. She also understands that his romantic nature prevents him from coming to terms with the fact that he is going out with a woman who is the mother of some other man’s child. When she ends their relationship, she explains her decision as follows: [Y]ou want someone with a less complicated life than me. No kid. No exhusband. No reminders of the past. You know you do. […] You think you want someone who can transform your life with love. But you don’t really want love, Harry. You couldn’t handle it. You want romance. […] That’s the way you are and in a lot of ways it’s a good way to be. But it would never work between us because you can’t make the hearts and flowers stuff last for a lifetime. Not with kids around. Especially when they’re not your own. (259)

If for a different reason, Harry like Duffy in Mr Commitment is scared of real life, which especially for a TV producer who could be expected to know the difference between real and staged life, is rather surprising. He wants things to be good and romantic. He confuses this urge for romance with an urge for love. He even hears this from Eamon, a comedian for whom he starts producing a show. Despite the similar message, we have to note the difference in the explanation. Eamon thinks monogamy is not adequate for men. Men need change because they relationships are like cars: ‘Just outside of Paddington, you pass this enormous great yard full of shining, brand new cars. And a little bit further down the line, there’s another yard – but his one is full of rusting, rotting, burned out old cars all stacked

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on top of each other like the junk they are. […] Relationships are like those cars’, he said. […] ‘They start off all shiny and new and looking like they’re going to last forever. And then they end up as rubbish.’ (273)

Even though Eamon spells out a completely different view of why relationships may fail, he also thinks that Harry’s problem is his attitude to love and romance: ‘[Y]ou’re a romantic, Harry,’ Eamon said. ‘Because you believe in all the old songs. And the old songs don’t prepare you for real life. They make you allergic to real life.’ ‘What’s wrong with the old songs? At least nobody thinks it’s clever to be a bitch and a lover in the old songs.’ ‘You’re in love with love, Harry. You’re in love with the idea of love. Cyd’s a grand girl – but what’s really special about her is that you can’t have her. That’s what really grabs you.’ (270)

According to Eamon, Harry confuses love with the idea of love. Ideas may enrich your life, but they do not always add to your happiness because they just might remain what they are, ideas. Whether the question of true love finally finds an answer remains open, despite the ‘happy’ ending with Cyd’s and Harry’s reconciliation at Heathrow airport because her motives to stay in England are not spelt out clearly.15 There is yet another person who believes Harry should change his philosophy of life because he is somehow caught between two worlds. Even though she does not figure prominently in the narrative, it is his mother who makes Harry understand that he has to fight his own battles and that he has to find a middle way to believe in the values he has been handed down by his parents on the one hand and those endorsed by the society he lives in: ‘You have to fight for your happy ending, Harry. It doesn’t just drop in your lap.’ ‘ You think I didn’t fight for my happy ending? You think I haven’t got enough fight in me? Not like Dad?’ I was curious to know what she believed. […]. ‘I think you’ve got a lot fight in you, Harry, But you beat yourself up sometimes. You can’t be the same man your father was – it’s a different world. Almost a different century. You have to fight different battles and not expect anyone to pin a medal on your chest. Looking after a child alone – you think your father could have done that? I love him more than my life,

15

Given the above metaphor of the Heathrow Express, their meeting again at Heathrow seems somewhat ironic. Does it mean that the express does its name credit by being so fast that the transition from the new shiny cars to the old discarded ones was not actually noticeable?

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but that would have been beyond him. You have to be strong in a different way. You have to be a different kind of tough guy.’ (296f)

In this brief extract, Harry’s mother manages to put his problem in a nutshell. Harry should fight the right battle with the intention that fits his personality as well as his circumstances. There is nothing wrong with having ideals and modelling oneself on somebody as long as one realises the general is not always applicable to the particular, and that one cannot fight for things and take them for granted at the same time. It is rather striking that it is his mother who has to tell Harry that his concept of masculine behaviour is rather outdated. She does it in a very sensitive way, though, reassuring him that he does not lack the toughness he so much admired in his father, and thus does not threaten his masculinity at all. At this point, Harry’s awareness of his problem starts growing. With his father terminally ill and Cyd gone he realises that he has to reconceptualise his life. Just as Cyd came into Harry’s life after a series of dramatic events, the structure of the narrative places her disappearance just before the onset of another series of dramatic events – Harry’s father dies and Gina comes back to claim Pat. Cyd is being idealized: when she is present, things go relatively well for Harry; when she’s absent, he struggles. The male lineage of the Silvers

When Harry’s father dies towards the end of the novel, he has spent some miserable weeks at the hospital, fighting for his life, or rather, against imminent death. His lungs are seriously affected by cancer, and his few conscious hours he spends under an oxygen mask. He knows there is no hope and that he is dying, and his only wish is to see his beloved grandson again. Even though his wife, Harry’s mother, is against putting Pat through the painful ordeal of seeing his grandfather in the terrible state he is in, Harry knows how important it is for both his father and his son to see each other again. He believes in their bond that will last beyond death. The narrative strongly suggests a very deep and loving relationship between grandfather and grandson; there are several incidents where it becomes very clear how much they love each other. However, I would argue this is not the only reason why Harry takes Pat to see his grandfather. As I have pointed out repeatedly, Harry is very traditional and mourns the decline of the nuclear family unit. The narrative suggests that at least in Harry’s eyes, there is nothing wrong with patriarchy, i.e. the father functioning as

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the head of the family. The following excerpt summarises how Harry feels about patrilineality: This was my father’s family – a family of men, shrewd, tough Londoners who were sentimental about children and their suburban gardens, men whose old photographs invariably showed them in uniform, gamblers and drinkers, although neither to the degree where it was ever more than light relief, men who loved their families and looked on work as merely an unpleasant chore undertaken to support those families, men who prided themselves on knowing how the world worked. (246)

Apart from the fact that women are not mentioned at all, Harry’s idealization of and nostalgia for the male lineage of his family is rather blatant – those were ‘real’ men of whom the ‘modern’ descendent like himself is only a sad remainder of what honourable masculinity once has been. It is also quite telling that when his father dies, he is given the sad news by his uncle Jack, with whom he does not have a particularly close relationship, and not by his mother. The narrative in line with patriarchal imperatives suggests that it is the duty of a male relative to inform about the death of another male member of the family. Harry’s patriarchal ideal is annihilated – or castrated – three times in the novel; first by the departure of Gina, which leaves him without a wife and thus denies him the status of a proper pater familias, secondly by the death of his father, and thirdly by his wife reclaiming his son. I shall stay with his father’s death for the moment and will discuss the last incident below. While I do under no circumstances intend to deny the deep love Harry felt for his father, the bereavement of an elder, male relative as such clearly marks a major and incisive change in his life. When his father dies, Harry also loses the idol of familial values on whom he tried to model himself. With his father gone, Harry has nothing left but a memory, not only of his father but also of how things used to be. He has to model his life on the memory of a memory. “[W]ith my father gone, there was part of me that felt alone – at last and forever” (304). Despite all the fear and pain caused by his father’s terminal illness and subsequent death, Harry is aware of the fact that the ordeal made him more mature. At his father’s funeral, he asks himself the question: “Does a man have to bury his father before he feels truly grown?” (303). What Harry does not realise though is that if he wanted to stick to his philosophy of family life, he has replaced his father and continues to live through him. True, he has lost him in the worldly sense, but by

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securing the ties between himself and his own son he has not only lost but also won something. As I have already pointed out above, Harry is conscious of presence and absence. When his father dies, he again becomes aware of the blurred edges of both presence and absence. It’s like he’s still there. I can’t explain it. Even though he’s gone, I feel him all around me. There’s just this big gap where he used to be. It’s like his absence is as strong as his presence. (336)

Harry feels presence in absence, and he hears a voice where only silence can be expected: “I could hear his voice. I would never hears his voice again. I would always hear him” (301). What Harry learns through the departure of his wife and the death of his father is that even if people leave you for good, they are still part of you and are partly responsible for your being what you are and what you identify with. He is afraid of losing people, but he learns that by letting them go he still leaves a door open for them to return in case they want to. In order to fully realise the weight of this, he has to undergo yet another phase of learning; how to let go.

“I want him back”

Just after Cyd has left Harry, Gina comes back from Japan. She rings Harry out of the blue and demands to see Pat. Apparently, the big Japanese dream did not come true because of a decreasing need for English translators. On her arrival she declares: “So here I am … [a]nd naturally I want Pat” (245). This is a very straightforward claim, an unambiguous statement which hurts Harry. By saying ‘naturally’, Gina refers to her status as Pat’s biological mother on which she legitimizes her claim. She departs from the assumption that generally speaking, a child should stay with his or her mother. What she does overlook though is that she left her son in Harry’s care in order ‘to get her life back’. She did not care about social, legal or pedagogical implications when she left for Japan. Because Harry had disappointed her by having a one night-stand, she just assumes she is in a stronger position and can make demands whereas he has to consent. Even though it is understandable that she feels let down, she should not try to gain an advantage over Harry with regard to their son. Implicitly, she referred Harry to the New Man-script by expecting him to look after Pat full-time. There is nothing wrong with that, but first, she then should have thought about the consequences before leaving, and second, she cannot refer him back to the traditional role, insisting on the normative gender division in terms of childcare. Like Mel in Mr

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Commitment, Gina confuses traditional and emergent female gender scripts. Harry has got so used to looking after Pat and to having him around him all the time, that at first, he does not really understand Gina’s claim: “She wanted Pat? Did she mean she wanted to see him? To take him to the zoo and buy him a stuffed toy the size of a refrigerator? What did she mean?” (245). When he finally understands her claim, he informs her that it is not as simple as she might think: You think you can just come back into our lives and pick up where you left off, Gina? You think that you can have Pat back just because the Asian economic miracle turned out to be not all that miraculous after all? […] I don’t want you to hate me. But can’t you see what’s happened? I’ve learned to be a real parent. You can’t just come back and take that away from me. (255f)

Harry decides to get a solicitor and fight for his son. He is informed that the law generally favours the mother, but because Gina left the marital home and Pat in Harry’s care, the solicitor is rather confident that they might win the case. But Gina and her solicitor are determined to get residency, as ‘custody’ is called these days, of Pat as well. Gina even goes so far as to use Harry’s information about what Pat does and accuses Harry of negligence because he allows Pat to listen to rap music. Even though Harry is furious with Gina for trying to get what she wants regardless of whether her means are respectable or not, he starts to realise that what he really wants is the best for Pat. Therefore, he finally decides not to fight for the custody of his son. He has come to understand that his wish to have him with him all the time might have been selfish, i.e. he was putting his personal welfare before his son’s. But the process during which he learns how to let go is a long and painful one, and he only realises how to do this after his father has died and his mother despite her pain keeps carrying on. When he asks her how she manages to do this, she answers: “Love means knowing when to let go.” The problem of holding on to things as they used to be was one of Harry’s most fundamental problems. He thought he was entitled to hold on to the people and things he loved most. He did not realise that everything is constantly changing, and that he was in love with the idea that good things just have to stay good, something he had to hear from both his wife and his lover, and even from his mother. He was unable to cope with change, or at least not with the sort of change of things he considered to be good. If change was to happen at all, he wanted to be the one who actively set it in motion. Therefore he found

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it hard to come to terms with the fact that his marriage changed with Gina and him turning into a parent, robbing him of the romance he thought was the basis for their relationship. And after his marriage had failed, he sought the same sort of romance with another woman. However, as he soon realised, he found that hard too because Cyd’s daughter constantly reminded him that there had been a man in her life before him. In conclusion, Man and Boy is designed as a study of the single parent phenomenon – it is the expression of male fear and masculine insecurity. Harry believes in traditional values, including the idea that no matter what happens, a family is supposed to stick together and a child should grow up with both its parents. He assumed that Gina shared his views and did not expect it to take as little as a ‘harmless’ affair to put the idea of the nuclear family into question. Being a hopeless romantic, he wants things to stay as they are and to experience the feeling of having recently fallen in love all the time. He does not realise that moving on means that things change and that it is in the nature of human relationships that feelings and loyalties have to be constantly renegotiated. The reason he is stuck in this anachronistic attitude towards life and relationships is twofold. First, he admires the older generation, especially his father, and he curiously feels some sort of nostalgia for a time he has never witnessed. Secondly, he is not aware of the fact that he confuses a number of masculine gender scripts, most importantly the one of the traditional patriarch and breadwinner, who is pragmatic, who does not show his feelings or lose his temper but is a softie at heart, and the New Man who feels in the same league as single mothers and who is capable of looking after his offspring just as well as women. He resents ‘the lousy modern world’ without being aware that he is part of it and that at the same time reproduces and questions the implications the modern way of life brings about. It is rather difficult if not impossible to stick to his romantic ideals while looking after his son full-time. He becomes aware of this through a number of incisive incidents. He meets Cyd with whom he would like to start a new relationship, and maybe even a patchwork family. However, even though he gets on really well with her daughter, he cannot get over the fact that she represents her mother’s former life and is a constant reminder of another man. The second reason for his reluctance to adopt a more flexible outlook on life is visible in the patriarchal subtext of the novel which suggests that Harry suffers a triple castration. First, his wife leaves him which dethrones him as the ‘head’ of the (nuclear) family. Secondly, his father dies and thus Harry’s model of patriarchy and the head of the enlarged family is not present anymore. That leaves Harry

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to act as pater familias, but with his wife gone, he does not fulfil the conditions to be a fully respected male leader of the family/clan. Third, when Gina returns and wants their son back, she removes another male member of the Silver family. Harry’s masculinity is under threat all the time, and without being aware of it, he learns how to become a more mature, responsible and caring male human being.16 The lessons he learns are through experience, especially when he has to look after his son, but likewise through the three strong female characters in the novel, Gina, Cyd and his mother.

