CC BY
27произведений Джулиана Барнса демонстрируется, что современный любовный дискурс обладает диалогической природой и представляет собой множественные диалоги с множественным Другим. Место Другого занимает преимущественно читатель, как действительный, так и, в ряде случаев, вымышленный. Ярко выраженная диалогическая структура любовного дискурса связана с метадискурсивными стратегиями текста, преобладающим размышлением о феномене любви. Цель диалога состоит в совместном поиске смысла - поиске истины, красоты и гармонии.
Ключевые слова: любовный дискурс, анализ дискурса, диалог, Другой, Джулиан Барнс.
*
УДК 821.111-31
Hanif Kureishi's Novels as the Discourse of Identity
Boris M. Proskurnin
Perm State University, Professor
614990, Russia, Bukirev str., 15; bproskurnin@yandex.ru
The novel Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi represents a break in the author's preoccupation with post-colonial themes. Kureishi explores the sense of identity of his hero in Intimacy in terms which bring him closer to the English traditions of literature of self-knowledge and of satirical reconstruction of a social milieu. This essay examines the psychological treatment of the hero's painful journey to self-understanding.
Key-words: English literature, Kureishi, novel, identity, postcolonial, psychological approach, literary character, narration
Whenever critics of English Literature speak about post-colonial discourse they remember Hanif Kureishi and his works - the novels The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, his film for the screenplay of which he was nominated for the Oscar Prize - My Beautiful Laundrette, his short story - and the film based on it - My Son is a Fanatic, and other works. The majority of those who have written and thought about him stress his Anglo-Asian origin - half-English, half-Pakistan. That stereotyped approach to his works has dominated so much that eventually has limited the perception of the whole complex of the writer's ideas, and our understanding of
® Boris Proskurnin, 2012
his works' merits and of his artistic achievements.
In one of his interviews the writer points out: 'Whatever I've written about, it's all been about England in some way... <...> Everything I write is soaked with Englishness' (Kaleta, p.3). It is obvious though that the more non-Anglo-Saxon is his hero - look at his Karim from The Buddha or Shahid from The Balck Album - the more he worries to seek for this Englishness in himself.
But I suggest that we should look at his heroes from much wider than a postcolonial perspective: from the perspective of universal human values and general identity especially if we take into account that one the general themes of English literature from Shakespeare up to nowadays has been self-knowledge and self-understanding.
We may definitely say that the young heroes of Kureishi search after and regain the identity they lost before the narration starts. They explore various and different images of their selves; and these 'trips into oneself are the issues of the plots. This is one of the reasons why the elements of Bildungsroman are so strong in the novels' structures. The American literary critic Kenneth Kaleta rightly writes that 'Kureishi's heroes are eager to understand themselves through awareness of ones' identity to the world and others' (Kaleta, p. 144). And at the same time they do not want to be like the humdrum masses, they wish by all means and at any cost to protect their individuality, even if this defence brings some sufferings to those nearby or leads to ruining the hero's wellbeing.
Some critics assure us that 'gender, sexuality and ethnicity are the main categories for Kureishi's' heroes to identify themselves' [see Bart Moore-Gilbert). I think that it's true for the works which belong, by Sara Upstone's definition, to the first group of Kureishi's novels - posed-ethnic. In her British Asian Fiction. Twenty-First Century Voices she speaks about the second group as post-ethnic [Upstone, p.38).
Thinking about this division as quite productive, nevertheless, I want to draw attention to the very quality of ethnicity in the works of the first type. The moral issues which the heroes of The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album are preoccupied with, are externally racial and ethnical, but internally [i.e. psychologically and socially) are far beyond the limits of national identity. Eventually what the
heroes of The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album are engaged with, are of universal character and are not only ethnical or racial. What is more, as Nick Bentley points out in his Contemporary British Fiction, comparing Karim not with Kipling's Kim (as many critics liked to do) but with Dickens's Pip, in The Buddha of Suburbia we have a remarkable 'mixture of contemporary social commentary, sexual politics and youth culture' (Bentley, p. 161). Bentley stresses that this novel combines two genres, the Bildungsroman and the 'Condition of England' novel where the ethnic aspect is to sharpen and thus to dramatize the whole plot. I should add to that the role of pop and rock music cultures which helps to strengthen one of the leading conflicts of the novel - that of fathers and sons, where, in its turn, ethnicity being quite important nevertheless plays one, but not the only, role. Moreover, I should also add here Kureishi's interest in the depiction of his characters' process of self-analysis. There is a very remarkable moment in the novel when this idea is proclaimed not by a representative of Fathers - Haroon Amir, who in his arguing with his friend, exclaims: 'Anwar, don't you ever feel you want to know yourself? That you are an enigma to yourself completely?' (Buddha, p.28). In The Black Album, where ethnicity is challenged by the ideology of terrorism, the main thing that helps Shahid (the hero) to avoid militant anti-Europeanism is love, the universal feeling which is above all ethnical borders; the love-triangle that dominates the plot of the novel turns the whole narration aside from pure postcolonial discourse.