HAVING

IT BOTH W AYS IN

THE BEST

A

MAN

CAN

GET

John O’Farrell’s The Best a Man can Get was published in 2000 and has been celebrated as one of the most wickedly observed confessional novels. To tune in with the tenor of the reviews, it deals with the tribulations of parenthood with the sort of honesty that makes you feel ashamed to laugh out aloud, but it is hard not to. Prior to the publication of The Best a Man can Get, O’Farrell made himself a name as a non-fiction writer with Things Can Only Get Better. Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter (1998). He regularly appears on radio and TV shows and writes a weekly column for The Guardian. The analysis of forty-five readers’ reviews has yielded that the book was generally well-received: twenty-seven readers praised the book, eleven thought it was average, and only seven dismissed the novel as below average or not worth a read. Compared to the reviews of the other male confessional novels previously discussed, the most striking difference is the readers’ low rate of identification. Only two readers, who could be clearly identified as male, felt that that they could see part of themselves in Michael, the main protagonist, or were convinced that especially fathers could relate to the novel. These two readers are both fathers and therefore easily responded to the fatherhood topic of The Best a Man can Get. Nevertheless, the genre of the book was largely recognised as ladlit: A touch of Ben Elton humour mixed with large handfuls of Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons family moralising. Sort of ‘Nick Hornby’ – but funnier – more pace.

16

Harry’s fear of emasculation and the symbolical experience thereof can be read as an expression of Freud’s castration complex: his wife, his father, and his son leave him at some point.

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[…] I would recommend Tony Parson’s Man and Boy or Nick Hornby’s About a Boy, which are far superior novels, with a greater depth of character and emotional pull. As gritty as Man and Boy but as funny as Monty Python.

As with the novels analysed heretofore, readers were drawn in by the aspect of realism. In one particular male reader, the book produced a rather high level of anxiety: I read this book on the plane to my honeymoon and it scared the life out of me.

It seems that the readers assume the storyline is based on real life experience. I have not come across any comment which indicated that O’Farrell felt like running away from his fatherly duties at some point in his life, but at least the topic comes across as very plausible and comprehensible by men who have already become fathers or those who are contemplating fatherhood.17 According to a philosophy student, The Best a Man can Get “is the modern version of Kierkegaard’s Either-Or”, claiming that it is “one of the best books [he has] read so far on ethics even if its not philosophy.18 This appreciation of the book underscores my argument that the male confessional novel contains a lot of popular scientific knowledge; people draw a conclusion that goes beyond the particular and extract some common-sense wisdom. The latter marks the most important difference from what is usually considered to be ‘high literature’; the genre’s self-complacency to express stereotypes and generally acknowledged ‘truths’. As a scholar, one is always rather wary of such conclusions, but taking reader reception into consideration – and seriously so – these cannot be avoided. Middlebrow fiction covers the middle-ground between literary appreciation for aesthetic reasons and pure entertainment and escapism that popular fiction tends to further. The realism of middlebrow fiction lends itself well to offer the reader both entertainment and at least some level of intellectual stimulation. According to one female reader, the book sheds a new light on New Laddism: One of the reasons I left England (being female) was that I had finally got fed up with the predictability of British laddishness. Of course, as all Brits know, this equates to ‘educated men’ running down the High Street on a Friday night, 16 pints, and weeing with pride in doorways… followed by a 17 18

O’Farrell is married and has two children, cf. O’Farrell 2000. Cf. www.amazon.co.uk/review/product/0552998443

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week of boasting about it at work. Normally I would not have even glanced at this book due to my ingrained prejudices. HOWEVER, by chance, I read the first chapter of this book […] and found myself laughing out loud. […] In the UK men today can be quite confused about their role in society. This book sums it up pretty well, neither condemning nor celebrating it, just having a good laugh at the absurdity of it all.

This review strikes me as particularly interesting for the following reasons. First, it affirms my claim that the male confessional novel neatly matched the zeitgeist of the 1990s including the overall impression among a certain generation that a) men were in crisis and b) the release of their frustration was the reason for the invention of new laddishness so successfully promoted in men’s magazines. Secondly, and more importantly, assuming that the male confessional novel of the 1990s is a typical British phenomenon, it is the specific humour of these novels that takes the edge off the topic and thus seems to be worthy of reading even by feminists like the reader above. According to sociologist Kate Fox, the most ‘defining characteristic’ of English behaviour is the value the English put on humour, claiming that “most English conversations will involve at least some degree of banter, teasing, irony, understatement, humorous selfdeprecation, mockery or just silliness” (2004: 61). Fox furthermore emphasizes the importance of the crucial distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘solemn’ and between ‘sincerity’ and ‘earnestness’. The rule can be expressed as follows: Seriousness is acceptable, solemnity is prohibited. Sincerity is allowed, earnestness is strictly forbidden. Pomposity and self-importance are outlawed. Serious matters can be spoken of seriously, but one must never take oneself too seriously. (2004: 62, emphasis in original)

These rules, I would like to argue, apply likewise to middlebrow fiction such as the male confessional novel. Identity crises, career failures and broken marriages are serious matters and are discussed in a semi-serious sort of way. However, the degree of laughter the novels evoke, and the readers’ insistence that these books are ‘funny’ is a clear indicator that the narrators do not take themselves too seriously. The rules of British humour transcend the boundaries of spoken conversations and are manifest in a wide range of discourses, including the discourse of middlebrow fiction. Therefore, I suggest that the reader quoted above was able to thoroughly enjoy the book despite her reservations about the general comportment of British men: the narra-

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tor’s humour and self-deprecation made the tedious topic of male crisis and misconduct an enjoyable reading experience. Some of the readers who were dissatisfied with the book bemoan that it does not keep to what it promises. I tend to argue that this might have something to do with the fact that Michael does not really live a double life in the sense that he stays sexually faithful to his wife; he does not have a mistress in his second ‘home’ nor does he make a great effort to meet women at all. There is only one incident where he almost starts an affair with a younger woman, and it is not quite clear whether this can be put down to genuine attraction or peer pressure since his flatmates get a bit suspicious because women do not seem to play a big role in Michael’s life – one of them actually thinks Michael is gay.

Plot synopsis

Michael Adams is in his early thirties, has a loving wife, a onetime actress, and two kids, a three-year-old daughter and a baby son. He is a jingle writer by profession. He is also a first class liar and deceiver. He is not an adulterer though because he has always been faithful to his wife. But he finds it extremely difficult to adjust to fatherhood and to the boring life that the transition from being a loving couple to becoming parents brings about. Deprived of sleep and the time to pursue the pastimes he has always cherished – such as engaging in pointless trivia games with his male friends – he feels more and more out of his depth. In order to save his marriage, Michael decides to set up a second life. Being a freelance jingle writer by profession seems to offer the perfect way out, and under the pretence of working long hours at the keyboard, he sets up a studio in South London while spending time with his family in North London when he feels like it. His wife, Catherine, thinks he is labouring hard to keep up with the mortgage payments when he is away from home. The truth is that he only works very rarely, and if he finds the strength to get some work done at all, he does not spend more than a couple hours writing music but more often than not spends days in bed watching daytime television or fooling around with his three flatmates. The latter have no idea that Michael is a husband and father and just take him as one of them, a mature teenager prolonging his adolescence. He successfully manages to lead his double life until he one day, his guilt of betraying his wife overwhelms him and he confesses everything in a letter to his father who, in a bout of pride for his son, shows the letter to his latest mistress before leaving her. Feeling compelled to let Catherine know how fickle the Adams men are, his ex-

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mistress forwards her the letter, on the receipt of which Catherine leaves Michael. She packs her bags in North London just when Michael is loading a rented van on the other side of the river, having decided to give up his ‘bachelor’ life for good. When he comes back home he finds an empty house and a rather nasty letter from Catherine. He wants to get her back at all costs, and eventually succeeds in convincing her to give their marriage a second chance on the day she gives birth to their third child. However, she only gives in after having told Michael that it was not he but their former German neighbour who was the natural father of the new born baby. After a short outburst, Michael decides that they are even; after all, she only committed adultery because she felt lonely while he was having fun with his mates instead of working hard to support her and the children. When he insists on adopting the child, Catherine tells him that he is the boy’s biological father after all, and that the claim to the contrary was just a ploy on her part to check out his commitment. She has her little revenge by taking up acting again and spending some nights away from home while Michael is forced to look after the three children. As it turns out, she does not really have to stay away overnight at all, but every now and then enjoys a night in a luxury hotel on her own.

The problem of facing everyday life

The Best a Man can Get is a very compelling example of the contemporary confessional genre because all Michael does throughout the three hundred pages is confess. However, his revelation, for the longest part of the novel, is not addressed to the person who is wronged, but solely to the reader. Nothing much happens in the book – we mainly witness Michael dividing his time between his bachelor flat in South London and his family home in the North. When Michael is not busy taking part in one of his flatmate’s guessing games, having a row with his wife or coping with his two children, he is engaging in long monologues in which he is trying to find a justification for his immature behaviour. Despite the thin plot, The Best a Man can Get is a very fastmoving and funny book. The cleverly humorous twists take the edge off the awkward situation created by Michael’s grievous misconduct. The novel opens with Michael admitting to the fact that he finds it hard to work long hours because he is his own boss, and there is nobody who controls him. He has just slept in because his rest was disturbed at seven o’clock by the paper boy standing in front of his bed, informing him that he would not be able to carry out the task in future because his mother did not approve of it. We are then introduced to

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Michael’s flatmates, all in their mid- to late twenties, pottering around the flat. There is Simon, a self-conscious late developer who spends hours on end visiting porn-sites on the internet and thus running up the joint phone-bill; there is ‘posh’ Jim who has been researching his PhD for the past ten years and who does not actually do anything at all apart from making tea and taking out attractive girls to the fashionable West end. Finally, there is Paul, the disillusioned and frustrated English teacher. The four men like to indulge in trivia games such as guessing songs from the intro tunes, or deciding which football team’s name only consists of letters that cannot be coloured in.19 Michael, himself obsessed with such games, finds it hard to get any work done when his mates are shouting the possible solutions of their games at each other, and he wastes his time joining in. Up to this point, the reader is totally unaware of Michael having another life which actually involves a wife and two children on the other side of the Thames.

Deception and the role of the reader

We then accompany Michael on his journey to the other side of London, making his way to his family home where he is greeted by chaos and noise. The reader, at first, is somehow startled by the following lines: ‘Daddy!’ exclaimed my two-year-old daughter Millie with delight as she ran up the hallway and hugged my leg. There was a tape of children’s nursery rhymes playing on the stereo and Alfie, my baby boy, was jiggling his limbs delightedly in his mother’s arms. ‘You’re earlier than I expected,’ said Catherine with a smile. I tiptoed over some wooden bricks that were scattered on the carpet, gave her a kiss and then took Alfie from her. ‘Yeah, and guess what? I’ve finished the job and won’t have to work at all this weekend.’ ‘Fantastic,’ she said. ‘Then it’s a double celebration. Because guess who wee’d in her potty today?’20

The quick change of scene from Michael’s bachelor flat to his family home is a clever move because first, it gives us an insight into both of his lives in a very short sequence which produces a nice twist at the beginning of the novel. Second, it legitimises the generic nature of the novel, because the reader is compelled to feel that given Michael’s circumstances, confession is imminent. There is no way Michael 19 20

Michael’s flatmates bear a strong resemblance to Frankie’s friends in White City Blue. O’Farrell 2000: 27f; subsequent page numbers will be given in the main text.

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could possibly get away without explaining to the reader why he is deceiving his wife and family on this scale. At the same time, because Michael only confides in the reader, we are immediately drawn to Michael’s side and begin to understand his predicament from the very beginning. The narrating voice makes everything sound so simple and straightforward that his betrayal almost seems natural. This alignment between narrator and reader is strengthened by the fact that he takes the reader with him on his journey on the underground from the North to the South of London. In other words, the reader becomes an accomplice not only because he or she knows about Michael’s double life but by following him around, as it were, is compelled to find reasons to justify it as well.

Uncertainties and the fear of the ‘other’

The novel’s main topic, Michael’s ambiguous relationship to fatherhood is subtly introduced while he is travelling on the underground. He is faced with the decision of whether he should offer his seat to a pregnant woman. However, he is not quite sure whether she is really pregnant or just a bit overweight. He makes the offer all the same whereupon the woman responds angrily: ‘Why would I want to sit down?’ (26). Michael muses on this problem of ‘The Bulge of Uncertainty’ (ibid.) and comes to the conclusion that women would make men’s lives much easier by wearing T-shirts saying ‘Yes, I am’. Later in the novel, he comes up with an explanation why men feel so awkward when faced with a pregnant woman on a public transport vehicle. I suspected that it was embarrassment that prevented some men from giving up their seats – the thought of talking to a complete stranger on the tube, a person of the opposite sex who they would specifically be addressing because of that woman’s gynaecological condition; it’s enough to make the average Englishman shrivel up and die. (206)

Pregnant women are not only scary because their very presence forces men to break one of the most precious rules of social behaviour, i.e. not to address people in public. Furthermore, pregnancy is a mystery to Michael and makes him feel uneasy as a general rule, let alone when his own wife is concerned. The ‘Bulge of Uncertainty’ therefore, apart from being a funny label given to a female stomach that is big either due to pregnancy or overweight, also refers to Michael’s main problem, being a father. Pregnancy and ultimately the arrival of an offspring, to Michael, is not only visible as a bulge of uncertainty, it is also a bulge in uncertainty. What happens if the father in question

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just does not feel ready yet or simply finds it difficult to look after his children when getting drunk with his mates seems a much more attractive way of spending an evening? As Michael himself puts it: “I couldn’t look after a toddler and a baby and try to restring my acoustic guitar as well” (208). Parenthood does not really work if the father in question has decided that he needs to prolong his adolescence. The two main reasons Michael cannot live up to what is expected from him are the following: first he does not understand what it feels like for his wife to be pregnant and therefore feels excluded. After her first two pregnancies, he has figured out that when pregnant, Catherine can change her mood like some other people would change their clothes due to the hormonal roller-coaster she is on. To him this was a foretaste of how annoying children can be because they completely change your life and everybody thinks that this is completely normal. Second, a pregnancy ultimately means a child that prevents him from feeling young and compels him to live an ordinary and boring life. Michael is rather blunt about this fact: Small children are boring. We all pretend we find every little nuance of our off-spring wonderful and fascinating, but we’re all lying to ourselves. Small children are boring; it’s the tedium that dare not speak its name. I want to come out of the closet and stand on top of the tallest climbing frame in the country and proclaim to the world, ‘Small children are boring.’ All the other parents would look shocked and offended as they pushed their toddler up and down on the seesaw for the hundredth time, but secretly they would feel a huge sense of relief that they weren’t alone. (88f)

Michael is not very good at fighting boredom because he does not know how to do it: Tolerating tedium is not something I’d ever had to do before. If I wasn’t enjoying a holiday, I would come home. If I was bored by a video, I would fast forward it a bit. I wished I could just point the remote control at the kids and fast forward them a couple of years; I knew they would be more interesting by the time they got to four or five. (89)

He seems to be caught in the media traps of modernity. Even though he sees through the tempting messages the advertising industry tries to trick us with, he would like to have a remote control to manipulate the situations he finds hard to cope with. The adverts told us we could have it all, we could be great dads and still go off snowboarding and earn lots of money and pop out of the business meeting to tell your children a bedtime story on the mobile phone. But it can’t be

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done. Work, family and self (my emphasis); it’s an impossible Rubik’s Cube. You can’t be a hands-on sensitive father and a tough, high-earning businessman and a pillar of your local community and a handy do-ityourself Mr Fixit and a romantic, attentive husband – something has to give. In my case everything. (88)

Troubled identity

Michael obviously has a problem with his identity, or rather with constructing an identity that fits his idea of himself and also complies with the social structure that pigeonholes him as a ‘proper’ adult with family duties. Michael does not decide to become a hard-earning businessman by making cutbacks on his duties as a husband and father, but he cannot decide in favour of a more fulfilling family life by openly admitting that he does not work hard at all. In order to maintain his double life as a caring father and an independent bachelor he has no choice but to lie and pretend for which he has a special gift. As far as I was concerned, telling people things only ever caused problems. It is always presumed that complete and total honesty is the only way to have a happy relationship, but nothing is further from the truth. […] All couples deceive each other to some degree, so what I was doing wasn’t particularly unusual. Every father has heard the cry of the baby in the night and then pretended to be asleep as his wife gets out of bed to deal with it. I was more secretive than some men, but far more loyal to my wife than many others. (122f)

Even though he is deceiving his wife about his work and about the financial problems they are in, at least he is not unfaithful to her; this is Michael’s main consolation. Even though he is not the kind of husband and father his wife thinks he is, he does not cheat on her as in going out with other women. I felt like a man having an affair, only it wasn’t an affair with a younger woman, it was an affair with a younger version of myself. Just as some men get back in contact with old girlfriends after they are married, I’d met up again with the twenty-something Michael Adams. He’d made me feel young again; he’d understood all my problems. And we still had so much in common; we liked to do the same things. (192)

Michael is afraid of losing his youthful self, or in other words, he is terrified of getting old. By dividing his life, i.e. by living out a younger version of his self for half the time, he has found a way of

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holding on to his youth. Just as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the protagonist is living out two different personalities, only in this case, Michael is totally aware of it, i.e. he does not suffer from pathological schizophrenia as here we are not dealing with a good and a bad version of the same protagonist, but with a younger and an older one. Michael cannot be what he thinks he ought to be, he does not really know where he belongs and therefore experiments with different identities. Zygmunt Bauman clearly sees a relationship between identity and the problem of belonging, claiming that “[t]he idea of ‘identity’ was born out of the crisis of belonging and out of the effort it triggered to bridge the gap between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’ and to lift reality to the standards set by the idea – to remake the reality in the likeness of the idea” (2004: 20). There are certain traits that go with the concept of being a father, especially a modern one, and these include looking after the family both as a breadwinner and a carer. Being married to a rather strong woman who in terms of teasing strategies and cynical remarks is on most levels equal to him, Michael is challenged by the concept of the New Man to a degree where he feels he has exhausted all possible options and all that is left is pretence. Furthermore, he not only pretends to be a good husband and father compliant with the New Man-script; he also pretends to be a New Lad when he is with his flatmates. He indulges in their silly games and in those moments he acts out a different masculinity script. Since he cannot be the good, caring father while still working hard to pay off the mortgage, he opts for the version that is bound to fail. He pretends to be what he ought to be by not running away for good, but only whenever he feels it is necessary. That he cannot maintain this charade for the whole length of the novel is clear from the beginning. As I mentioned earlier, confession marks the narrative from the outset, and just as in a romantic novel where the prospective groom is bound to propose at some point, we feel that Michael is working himself into a situation where introspection and monologic confession are not good enough anymore. In order to shed some light on the process that is going on in Michael’s mind, I would like to draw again on Anthony Giddens by taking a closer look at his theory of the trajectory of the self which he establishes in conjunction with a discussion of Janette Rainwater’s SelfTherapy (1989). Self-Therapy is a programme of self-realisation, claiming that “therapy can only be successful when it involves the individual’s own reflexivity: when the clients also start learning to do self-therapy” (Rainwater in Giddens, 1991: 71). Giddens claims that “therapy is not something which is ‘done’ to a person, or ‘happens’ to them; it is an experience which involves the individual in systematic reflection about the course of her or his life’s development. The thera-

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pist is at most a catalyst who can accelerate what has to be a process of self-therapy” (ibid). Let us just for a moment consider Michael as a patient who engages in self-therapy. By constantly observing himself, i.e. by putting himself into a state of elaborate self-reflexivity, he tries to make sense of his Sein while questioning the concept of Dasein. In other words, by challenging the possibility of ontological security, i.e. to lead a ‘normal’ life as a husband and father’ he engages in some sort of a semi-ontical enquiry, trying to make sense of his alternative lifestyle as an independent single man, sharing a flat with three other men. Giddens emphasizes the aspect of temporality, and the necessity to master the present.21 “The ‘art of being in the now’ generates the selfunderstanding necessary to plan ahead and to construct a life trajectory which accords with the individual’s inner wishes” (ibid). In this respect, Michael is rather different from the other male confessors – he tries to question the present in order to create a future that is at the same time ‘appropriate’ in terms of fitting in with the contemporary social structure and acceptable to his wife as well. As noted before, Michael is completely aware of his own faults – he even toys with them. Of course this very fact adds to the narrative’s humour and makes the reader sympathise with him. However, we must not take Michael’s confession too lightly. As Hans Georg Soeffner rightly observes, “[s]elf-observation always amounts to the observation of the sinful, observation of one’s own sinfulness, of one’s own failure” (1992: 60).22 In the following I am going to sketch out Michael’s journey of maturation, again focusing on the most important turning points in the novel. These occur when he accidentally bumps into his daughter in the park, when Catherine reads Michael’s letter to his father just when he decides to put things right and move back in with his family permanently, and when Catherine pretends that Michael is not the real father of their newly born baby-boy.

Double life

Michael is invited by Jim, one of his flatmates, to come along to a barbecue his friends have organised on Clapham Common. He has just informed his wife that he would not be back for a few days because he was buried in work and had to go to Manchester on a business trip. As he confides to the reader: “Lies are like cigarettes – your 21 22

Cf. Heidegger 1923. “Selbstbeobachtung ist letztlich immer Beobachtung der Sünde, Feststellung der eigenen Sündhaftigkeit, des eigenen Versagens.”

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first one makes you feel sick, but soon you’re addicted to them, unaware you are even doing it” (153). Michael agrees to go with them even though he has never been to a social event with his flatmates before, and he feels slightly anxious because their friends are in their twenties, eating hotdogs, drinking French lager and smoking cannabis. Michael has a problem with age and time, he has lost the feeling for them: “The tragic thing was that while I could remember everything from when I was young, I couldn’t actually remember anything from the last few years” (155). Furthermore, Michael realises that he does not really fit in in terms of class either, as all Jim’s friends were like Jim ‘hippie posh’; “they’d dropped out, but had return tickets for when they were older” (156). When the alcohol takes effect, Michael begins to relax, especially when Kate, an old flame of his, appears. He is rather pleased with himself: Temporary financial setbacks aside, my double life was a well-oiled machine. I had a wife, but I was independent, I had a job in which I could choose my own hours, I had the perfect amount of time with my beautiful children, but I also had my own space and all the time to myself that I could possibly want. (162)

Michael has complete faith in his ‘well-oiled machine’, but just as he has finished his praise, it breaks down on him because he suddenly spots his daughter Millie. She is all on her own. It was as if she were a child I didn’t know; she was completely separate from me, as if I were observing her through a one-way mirror or an old family video recording. […] I could see my child, but I wasn’t able to relate to her. She felt distant and surreal. (162)

Here Michael experiences what could be described as detachment from his own flesh and blood – his daughter is just a little girl he happens to see in the park. He feels alienated, as if Millie belonged to another life. He begins to realise the surrealism of his double-life. Within a short time, he has felt out of place, first with Jim’s young, posh friends at the barbecue, and minutes later when he sees his daughter whom he cannot approach if he wants to keep his camouflage as a young, artistic bachelor intact. Furthermore, Catherine is bound to be somewhere, even though he cannot see her. Why isn’t Catherine with her? I wondered anxiously. I hid behind a bush so I could watch Millie without giving myself away. Part of me wanted to run and give her a big hug, but there was so much at risk. She must be lost. I

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would just keep an eye on her from a distance, until her mother found her, and then silently slip away. (162f)

The situation borders on the absurd – Michael plays his own daughter’s guardian angel behind the bushes. He wants to protect her but cannot do this as her father. The absurdity of the scene becomes even clearer if we consider Michael’s phrasing a bit more closely. He does not think of Catherine as his wife, but as Millie’s mother as if Millie was somebody else’s child. It seems as if Michael was somebody else, or maybe the younger version of himself who watches himself in the future when he will be married and have kids. However, in spite of himself, he calls out her name when she comes closer. She does not seem to be surprised and runs towards Michael to be picked up. Naturally, he wants to know where Catherine is, and then he hears her screaming Millie’s name: “Look Millie, there’s Mummy. Run to Mummy. Tell her you saw a man that looked like Daddy” (163), upon which Millie runs towards Catherine, shouting: “Mummy! Daddy said I saw a man that look like Daddy” (164). Catherine does not get the implication of Millie’s strange statement, putting it down to child’s logic, too much concerned that she might have been picked up by a strange man without honourable intentions. She is angry with Millie, and when she starts crying and becomes hysterical in the process, Catherine loses her temper as well. The whole scene is being overlooked by Michael’s barbecue friends who start making nasty jokes about ‘little brats’ and ‘single mothers’. Michael again experiences the absurdity of being divided between two worlds, at this very moment joined on Clapham Common, only a few yards away from each other. He is like an actor between two plays, not quite sure in which one to perform even though he knows that if he wants to uphold his charade he is supposed to perform the part of the bachelor while hiding successfully from the family set. However, both Millie and Catherine seem to be on the verge of losing their temper, and Michael is drawn in by the husband/father part. He walks towards Catherine and asks her whether she is alright. Catherine of course is very astonished to see Michael because she believed him to be in Manchester. Michael pretends she misunderstood him and that he said ‘Manchester Street’. They go home where Catherine confesses that she is out of her depth and that she could not cope with the children on her own. Michael starts to feel really guilty and reflects on his life, his lost youth and his double life. He truly believes that becoming a father has bereaved him of his youth and independence:

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That day that baby comes out it’s over. Your independence, your youth, your pride – everything that made you what you were. You have to start again from scratch. (178)

Michael suffers from a severe identity crisis. He feels that after the baby has been born, he must be somebody else, but his reasoning bears a paradox. He claims that fatherhood divests a man’s identity – he is no longer what he used to be. All his identity work, his selffashioning has been in vain because he is forced to redefine his masculinity as soon as he has a baby. The process of defining who you are is usually something people are most challenged with during their adolescence. If Michael took a more positive attitude, he would see that being forced to rebuild his identity could actually be seen as a youthful initiation rite. However, he has this idée fixe that his youth has gone and that he cannot face adulthood – his conceptualisation of these phases is very rigid. It does not occur to him that there are no neat transitions. Because he feels so bad about having betrayed his wife and kids, he suddenly decides to confess everything. He rings Catherine and tells her about the debts they have and that he has not been working hard at all, avoiding his parental duties while enjoying a bachelor life. There is silence at the other end, and when Catherine speaks again, she informs him that his Millie had pressed the button down on the receiver and could he please repeat what he had just said. Michael does not have the courage to repeat his confession. He needs to get his guilt off his chest, i.e. he feels the need to tell someone and therefore decides to write a letter to his father in which he tells him everything. Secondly, he comes to the conclusion that his double life is over, he packs his bags and wants to return to his North London family home for good.

Going back to be alone

Upon receipt of Michael’s letter, his father tells his girlfriend Jocelyn about Michael’s double life because his son’s honesty makes him very proud. However when he leaves her for a younger woman shortly after that, Jocelyn thinks that both father and son are the same, i.e. fickle and unreliable, and in an act of retaliation forwards the letter to Catherine. So when Michael’s removal van pulls up in front of their house, Catherine has already left. The house is empty, and at first, Michael does not comprehend what has happened, simply assuming that Catherine and the children were asleep upstairs. He notices a video tape and is pleased that his wife remembered to record his favourite programme. To his shock, however the tape is homemade and after a few

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episodes featuring his kids, the picture goes blank and Catherine appears on the screen, cursing him in the most offensive language. He runs upstairs and finds all the rooms empty. Michael realises that his remorse and his decision to give up his double life have come too late. Upon learning how Catherine got to know the content of his confession letter, he blames his father for the whole misery, still believing that he could have gone back and let his bachelor life be his own secret. Michael feels infinitely sad and wants to set things right. Most of all, he wants his ‘old’ life back (like Harry in Man and Boy), but Catherine only reminds him that this was what he wanted, space on his own. But to Michael, this is not the case: From the outside it might have seemed a similar existence, but whereas before I’d believed I had organized myself the perfect life and had revelled in the best of both worlds, now I was utterly miserable. Because now none of it was in my control, now my hours as a father were begrudgingly meted out to me rather than being generously granted by my good self. Catherine had the power. My secret outpost of resistance to the dictatorship of babies had been betrayed by an informer. Now I’d been exiled to parental Siberia, condemned to solitary confinement with two hours’ visiting time a week. (232f)

Considering that at that point we are already approaching the end of the novel, Michael has not learnt a lot. He still believes that somehow he was entitled to do what he did, that other people tried to control his life and that his bachelor flat south of the river was to everyone’s benefit. He even tries to defend himself by explaining that his double life had not been as bad as having an affair and he does not understand when Catherine says that she would have preferred that. We must not forget that Catherine is heavily pregnant with their third child, and that her emotions are probably slightly out of order even without her husband trying to excuse his outrageous behaviour. The vocabulary he uses in the above extract is rather striking and highly reminiscent of war veterans or prison convicts. He understands his life to be organised by a legal institution with his wife acting as an unfair judge. Everybody and everything is against Michael; he even blames biology for not having adapted to human passions: “If only babies could burst forth at the moment of passion in which they are conceived and not nine months later when it’s all turned to dust” (233). So far, Michael has not learnt to take responsibility. To him, acts of responsibility are always short-term. When he promises to write a jingle for a TV ad, he does it in a night-shift, sends it off and goes back to having fun again. Becoming a father is a little more compli-

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cated than that. To him, having children is special, and whenever he sees them, he wants it to be a special event. Unfortunately, everyday life is only special very rarely, and a bit like Harry in Man and Boy, to Michael the prospect of things growing ordinary and stressful is a nightmare. Furthermore, he has problems with his gender identity. He wants to be both a father and a young, independent bachelor. By establishing his double life scheme, he had the best of both worlds. I would also argue that Michael has a rather severe problem with his gender identity. To him the period when one is young and free comes to an abrupt end with the birth of a child. So in order to regain his youth, he has to displace himself, to run away, at least temporarily from the duties and responsibilities that are supposed to make him an adult. It does not occur to him that he can perform different masculine roles in the same place. Even though this might be more difficult, it is not impossible. His job as a jingle writer leaves him the option to organise his working hours relatively freely; he is not stuck in an ordinary nine-to-five-routine. But maybe this is the moot point – he cannot cope with having freedom in one area of his life while being a bit more constrained in another. He is not capable of making compromises that are obvious and comprehensible for everyone because that would again restrict his freedom of choice. He lacks the selfconfidence to be who he wants to be, and more importantly, he lacks the courage to be open about his needs – the context for his gender scripts, the dutiful father and the independent bachelor, need to be perfectly attuned to his idea of these scripts. In short, he cannot be free, independent and creative with his children around, and he cannot be the responsible father in front of his male friends. He tries to justify his actions by claiming that he had not been quite ready for fatherhood and was only just adjusting to it. His wife thinks this explanation is outrageous because it has not once occurred to him that she might have had problems adjusting as well but did not have much choice. Michael just assumed that simply because Catherine is a woman, it was easier for her to give up her old life and adjust to looking after children. He is an essentialist who believes that men and women are dissimilar due to their biological difference and hormonal attribution. Therefore, it seems natural that women find it easier to be mothers while men struggle with their fatherhood. This is a very short-sighted, essentialist and monolithic view, and Michael needs one more shock to wake up and face reality without thinking that accepting it equals being incarcerated.

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The birth of a new responsibility – a new chance?

Being on his own, Michael has a lot of time to reflect on his life and what has gone wrong. This not only includes Catherine and the children, but his father as well. It suddenly dawns on him that the letter he wrote to him was the only time he had ever confided in him. He did not care too much about him, and naturally his father must haven been proud when he received a very private letter in which he was told things nobody else knew. He feels sorry for his father and realises that it was not his fault at all that Catherine found out about his double life – it was his own mistake. He suffers greatly because Catherine is supposed to give birth soon and he feels detached from her. When Catherine goes into labour, he rushes to the hospital. She eventually gives birth to a boy and Michael is overwhelmed with happiness. However not for long because Catherine informs him that he was not the boy’s natural father. Catherine admits to having had a brief affair with their German neighbour Klaus because she was feeling lonely. Michael cannot believe how unfairly Catherine has been treating him: She thought I had done her such a wrong; she had behaved like such an injured party, such a poor victim of my callous deceit, and yet all the time, inside her had been growing this witness to the most fundamental betrayal possible. […]. (285f)

It is rather ironic that Michael who thought of the extending female stomach as ‘bulge of uncertainty’ should have such a puritan attitude to the moral duty a woman had in ‘carrying’ the proof of male fertility. However, he loves his newborn child and desperately wants to be its father, he soon comes to his senses: “She’d had sex once with the bloke from next door. Couldn’t I forgive her for that? Was that any worse than the extended deception I’d pursued?” (287). He decides to forgive her and to adopt the baby. When he tells Catherine his decision, she confesses that she had never had an affair with their neighbour and that Michael was the baby’s biological father. The Best a Man can Get is a novel about a young husband and father who struggles to adjust to adult life. His idea of himself is grounded in the belief of having lost his youth with the birth of his first child. In his early thirties, he already feels old, and to regain his youth and independence, he starts a second life as a bachelor, pretending to work long hours in his studio. In the course of the novel he learns that he cannot choose bits and pieces he likes and shut out those he does not – life comes as a whole package. Towards the end, he explains this to one of his clients who wants him to change a jingle he

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wrote by leaving in some parts while substituting others. “[I] tried to explain to him all over again that you can’t just have the special bits on their own. Art isn’t like that, and life isn’t like that. I understood that now” (255). While for the most part of the novel Michael’s behaviour is rather disturbing, as readers we empathize with him, which has partly to do with the fact that he comes across as plausible with regard to the love he feels for his family – he is not an evil character. The second reason why as readers we cannot help but like Michael is the humour the novel displays. Even though Michael finds the most ludicrous explanation to justify his double life, it is sometimes hard not to be amused by his creative mind. The novel ends well, both Michael and his wife have forgiven each other, and Michael has undergone a rather turbulent maturation process. In the very last chapter he is invited to the wedding of one of his former flatmates. Jim marries Kate, the woman Michael nearly had an affair with. Catherine and his children are there too, and the three young men he used to share a house with are rather surprised to see him with his family. Michael does not feel embarrassed anymore, but very proud: “Then I introduced my three kids to the three kids I used to live with” (297). Michael has now adjusted to the idea of being a father and he realises that he can still relate to other men who have no children and fewer responsibilities. He has finally realised that there are many different ways to be a man, and that fatherhood does not erase his masculinity. I would like to end by saying that Michael despite being a fictive person is a good example of the fears many young men have when they become fathers, and a novel like this should make us rethink the concept of the nuclear family. Michael not only constructs two homes for himself, but by the same token, distinctly separated gendered spaces. Even though Michael’s problem is rather different from Harry’s in Man and Boy, we have seen that the concept of fatherhood has changed a lot, and the gender trouble resulting from the transformation couples undergo becoming parents cannot be simply put down to masculine immaturity. In other words, even though laddism is a way to react to the expectations partners and institutions may have of men, this should not be considered as a backlash on feminism but as an articulation of uncertainty.

CONCLUSION One dimension of feminist movement that did have a profound impact on men was its insistence that women had the right to critique men both collectively and individually. (bell hooks)

Was it easy to be a man in the 1990s? I would like to answer Gary’s question with which I opened the discussion in the introduction by saying, no, it was not easy to be a man in the 1990s, but neither was it before, nor will it ever be in the future. By the same token, it has never been easy to be a woman, and it never will be either. Each generation has its own battles to fight. There might be specific problem areas by which one generation is particularly challenged, but by and large, the struggle with gender identities will persist. Unless, of course, the normative gender structures change dramatically. As the close reading of the male confessional novel against the cultural context of the 1990s has shown, the pre-middle-aged male generation at the time was faced with a particular set of problems, which, in combination with other, cultural discourses such as represented in the daily media and in self-help books, furthered the climate of the men-are-in-crisis outcry on the one hand, and the publishing phenomenon of the genre of the male confessional novel on the other. The latter filled a specific market niche that was created by the longterm effects the feminist movement has had on the conceptualisation of gender relations. The alleged crisis of masculinity was articulated in different media and thus contributed to the intertextual presence of the phenomenon. The 1990s were a period in which the consequences of late modernity (or postmodernity) with its proliferation of lifestyles and identity scripts had reached a point of excess. Men felt insecure and inadequate, and reasons to explain or excuse their inadequacy, were called for. The male confessional novel is a literary discourse that successfully took up the cultural climate, including male insecurity, and by adding a self-reflexive, self-ironic touch to the stories of

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men ‘who should know better,’ created a genre that became very popular among the young, urban professional middle class, for the male confessional novel – in a true middlebrow fashion – fulfilled the desire for realism, intellectual stimulation and entertainment. The anti-heroes of the male confessional novel are the Everymen of the 1990s; men who do not act their age but prolong their adolescence, delay decisions and make up for their personal deficiencies by indulging in obsessive pastimes. They are passive and self-indulgent, and only ever become active, hyper-active even, when they express their self-pity and talk about themselves and their problems. As I have argued, the male protagonists invariably seek a change and a more fulfilling life, but are unable to bring about that change on their own account; they are trapped in an aporia, an insoluble paradox in the sense that in order to construct their identity, they at the same time have to deconstruct it. In the fashion of the Bildungsroman, they have to undergo a process of maturation which is always initiated by an external force, either by a dramatic event or by a person who is close to them, usually the woman they end up with. Despite the somehow arbitrary division of the eight specimens of the male confessional novel into three separate chapters, it nevertheless highlights a vital distinction between these three groups in the sense that each group of male confessors had to overcome obstacles of a similar and yet different nature. Whereas in the case of those I discussed under the heading of ‘structures of obsessions’, the male antiheroes had to realise during their process of maturation that their monolithic concept of identity did neither help them to find their true professional vocation nor the woman of their dreams, those in the second and third section had to abandon their fear of commitment and nostalgia for their youth. What all the novels share is that it is always a woman, or several women, who institute the process of maturation. The female character seem to have a more balanced sense of self wherefore the come across as more self-assured and sorted than the male protagonists. But as I hope to have successfully shown when discussing the novels I attributed to ‘structures of non-commitment’, the women themselves add to the confusion their male counterparts find themselves in, because, oscillating between the emancipated, independent feminist and the traditional woman who wants to settle down in order to reproduce, they send out mixed messages. As far as the ‘structures of prolonged adolescence’ novels are concerned, the women play a different role in the sense that their actions have more of an indirect influence on how the male protagonists change, coincidence or fate being more decisive. Specifically, in the case of About a Boy and Man and Boy, as the title of the latter suggests, it is the relationship between a man and a boy, father and son in

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Man and Boy and boy and surrogate father in About a Boy that trigger the maturation process of the main character. In the male confessional novel, masculine deficiency is put in a critical spotlight. In conjunction with the narrative device of granting the women the role of the more stable and self-confident person in a mixed gender relationship, masculinity becomes the marked gender. By exposing themselves and their inadequacies, the male protagonists put themselves at the centre of attention but at the same time undermine their privileged position in a society that in many respects still privileges men. Therefore, the male confessional novel can be likewise read as an accusation and an apology; the male protagonists both accuse and excuse themselves. This discursive mix affects the structure of feeling in the sense that it highlights ‘common’ experience this specific male generation of the 1990s shared. Furthermore it produces a specific discursive formation which I understand as a particular form of the emergent masculine discourses, a concept I find more adequate than ‘the crisis of masculinity’. The male protagonists all make the same mistake; they are all under the impression that their gender identity is unified and fixed. They have not accepted the end of the great narrative of traditional gender roles in the sense that male and female are clear-cut opposites of a dichotomy, nor have they understood that masculinity takes on various guises. Whenever their deficiencies come to light, they think their masculinity is under attack. The juggling of different masculinity scripts such as the New Man and the New Lad exemplifies this crisis. In order to do justice to the complexity in which gender antagonisms are grounded, the importance of popular culture cannot be emphasized enough. Popular culture is not only a site of power struggle between the people and the power bloc, but to a large extent between the people themselves. It is the space where meanings, identities and pleasures are constructed, but it is also a space where cultural scripts are articulated and negotiated. Furthermore, it is a place where the popular meets the scholarly, where scientific theory is used to theorize the popular, and where the latter inscribes its trace into the scholarly preoccupation with cultural meanings and cultural scripts. In view of these considerations, the male confessional novel or ladlit cannot be dismissed as laddish and retrosexist for it is not a unified reaction to feminism, but an expression of postmodern anxiety expressed by biologically male human beings. Feminists like Whelehan and Showalter take the correct critical stance, but are wrong in their conclusions. Furthermore, as I have argued throughout this thesis, the male confessional novel displays a number of characteristics that make obvious its generic resemblance to the Bildungsroman. But in contrast to the traditional Bildungsroman, which often features a young woman who is mentored by an older man, in the British male

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confessional novel these roles are reversed, and it is the man who has to make do with the part of the mentee. As we have seen, the narrative structure is rather similar in all the novels I analysed in Part II, and what is rather striking is that despite the protagonists’ high level of self-reflexivity, they tend to go round in circles, mulling over the same problem time and again. They are in love with something else they think they are in love with, either with being in love as such, with their past or with idea of not being able to commit. They suffer from an idée fixe from which they have to be cured during their belated maturation process. Part of the problem the male protagonists face is that they construct themselves outside from what they think is reality without realising that reality is a construct itself. Reality, to them, is a confusing and hostile world in which they cannot be accommodated. This is particular interest since as we have seen with regard to the readers’ reviews, realism or the realistic depiction of everyday life is an important feature to which the male confessional novel owes its success. The protagonists of the male confessional novel are rather oldfashioned in the sense that they bemoan the shortcomings of the ‘lousy, modern world’ that does not offer the sort of initiation rituals the men of the older generation had to go through in order to secure their masculine identity. They do not realise that the coming to terms with the multitude of gendered identity scripts contemporary society offers constitutes the first phase of initiation. In this respect, I want to come back to the male confessional novel’s meta-narrative function. I have argued that the novels of my corpus display a high degree of generic self-reflexivity that suggests an analogy between books and life in general, in the sense that they are both stories with chapters. In as far as the protagonists’ maturation process is concerned, this division makes sense. However, in terms of identity construction, the male confessional novel exposes its limitation for the quest of finding a stable and suitable gendered identity script cannot be arranged in chapters but is an ongoing, lifelong project. The most important generic characteristic of the male confessional novel, confession, also underscores this argument. Without the discursive device of the confession, there would be no confessor, i.e. confession constructs the confessor; the confessor is a discursive effect. This is not to downplay the importance of the narrator in the novel, but to highlight the contingent nature of identity construction. Identities, including gender identities, are based on scripts that circulate discursively and are subject to constant re-articulation. Therefore, they are temporary and unfixed. By making the construction of masculine identity the core problem in the sense that it is portrayed as deficient and inadequate, the male confessional novel at the same time constructs and destabilises, even erases, its own genre. This tendency is fostered by subtexts that reveal that more

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often than not, the struggle to pin down one’s gender script is not necessarily a struggle between men and women, but one between men. Homosocial bonding and homoerotic desire challenge the norm of masculine heterosexuality. To put it differently, even within the realm of so-called ‘normality’, masculine gender scripts differ and are subverted or queered by narratives. The claim that the clash of gender scripts can be explained in terms of new laddishness and boorish behaviour as a backlash against femininity does not go far enough, for as the analysis of the male confessional novel has shown, even heterosexual men as a group differ from each other and hence add to the diversity of gender scripts in just the way gay masculinities, female masculinities or transsexual masculinities do. In order to do justice to the myriad of gender scripts, we must leave the terrain of heteronormativity and as Judith Butler suggests, move beyond binarity into multiplicity (2004: 197). By applying an interdisciplinary and eclectic approach, drawing on Derridean deconstruction, the micropolitics of everyday life as represented by Fiske and de Certeau and insights from late modern sociological thought, I hope to have shown that literary as cultural studies helps to make sense of social and cultural crises and that the social sciences and the humanities should cooperate rather than segregate. The inclusion of empirical material in order to supplement the analysis which is carried out by one reader only should be understood as a gesture hinting in the same direction. Most importantly, I hope to have shown that gender is more complex than suggested by the guardians of normality and heteronormativity, but also more complex than suggested by feminists and profeminist sociologists of masculinity. Essential gender scripts are not viable anymore, and that is what the male protagonists in the male confessional novel of the 1990s have to learn during their process of maturation. They fight to endorse their unified concept of identity against the narrative that suggests the opposite, and in the course of the novels, the male identity scripts are being deconstructed. The crisis of masculinity has indeed been unmasked as a myth; men were, i.e. are not in crisis because they are men. Crises are inherent to human nature, yet the articulation of a gender crisis may be specific to a generation if viewed against the background of the heteronormative gender scripts enforced by public discourse during a specific decade. Maybe five sexes are indeed not enough, let alone five genders, and because the contingency of sex and gender is not only subject to difference but also to the structure of feeling of a generation, we should start talking about genderations.

EPILOGUE: THE LAD LIT PROJECT In the following, I would like to complete my project by adding a practical and empirical perspective. Throughout this book I have argued that masculinity and identity are unfixed, unstable and ambiguous. At the same time I have tried to demonstrate that such an antiessentialist reading of discourses, literary or otherwise, does not necessarily preclude the possibility of detecting a certain common ground from which the masculine voices speak. I have tried to show how this common ground is what Raymond Williams calls the structure of feeling, which in my poststructuralist interpretation, is not fixed either, but leaves threads and traces which are used to weave the fabric to create meaning and identity, gendered or otherwise. Reading is therefore a creative activity. Readers are active, creative, productive. They create their own meanings out of books; they rewrite the stories according to their own preferences and thus create something new. As Fiske, Ang, Radway and Winter, among others, have shown, readers or quite generally speaking, consumers of popular culture can develop an excessive liking for one particular genre and hence become what is usually termed a fan. Genre fiction is the best literary example to fulfil the reader’s desire for more of the same. As pointed out in the main part, in the case of the male confessional novel this is of particular importance as the recognition factor is relatively high and therefore may satisfy the reader’s wish to get a variation on the theme called life. The following example of The Lad Lit Project illustrates how the conjunction of two phenomena, i.e. collecting books of the same genre and ‘rewriting them’ in the sense that the material is interpreted to fit a particular need, can result in the creation of something new. Additionally, The Lad Lit Project does not only rewrite the material of the male confessional novel, it also transgresses its genre; it is a play that is based on a formula elicited from the male confessional novel. The Lad Lit Project was written and performed by the Sheffieldbased group “Third Angel”, a performance company run by CoArtistic Directors Alexander Kelly and Rachael Walton. Their projects

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include plays, live art, installations, film, video art, documentary, photography and design. The Lad Lit Project was inspired by ladlit fiction, the novels of Nick Hornby and his ilk. The one-man show offers a slice of the male psyche based on the stories of real men.1 The play that successfully toured Britain in 2005 is a 75-minute running tale of male anxiety and masculine identity crisis, delivered in a second-person narrative by the co-director and actor of “Third Angel”, Alexander Kelly. The different chapters that range from the observational to the emotional to the absurd cover different stages that make up the life of an average male and are interspersed by what might be Kelly’s own reflections on what it means to be a modern man. The setting is quite simple; a table, a few chairs, a pint of beer. This is how the play begins: 2 I’m a man. I am 6 feet tall. I weigh 12 stone, and 12 lbs. That gives me a Body Mass Index of 24; that's the highest acceptable Body Mass Index, apparently, before you are overweight. I have a 39 inch chest, 33 inch waist, 31 inch inside leg. Size 8 feet. 16 and a half inch collar. Hat size 7 1/4. Wedding ring size Q. My hairdresser says that my hair is 'dark blonde', although I've always called it mousy brown. My eyes are somewhere between brown and green, so I usually say they're hazel. In the last two and a half years I have developed eczema for the first time in my life – but I only get it on my feet. Over the same period I have also developed hayfever. After a couple of seasons saying 'but it can't be hayfever – I don't get hayfever', I finally went to the doctor he told me that actually I do get hayfever now. I have developed an allergy to tree pollen, so I get hayfever in the spring, rather than the summer. I have a mild obsessive compulsion which means I can go back to double, triple and even quadruple check whether the back door is locked whenever I leave the house. I prefer coffee to tea I prefer bitter to lager I prefer red wine to white wine I prefer gin to whisky I prefer sparkling water to still I prefer plain chocolate to milk chocolate I don't like: olives 1 2

Cf. www.musicomh.com/theatre/lad-lit.htm. All the extracts quoted from The Lad Lit Project are taken from the unpublished manuscript made available to me by courtesy of Third Angel. © Third Angel 2005.

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cucumber celery marmite or peanut butter

This introduction strikes a familiar note with anyone who is into lad literature. Facts are neatly arranged into individual bits of information, as trivial and unnecessary as they may sound. It is this urge to make an inventory of one’s life, of what one looks like, of things that one has, things one likes or dislikes –that makes the genre immediately recognisable to the ladlit fan. As I have argued, these personal inventories are part of the confessional mode and are a preferred way to introduce the confessor as an average, male, human, being with natural likes and dislikes. Apart from the chapter on friendship which I will discuss further below, the beginning is the only part that is delivered as a first-person narrative; for the rest of the play the second person address is used which lends the rhetoric a rather different tone. The use of the form ‘you’ suggests that the experiences related are common and thus easily recognised by the audience. It is important to note that the audience addressed is exclusively male even though at least half of the people who went to see the play were female. During the performance of the play, this first glimpse into male obsessions elicited a lot of laughter from the audience, the majority of which I assumed were avid readers of male confessional novels and true fans of ladlit. Kelly is one such fan himself. In his personal notes which he kindly made accessible to me, he tells how The Lad Lit Project started: A couple of years ago a friend of mine, my oldest friend in fact, one of my gang, one of the lads, sent me an email in which he said “You have to go and buy White City Blue by Tim Lott, man, it’s about us“. So I went straight out and bought it […] and started in on the bus on the way home. It describes a period in the life of the narrator, Frankie Blue, in his early 20s. He’s still hanging around with the gang of mates he’s had since school, since he was a teenager. But he’s coming to realise that maybe he has changed and this group of friends don’t have as much in common as they used to. He’s trying to juggle his life with his girlfriend and his old loyalties to his mates, and these don’t seem that compatible. But what is most important to me, and to Boris, who recommended the book to me, was that in Frankie and his mates I recognised myself and my mates at the age of 19 or 20. Okay, it’s set in London rather than Walsall, they play golf rather than Dungeons and Dragons, and there are four of them when there were five of us. But other than that it was like I was seeing

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a snapshot of our lives together, the way we behaved with each other. Frankie’s mates even seem to correspond to my mates. Frankie begins to question whether he’s still friends with these blokes because he actually has something in common with them, or just because he has been mates with them for so long. And this is a feeling I recognised, that we had talked about from time to time. If you met one of your old mates now, as a stranger, would you actually get on with them? Would you want to be friends with them? What makes us friends with each other? At what point does an acquaintance become a mate, a mate become a friend? When you move on from one chapter of your life to another, do you choose which friendships come with you, or does it just happen?

As we can see, The Lad Lit Project grounds in personal experience. This is experience is twofold. First, Kelly and his friends share the same adolescent background; they went to school together and were part of the same group of friends. Secondly, they recognise themselves and their gang of friends in White City Blue, a novel I discussed intensively in Part II. Like Frankie Blue, they too have asked themselves what their male friends mean to them and whether it makes any sense to keep up their friendship after having reached maturity. Despite the difference in location (North versus South) and in their preference for games (Dungeons and Dragons versus golf), they still think they share the same experience with Frankie and his friends who grew up at roughly the same time. What is also noteworthy is Kelly’s analogy between novels and life: they are made up of chapters, we experience them as structured by chapters, and as the saying goes, we close chapters or open up new ones. In short, life and reading are organised chronologically and it is important to move on, the very thing most male protagonists in the novels discussed are not particularly good at because their main forte lies with revisiting the past. When reading a book, we do not necessarily have to read in a linear way; we may skip a chapter or go back to one we particularly liked or could not entirely understand at the first attempt. In everyday life, we cannot skip chapters, but we can go back and reminisce about what life was like ten, fifteen years ago. This is what realist fiction like the male confessional novel does; it allows the reader to make an inventory of his or her life, to think about what is important and what is not, and therefore aids the reader to reconstruct or reconfirm his or her identity. As far as The Lad Lit Project is concerned, what is particularly interesting is the exchange of mutual experiences through the exchanging of books:

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Every once in a while now, Boris and I will give each other one of these books, Lad Lit it’s called. The author is always taking a look at an important period in his narrator’s life, a time of change, of transition. The End of an Era. There’s always a gang of comedy mates. Always a girl. The Girl. To be worshipped from afar. Or to be missed. Or to be taken for granted. To not get on with his mates. He’s usually got a crap job that he can’t stand, or something else that he needs to move on from. The mates always meet in a particular pub, and the narrator will usually remind us that pubs are important because drinking with your mates is important, getting drunk with your mates is important; pubs are where male friendships are cemented. He talks about loyalty, about thick and about thin. Pranks are played on enemies, and on friends. Alcohol is consumed. The Piss is Taken. Tables are Turned. A betrayal occurs. Something goes wrong. Something that cannot be talked about. Skeletons shoved into cupboards to gather dust and then they are dragged out a few chapters later. Records are set straight. Decisions are made and choices are taken. Old chapters are closed and new chapters are begun. […] [T]he narrators can look back with the benefit of hindsight, with wisdom and maturity, on the follies of their youth. Which in turn is an excuse to revel in stories of boozing, shagging, juvenile pranks and practical jokes, dares, youthful obsessions, (mis)adventures and misdemeanours, and then say, but we’ve grown out of all that now! And the trouble is, I’m kind of addicted, I mean, some of them are awful. Sometimes all of the characters are hateful: selfish whingers and whiners, boorish arseholes, unreliable dickheads, idiots with shit in their eyes. […]. And yet these books still speak to me about my life. No. Scrub that. These books speak to me about a particular period of my life. A part of a particular period of my life. So, what I want to know is: what is it about that period of my life, that I can’t let go of yet?

What becomes clear from Kelly’s notes is that, as I have shown when presenting my analysis of the readers’ reviews in Part II, male confessional writing usually evokes a high degree of recognition and identification. Even though the experiences had by one young man may differ from those had by the next, they nevertheless share a common structure. “These books speak to me about a particular period of my life” Kelly says. The books are not about his life, and yet he recognizes his life in them. In short, the life stories, factual or fictional, express a shared structure of feeling. Kelly extracted the structure of such stories, which he collected over years by talking to men with different experiences, and again, there seemed to emerge a common pattern. The chapters written on the basis of these true stories intersect with the general ladlit chapters

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such as the one quoted above, which together, almost make up a typical male confessional novel. As I have emphasized several times, ladlit is highly generic, and the basic structure, or formula as Kelly terms it, is usually quite similar: […] If you read a few examples of it [ladlit, ao], it doesn't take long to spot that it usually works to a pretty clear formula. A gang of mates. A crap job. A girl. A pub. A particular time and place. A good helping of nostalgia. A dilemma. A betrayal or a secret uncovered. A decision made. The End of an Era... The author is usually in his 30s, and the books often read as semiautobiographical. Some of them are great. Some of them are awful. But I got kind of addicted to them. They spoke to me about a part of my life, part of my past. I began to wonder if I could fit my own life story into the Lad Lit formula, and this project started with me trying to do that. The answer was no. So from here I asked myself, how would I tell my life story? I became interested in how other men view their lives. How would they tell their life stories? What would they call the chapters in the unwritten books of their lives? What stories did they want to tell? And these are some of the questions that we set out to explore.3

The Lad Lit Project is more than a play, i.e. the play is just part of the project since Third Angel have only used part of the material they gathered. Some of the chapters based on the stories provided by the informants are rather bleak including fights, terminal illnesses or the ordeal of a Resistance Soldier in the Second World War. By interchanging these specific ‘real life’ stories with those which are, strictly speaking based on the ladlit formula but ground in real life experience as well, on a more general level, revolving around going to the pub, drinking, watching football and wooing ‘the girl’, The Lad Lit Project at the same time reproduces and deconstructs ladlit. In what seems an endless list, those general and specific experiences are enumerated. The following is a shortened version of that list: What do men do? They… Watch the football; take the piss; take things too seriously; don't take things seriously enough; listen to music on headphones; down pints; read on the toilet; drive too fast; drive whilst drunk; fight; watch other men fight; open jam jars; cook; look out for their mates; flirt; keep phone conversations short; imagine being able to fly; imagine being able to turn invisible; fix

3

From Programme Notes, Alexander Kelly, January 2005.

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things; get depressed; feel lonely; eat some toast; wonder who they are; act on impulse; show off; fix cars; struggle to accept hair loss; buy gadgets; avoid work; make compilation tapes and CD's; drink too much; eat too much; walk around like they own the place; go to sleep during arguments – if they're allowed to; build homes; piss in the sink; piss in the fireplace; get (unnecessarily) competitive; pick their noses while driving; think about things rationally; hang around in gangs; wash the car; watch films; buy magazines; beat their wives; refuse to ask for directions when they are lost; say ‘that’s not what I mean’; look at pornography; worry about the size of their penis; forget birthdays; write lists; make maps; start wars; sign treaties; invent things; ejaculate; reminisce; pick their teeth; give farts marks out of ten; say ‘If I were you….’; grow beards; shave them off; get erections on public transport and secretly enjoy them; do press ups; whinge; daydream; straighten their ties; straighten their hair; play with kids’ toys; jiggle their bollocks; stare at women’s breasts; try not to stare at women’s breasts quite so much; drink themselves into temporary impotence; try to solve your problem even when you haven't asked them to; swear at inanimate objects; swear at strangers in the street; swear at referees; say ‘you like that don’t you’; fall in love; go to clubs; pay for sex; hurt your feelings; make women pregnant; pat each other on the back; cuddle their pillows; take their time; read the news; wait for their wives; wait for their children; wait for their chance; make excuses; make weapons; make speeches; go to board meetings; eat the last biscuit; imagine having sex with someone else.

If one has a closer look at that list, we can see that it first includes a lot of male stereotypes and gender prejudices such as driving too fast, swearing or watching pornography. Secondly, some of the entries clearly allude to traditional, patriarchal structures and a clear-cut division of labour, such as inventing things, signing treaties and starting wars. We then have thirdly quite a number of things we recognise from the male confessional novel: listen to music on headphones and make compilation tapes (Rob Fleming), drink too much and show off (Frankie Blue), write lists, make toast and whinge (Will Kelly), avoid work and buy gadgets (Will Freeman), daydream and refuse to ask for directions when they’re lost (Gabriel Jacoby), go to sleep during an argument and feel lonely (Benjamin Duffy), act on impulse and hurt your feelings (Harry Silver); play with kids’ toys and get depressed (Michael Adams) etc. This mixture between stereotypes, obsessions, bad habits and general observations – apart from producing a comic effect that triggered a lot of laughter from the audience – reads like an indictment. The defendant is not an individual man, but the male collective, i.e. manhood as such. By drawing on the irony that is characteristic of the male confessional novel, the indictment may also turn into a defence speech to guarantee the verdict ‘not guilty’.

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As we have seen in Kelly’s personal notes, friends are very important to him. Friendship is the basis on which he started the project, and friendship is one of the major themes in the book that triggered the ideal, White City Blue. In the play, there is an extensive chapter on friendship which is highly reminiscent of Frankie and Veronica’s discussion in White City Blue: Because if I look back at my life I can see that I've always had a gang; not the same gang, obviously, but there has always been a core of close friends around me. And I think about how my friends all fit together, as groups and as individuals. I think about how I can know two people really well, but how they’ve never met each other; and I wonder if those two people know two different versions of me. And I like to imagine all of my friends in a big diagram in my head, in fact, with lots of different categories. And the categories all overlap, and I move people from one category to another as relationships change. I start with My Gang, and outside that I've got my entire Social Circle of friends and acquaintances. I have a category for my Work Friends. And a separate category which is Work Mates – because these are people who I can get on with at work, but I wouldn't risk going to the pub with them because I know that conversation would run out after about 20 minutes, it would all be a bit awkward. Over here I have School Friends – who I have chosen to stay in touch with. And this has a sub-category, which is Friends Reunited Contacts – people who have emailed me through the Friends Reunited Website and said – Hi there, remember me? What are you up to these days? And I've thought – That's nice, and I've emailed them back and I've never heard from them again, because they've realised that they are not that interested. I've got Couples Friends – double dates. Then I've got my Girlfriend's Friends – who I like, and enjoy seeing them, but I wouldn't ever arrange to see them without my girlfriend being there because that would just be weird. There's also my Girlfriend's Older Friends – who know her from other aspects of her life, and most of them are preme, and when we see them they talk to her like she's the person they first got to know, not the person she is now, and that's very irritating. Friends' Partners. Now some people in this category will move into other categories as I get to know them better – probably Couples. But at least one person will only ever be in this category because I just don't like her very much. And I don't get on with my friend as much since he's been going out with her, because I go round to see him, and she's always there, and I'm trying to talk to him and she's saying things like – Well, we think this, don't we honey?

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Over here I've got Friends Of Friends, people I would like to know better, but with a couple of them I have a sneaking feeling that they don't like me quite as much as I like them, but the main problem is simply that I don't have their mobile number, so I can't invite them to things, and I have to wait for our mutual friend to invite us to the same thing before I can even speak to them again. Over here is a Bloke Who Really Likes Me, and would like to be friends with me but I just don't have time to be friends with him. This guy I have got time for because this is my Friend Who I Really Like But Who None Of My Other Friends Can Stand, so I have to arrange to see him on his own. A complicated category: Ex-Girlfriends – now a couple of people in this category are genuinely close friends now, but there are one or two people in here who I am still in touch with because I have this idea that they never quite got over me, and they still fancy me a bit and that's good for my ego. There's also a sub category here, Flings, a friend I got drunk with and had sex with one night – but it's not a problem, we can laugh about it now – or there's the girl from work who I went home with one night, and the next day it was – Hello, saw you naked last night but we're not gonna talk about it are we… no we're not! And we've never acknowledged it since. This is My Special Friend – who is a woman, but there's nothing 'going on' – I think of her as the sister I never had – she doesn't know that many of my other friends that well, so there's a bit of distance, which is good, so we can confide in each other – but it's completely platonic. Ex-Friends – still mates, still like them, but we're just not as close as we used to be; it's like our friendship went in at Number 1 then slowly drifted down the charts. We still see each other occasionally, and we always have a really good night, and at the end of it we always say – We really must do this again sooner next time, and we always mean it, and it's always a year before we see each other again. This last category overlaps with 5 or 6 other categories, too, and there's probably just one person in each of the overlaps, because these people are My Closest Friends – the people I rely on, the people I turn to for advice, and who won't take the piss out of me too badly – at least not until the problem is sorted out. With these people I might see them every week, or just twice a year, but I know they'll always be there. I think that's it. I have got all this worked out on graph paper, with different coloured pens and a nice key in the bottom right hand corner…

Friends are important to men for they provide a mirror which reflects their strengths and their faults, their prowess and their insecurity – in short, their masculinity. Male friends both challenge and reaffirm men’s masculine identities. In case of the latter, the familiar gender

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identity script may be kept, whereas the former, an alternative one must be chosen. Taking an inventory of friends seems to be rather common among men; Frankie Blue in White City Blue is a specifically good example, but so is Will Kelly in My Legendary Girl Friend who has no friends to go out with for a pre-birthday drink and who feels so embarrassed about that shortcoming that he invents friends to boast of when he is talking to his younger brother for whom he is supposed to set a good example; or Michael Adams in A Best A Man Can Get, who leads a double life so that he can have some quality time in male-only company. The characters in Hornby’s novels, Rob Fleming and Will Freeman are not particularly good examples as they do not have a close circle of friends, apart from Rob’s work mates to whom he connects solely on the level of music. As my analysis of the male confessional novel has shown, the question of masculinity and masculine security is intrinsically linked to the question of belonging and fitting in. Being an acknowledged and estimated part of the gang one hangs out with is just as important as professional success and a satisfying relationship. There are different categories of friends, a fact which the above extract makes obvious in a detailed way. A best friend differs from a friend at work; a business partner cannot be trusted in the same way a childhood mate can. The friend(s) in whom men confide their first romantic encounters are trustees whereas trophy friends are supposed to smooth the path for professional and personal recognition and fame. Against the background of the argument underlying my thesis, masculinities are temporary and identity scripts that are subject to alteration and renewal, not in the sense that men ascribe to one, get tired of it and exchange it for a more suitable one. Men perform masculinities – and so do women for that matter, but that was not the subject of this book – and they alter their scripts not only to their personal preferences, but also according to social encounters and contexts. They might be the cool drinking buddy with one male friend, the cynical misanthrope with the guy they watch the football with, and the soppy romantic with a childhood friend. Despite the stereotypes that circulate in our cultural discourses – some of which undoubtedly find their validation in everyday life – there is a whole number of masculine identity scripts. The Lad Lit Project’s success boils down to exactly this: it leaves space for the particular in the light of the general. Men might display a tendency for picking their nose while driving, annoying anybody who observes them or is forced to sit next to them, and they may lack the emotional articulation to express their feelings and instead give their loved ones a compilation tape, but are these shortcomings specifically and intrinsically male? Empirical observation and statistics are just one way to get an insight – the individual experi-

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ence is something quite different. Women have been politically and openly aware of their gender for forty years now; men have only just realised that they have a gender, too.

APPENDI X: I N T E R V I EW

W ITH

NICK HORNBY

Recorded on 2 December 2005, Highbury Hill, London Transcription: January 2006/AO1

AO: In the introduction to ‘Fever Pitch’ you mention that football offers all sorts of information about our society. What do you think is the role of books in that sense? What kind of information do they offer us today? NH: Well I think books still remain the best way to find out about culture and society. Maybe not directly because books cannot always be trusted. But literature is still capable to impart information about culture and society and is still superior to cinema and television throughout. AO: I’ve noticed that most protagonists in your books are concerned with the question of belonging and fitting in, and even more so, with the question of being average in the sense that they feel they should have been successful whereas they are just in average jobs, even in crappy jobs sometimes. They are struggling with routine and boredom while at the same time seeking a big change. They want to find the job, the woman etc. Do you personally think that writing and reading books help us to come to terms with the awareness of being average? NH: Well, I think in some ways it’s one of the most important questions, i.e. problems because when we are children we all think we are special, and children never say I’m going to be an accountant; it’s always film stars and musicians, and this goes on until our teens maybe even early twenties, and then I think a sign of true maturity is to ac1

The transcription is an authentic rendition of the recorded, live interview, wherefore the language use does not always comply with the rules and regulations of academic discourse.

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cept that this isn’t going to happen. But actually I think that this is one of the big problems about artists because we trust them to impart information about the world because they never have been able to do this. I think there is always something childish about writers and musicians and so on because they have never let go of this idea that they are special. Maybe they are special but maybe they are not special, but no one knows at the point at which they started their carreer. So I think it is a problem with all art that it is basically maturity. I think people appreciate reading about these things. I personally get very frustrated with novels that are about special people, or clever people. I mean, it seems to me that there is a disproportionate number of books for example about academic life and these books of very articulate people being very articulate, and I’ve never understood the fascination of these varieties because to me a part of the challenge is to write about people who are less articulate. In a book maybe they cannot express themselves directly but you can provide a shape in which they can. AO: I think this was particularly striking in “About a Boy” because there the roles of the adult and the child are sometimes reversed because the twelve year old Marcus sometimes comes across as much more mature whereas Will knows which tools to give to Marcus in order to act like a twelve-year-old. NH: That was something that interested me when I was writing the book that Will’s skills, as it were, to be an adult were those to teach someone how to be a child. AO: So in a way one could say that the book is about losing something in order to gain something, which I find really interesting, and I was wondering – well, I know how you came to write your latest novel – what exactly was the background of “About a Boy”? NH: Well, the two characters came from […], well, Will I think really came from men’s magazines in a way because when I was writing the novel they hadn’t existed that long, you know Esquire, FHM and things like these, and […], and they always struck me as very strange, these magazines because I couldn’t think of any men who were like the men represented in these magazines because they seem to have a fairly high disposable income, there’s no sense of having family problems, there’s no sense of having boring jobs, they are entirely aspirational. So, really, Will was sort of a composite picture of a kind of person who might actually read these magazines or feel directly spoken to by these magazines, which meant in some way that he was not a realistic character but I thought that he might be the only possible

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kind of person who could step from the pages of these magazines. And then there is a sort of cleanness about it, a lack of emotional complications and mess, you know, a clean life in a clean accommodation, these beautiful gadgets, these beautiful suits and they don’t teach you how to deal with life at all. So that was one idea. Marcus came from teaching. There was one boy I taught who was sort of hyper-articulate and everybody hated him at school. He actually came from a South-African military background and his parents had left the country because they didn’t like the way the country was being run by the blacks, so you can imagine what kind of background he must have come from. … I exchanged this culture with the kind of hippie culture and yes, I wanted to write about the question of fitting in. When I was at school, I was very conscious of the fact that I fitted in very well because when you’re interested in music and football, it is almost impossible not to fit in. So if you take that away from somebody, all the other skills you have, talents and intelligence, count for nothing at all. So I wanted to find a way to make these characters collide and so I put this mess that is Marcus into Will’s clean flat basically. There is a “place” in the book where Will says that I’m always accused of being selfish, but why can’t I be selfish when there’s only me? And there was a kind of serious point to that but there is a great pressure for people like that to come forth but no one can come up with a very good idea why they have to have children. There is a very important notion of being mature. One problem Will has is that he cannot shut the door on the world because the world comes through and how ever much he tries to keep the world out, it will find a way to get into the flat in some way. And then on top of that, Will can’t live comfortably because he himself has achieved something very special, but because a very long time ago his father wrote a Christmas song that had become very popular. If he had, for example, written a bestseller novel, that would have a completely different story, so in a way he is famous, but famous only in the margins, so that again gives him something realistic. He is special but not as special as he would like to be, which I think is quite a nice way of getting him the chance to become real. AO: It’s funny you mention men’s magazines because I think there is a sort of connection in terms of the assumed revival of laddish culture which academics often take to be an answer to second and third wave feminism, a backlash even. Do you think that books like yours and those by people who copied the genre in the 1990s, along with films like “The Full Monty” or sitcoms like “Men Behaving Badly”, do actually give us an insight into what was going on in the mid-1990s? NH: I’m not sure. I mean, to me, these things were nothing new in the sense that I believe men behaved that way in the 60s and 70s. There

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was an explosion of the media in the 1990s, I mean they were no glossy magazines about rock music until the 1990s. But this does not mean to say that there was no interest in rock music then. To me, it was much more about the media discovering niche markets. When I think, for example, of the Sunday newspapers, at the beginning of the 80s, they were smaller then than the daily newspapers are now, and I don’t know how many extra thousand words are published per week compared to the 80s, and there were not so many women’s magazines either, and magazines like Hello! and glossy celebrity magazines. I think connecting these developments with what was going on is a mistake because the thing that was happening was an explosion of media rather than an explosion of interests because there has been an interest in celebrity, ever since there was celebrity and in that respect, there was nothing special in the 1990s. AO: You’re probably right. But how about gender relationships? How about the concept of the New Man or the New Lad? I’ve always thought that there’s a sort of gender negotiation going on, in books and well, in the magazines you mentioned at least to some extent for men were suddenly expected to behave differently from their fathers. NH: Well, I think that’s true. Men in the 1990s are different form the men in the 40s or 30s. But then again I think it is more complicated that any of these labels. Because if you look at something like the New Lad, that means basically women, football and drinking which again, is not a new ideal. I think what was new is serious media, like for example the book, paying attention to these things. This was regarded as not a proper subject for books. The same goes for sitcoms. Formerly, sitcoms had been made by middle-class, university-educated men who portrayed a very cosy middle-class life. The changes in education in Britain after the war meant that all kinds of different people started to work in the media, started to write books, which formerly was considered to by a gentleman’s profession, possibly until Penguin was invented, in the sense that you couldn’t really make much of a living from writing books unless you had another income or unless you wrote an enormous bestseller. So I think that all of these things in the 90s actually were reflecting things that had started to happen in the 60s. I remember when Fever Pitch came out it looked like that now that a middle-class person writes about football, all the other middle-class people suddenly show their interest in football, but actually what happened was I think that football had become classless. When I was a child, when I was eleven years old, George Best was a pop star, and there had never been a footballer like this before, and of course when you’re eleven, you’re interested in the one, the glamorous one, you know, the one with the long hair, and it stopped to be the

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working-class game when people like George Best were shown on television. So this is, you know, 1966, 1967, twenty-five years later, all of these boys are working in television, or are writing books, or are writing for newspapers, so it looks like suddenly, the middle class is interested in football, but the seed had been planted in the 60s, and it looks as if suddenly all these men are writing about, you know, making up these magazines and there is a conflict between New Man and New Lad. And in these very crude terms, and I think they are extremely crude because what is happening with men is more complicated. I think that every man I know is a New Man and a New Lad, and it’s natural too. But they are absolutely expected to be much more part in bringing up children than their parents’ generation but they still are still interested in football and they still find a baby sitter and go out to drink beer. It’s a much more classless society than it was and even now I think what the media think of as being middle-class still refers back to a long time ago when as middle class man you went to a private school and maybe you were brought up by your nanny. So I think they are very complicated issues but my guess would be that it was this accumulation of changes that haven been happening ever since the war. AO: Do you think the concept of “relationship” has changed? I’m also thinking of the characters in your books. Rob, for example, is very much concerned about relationships, when he comes up with this list of the five most memorable split-ups at the beginning of the book. NH: I think there was a time when marriage was not so important in terms of what space it took up in your life. Obviously it is a matter of responsibility, but I get the impression that women were much more an adjunct to a man’s life whereas now marriage is a partnership, the woman’s also supposed to be working, and there’s a mutual responsibility in terms of childcare. It is more complicated for men, and I’m quite sure that some men look back to the 30s, I mean you didn’t even have to be at the birth, it was a dreadful thing for men, watching your partner in terrible pain, probably thinking I wish I could be outside with a cigar like my dad. But I think the thing about the New Lad thing that has always confused me is that there is a big celebration of masculinity, and I think the reality is that men are far more confused. I think that one thing that High Fidelity and Men Behaving Badly have in common is that the men are actually all a bit pathetic. I mean if laddism means anything then it means celebration of these things, and none of these men, in the sitcom or in my book are celebrating anything. They find being a man difficult, the women are stronger and smarter, and they’re in a mess and confused and don’t know their role.

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AO: They’re kind of obsessed with self-pity, with this sort of feeling “I could have been special but the world has just been very nasty to me, which is not my fault and beyond my power to change.” This is the thing that has always struck me; this obsession about finding a possible outlet for this sense of being special, i.e. seeking a dramatic change in your life but there is no commitment, or it is transferred to what I think, or at least this is how I read “High Fidelity”, for example, to archiving, collecting records and making lists and that sort of thing in order to escape the dreariness of everyday life. NH: Well, I think the thing with High Fidelity is, also, that their choice to catalogue is actually emotionally very healthy because the characters in the book don’t really know how to articulate themselves, so they make lists. They are actually not responding in the way they feel to the music; they only respond in the only way they can respond. AO: I read “High Fidelity” as a metaphor for writing one’s autobiography, I don’t mean in the sense that you as the author write an autobiography, but the main protagonist does exactly this by archiving the record collection in certain ways, such as in alphabetical or chronological order. NH: It’s a way of making yourself special. You’re placing yourself at the centre of the narrative, in a way that you can’t in life. AO: I’m also interested in the labels that have been given to your books or to books that supposedly belong to the same genre. What do you think of the terms male confessional novel or ladlit? NH: Not very much. Well, I mean, these terms tend to be used for what I did first, or Tim Lott did, and then, you think I’m not writing another memoir, there’s nothing else to say, so now I’m going to write fiction. So somehow this career path, right, it’s kind of an interesting career path because it’s somehow new that you start with your autobiography before you turn to fiction. I think it’s a hangover in some sense, i.e. that people write a memoir first and then transfer the confession that is in the memoir on to the fiction. And I think the memoirs themselves are kind of interesting but, you know these books, like Tim Lott’s, mine or Dave Egger’s, I mean none of us were very pleased with our lives, so we were talking about something else and we overreact to things you share with other people but never add up to themselves. So that confessional memoir thing, I think, the novels, I mean all of these things, to me, if you look back at the history of literature then this it what the novel does, there is no point in a novel that doesn’t confess anything. The same applies to ladlit. I mean how

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come that Philip Roth and John Updike are never ladlit. When you read those books, I mean some of their attitudes to women for example, I think, they are far more problematic in Philip Roth and Updike than they are in ours, but then that’s proper literature, they’re never ladlit. AO: Maybe this has something to do with the kind of confession the different novels make. I mean when I was reading “Fever Pitch”, I came to understand what it really means to be a proper football fan, I mean, for a man. I remember where you’re wondering whether it was worse that the girlfriend has left or whether Arsenal didn’t win the Cup. I’m sure it’s a quite common dilemma, but the crucial thing is that you somehow made this sort of question socially acceptable, you took the stigma away, as it were. NH: Maybe. I think it should still be there though. I don’t think it’s great behaviour you know. You know what was interesting with Fever Pitch, I knew that when I was writing the book, these were feelings shared by people I watched the football with and I knew that an awful lot of people liked football and, you know, during the match you think “oh this must be true”. Of course I didn’t know that football would connect in quite the way it did but I could never see any reason why it wouldn’t connect. And the thing I thought at the time was that people wouldn’t overcome that disrespect about other people’s football teams. The thing that was interesting was that the first letters I got were from Arsenal fans, and then about four, five weeks later I started to get letters from up and down the country. So it doesn’t matter which team you support. AO: Yeah, I think it says in one of the blurbs that the book should be compulsory for Chelsea fans as well. I mean there’s something universal about football, isn’t there? I mean, something anybody who’s interested in football can relate to and of course, there’s a specific Arsenal interest. NH: Well, I was very careful in the way that I didn’t want to write a book that was slagging off other football teams because that seems pathetic, you know in the sense that “I like Arsenal because they are the best”, and “I don’t like the Spurs” etc. That what was not what the book was supposed to be about and it was, you know, I was quite careful in making sure that I was speaking for people who supported all teams and not just my own team, and it frustrated me to talk to football fans who can’t do that, you know people who can only talk about how good their own team is, even though it might be fifteen

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places below in the league table every single season. This is not a mindset I’m interested in writing about. AO: It’s not very sportive if you can’t accept that other people support other teams and that they want their teams to be successful, too. NH: Exactly. If you can’t accept that other people are feeling the same then you have no business being a writer anyway. What writing is about is to understand that people who are on the outside are different. AO: I’ve noticed that in Britain, almost everybody reads books. If you are on a train journey for example, you see all sorts of people reading books, like, for example, workmen in their overalls having a paperback in their top pocket and that sort of thing, which you are not very likely to find in Switzerland or Germany. I mean people there tend to read either Goethe or Barbara Cartland, if you know what I mean. But what’s in between, you know, what I call middlebrow fiction – I don’t know whether you agree with that term at all – I think in the German-speaking part of the world, this middle-ground is not covered. And I think in the UK, this is completely different. NH: Well, I think that’s interesting because when I began to write, it was quite clear to me that the middle-ground wasn’t covered in this country and it seemed to me there was nothing between you know Salman Rushdie and […]2 and to me, Roddy Doyle was important because those books, his first three especially, it seemed to me that they did start to occupy this enormous space between one end and the other. You know, in my own life, I don’t want to read boring books and I don’t want to read stupid books, and I think that was a constant problem for people. Well, actually, this is a very complicated issue. Certainly, the middle-ground, I don’t mind middle-ground because it seems to me that Jane Austen was a middle-ground writer, and Charles Dickens was a middle-ground writer and to me, middleground just means good. And the older I got, the more I thought about it, the more I had strong feelings about it. Well, yes, this is a new idea, it was a twentieth century idea that there was such a thing as highbrow fiction and it came with modernism, and you know in part modernism was designed because intellectuals were scared by people beginning to read, by the mass of people becoming educated, and they started basically to work in code so that they could only be understood by each other, and this development kept the mass of people out and there were all sorts of reasons, and this still goes on that idea if a book is interesting to read then it is by definition good and therefore highbrow. 2

Inaudible due to technical reasons.

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You know, if you have a look at the history of literature, all the literature that has survived and is valued and that is supposed to be highbrow literature. For example nobody would ever associate Charles Dickens with middlebrow literature because he is a hundred and something years old. But these were popular books and Dickens was read in huge numbers in monthly serials and I’d like to think that we have now started to cover some of the ground that was lost by modernism. AO: Ok. That’s a very interesting and feasible thesis. From a more continental perspective I tend to think that the reason why middlebrow fiction, in Britain, has got bigger again is twofold. First because of the invention of the paperback and, second, because of the typical British sense of humour, which is one of the most important ingredients of novels; well, it is one of the most important things to survive anyway. Do you agree? NH: Well, it’s true that non of the highbrow books contain real humour and it is probably very important to middlebrow fiction. AO: I was trying to think of any German books that could compete with their English counterparts, like your books for example, and I came across one, and it doesn’t actually compare. And I’m convinced that in the English language, there is some sort of an inherent humour which is absent in German. I also got this impression when I was attending the reading you did in Zurich. You know, the part that was read in German was not really funny, even though it probably was in the original version. NH: Possibly. It is difficult to compare. I’ve done that before with German readings and I think, you know, we’ve got basically two registers of language, and most countries only really got one, and you know, in the English language if you choose between Latinate words which tend to be the posher words and then the Anglo-Saxon words, then you can get something else going. In that way I think there is something inherent in the language that helps with humour. You know, in German, you only have the one register and you have these long compound nouns, and it sounds as if you were writing about the history of the second world war even if you’re writing High Fidelity. AO: Absolutely. And if you choose another register, it can come across as very coarse or harsh, self-conscious or too complacent. Again, I think there is this sort of middle-ground, also in the English language itself, that lends itself much better to writing novels that cover that part the modernists left out.

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NH: Well, I think American fiction has been good for that reason, it has been good for English writers because the Americans never had this problem of highbrow versus lowbrow. You know, their writers come from a specific tradition. If you think of Mark Twain, Hemingway and Steinbeck, and there is no debate about whether these people wrote proper literature, or what proper literature is, whereas here, there is a constant debate whether someone who writes in that kind of language can actually writer proper literature. AO: There is something you said in that interview for the a Swiss Sunday paper, I don’t know how you originally phrased it, but you probably said something along the lines that it is important to feel safe, or secure, in one’s own culture. Do you actually feel like that yourself, i.e. do you feel you belong to a specific kind of culture? You now, as a male, white British writer of a certain age etc.? NH: I think I’ve had a problematic relationship with this country, and there are a lots of things I don’t like about it and most of the books and music I consumed tended to be American rather than British. But there are a lot of things I like about this place. It’s more about knowing what’s going on, this is what I meant when I said you’re supposed to feel secure in your own culture. I think it might have been a question about writing a book set outside London. The reason why I wouldn’t do that is because I have a very detailed frame of reference here, and I think that kind of authenticity is important. It is important to readers even if they don’t recognise the actual references but even readers of German can recognise that these books are written by someone who actually knows […]3 even if it’s not your city. And if I wrote about a city I didn’t know, then I would lose the whole level of detail which I think is important to the work, and so that’s why I feel secure in my own culture in the sense I don’t feel cut off from it, I have my eyes and ears open to everything in this country in terms of culture and popular culture (sic). AO: So, do you think that this is a responsibility any writer should live up to, i.e. to give an authentic account on what’s going on even if it’s transferable to a certain extent? NH: Well I wouldn’t want to prescribe what writers do, and there are lots of writers who write about other things, history for example, but it would be a great shame if no writer wrote about contemporary culture.

3 Ditto.

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AO: You mentioned modernism. I thought when I was reading contemporary books like yours for example, that there was some sort of a revival of realism and, in way, that would tie in with what you’ve just said about being authentic. NH: I think books will die unless writers start to write, start to address mainstream culture. AO: Have you actually had encounters with your readers? Do you know who your readers are, and, if any, what sort of exchanges have you had with them? NH: Well, to a certain extent I know who my readers are from readings. There are all sorts of levels because you can look around the room and you always spot about four or five people wearing an Arsenal shirt and you meet about four or five people who want to give you a compilation CD. And there are always a couple of parents who have an autistic child. But this has changed with every book, you sort of retain part of your previous audience. It has changed during my writing career. I think the audience has got younger which I like. I think that more and more people have read the books and certainly there are many more women than there were. Now I think it’s 50:50 at least at the readings and it wasn’t like that with the first couple of books. AO: Do you think this might have to do with the change of topic or also you’re moving away from proper ladlit stuff? NH: Ah, I think partly, well, more women than men read novels anyway, men don’t read a lot of novels and this is a big problem for publishers because they’re always trying to find books that appeal to men. I did quite well in that way even if I’m writing something like How To Be Good, some men would read it. AO: Thanks very much for your time, Nick. NH: My pleasure.

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