National and race identities are compulsory things when we speak about postcolonial discourse. In the book of Nick Bentley we read: '...one of the most important contexts for contemporary British fiction is postcolonialism, a term that encompasses a range of discourses and issues that relate to the construction of national identity, race, immigration and multiculturalism' (Bentley, p. 65).
National and race identities are, by my understanding, a part, quite important, no doubt, but only a part of the process which we call 'personal identity', and by which I mean (following psychologists' recommendations) 'a stable notion of oneself. This notion of oneself is procreated by two very well known in psychology mechanisms of self-consciousness - likening and intellectual self-analysis.
In Hanif Kureishi's novels, beginning with The Buddha of Suburbia, the narrator is trying to answer one crucial question 'Who and what am I?'. This question is a question of personality's essence in universal meaning. In his book Nick Bentley puts his discussion of this novel not in the chapter entitled 'Writing Contemporary Ethnicities', but in the chapter named 'Narratives as Cultural Space'.
I see here quite a noteworthy moment: for him (and I think for many British critics) Kureishi is a writer of cultural, i.e. more general, than ethnic, identity. As early as in 1985, i.e. five years before The Buddha of Suburbia and a year after his script of My Beautiful Laundrette, Kureishi wrote in an article for Time Out; 'If contemporary writing which emerges from oppressed groups ignores the central concerns and major conflicts of the larger society, it will automatically designate itself as minor, as a sub-genre' fCited in; Upstone, p. 40). What is more, Kureishi quite soon started to reject calling himself an Anglo-Asian writer. In the majority of his works - in the novels Intimacy (1998) and Gabriel's Gift (2001), in the collections Midnight All Day (1999), and The Body and Seven Stories' (2002), and even in the majority of his short-stories from the collection of 1997 'Love in a Blue Time' the main characters are white people or their race and nationality are not mentioned because it is not important for the idea and narrative policy of the author. Here I agree with Sara Upstone who thinks that Kureishi writes about British culture as a whole from within.
The novel Intimacy is in many ways the work which opens this 'new Kureishi'. In the novel the main character is concerned with the search for his personal identity, when he loses himself in the system of current social values. In the very beginning of the novel he characterizes himself as a person who is 'lost in the middle of my life and no way home' (hidden citation from Dante's Divine Comedy). One of the peculiarities of Kureishi's narration is openness and confessionary style; and he is not the only writer with such a style in contemporary British fiction; remember Martin Amis. Both Martin Amis (in his Ich-ezahlung or even in his Er-erzahlung novels) and Hanif Kureishi depict heroes who are remarkable by their full self-revealing narration.
Just the very beginning of the novel, metaphorically speaking, tunes us to the story of confession. The tradition of the plot's start
of such a kind is well-known in literature, for example. Ansichten Eines Clowns (1963) by Heinrich Boll, The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by Jerome Salinger, Therapy by David Lodge, etc. The hero is in the state of crisis and before readers' eyes he seeks for the way out of it. Kureishi's hero, as well as Boll's and Salinger's heroes, are, in addition, angry about the world around them, and this state of mind is increased by inner pain and understanding of their loneliness and alienation. Kureishi's heroes (in all his novels practically) resemble the 'angry young men' of Kingsley Amis or John Osborne, but they are provided with more explicit bravado of their cynicism,
Once again, in terms of narration, this search for one's own identity is a confession, and it corresponds with the tendency peculiar to the English literature of the final quarter of the twentieth century, when it was so responsive to 'being of a suffering man' (as one of the critics puts it out) Qumailo, p.ll). In such kind of narrative we usually have remembering and reflections, the chaos of forms of thinking, stages and states of mind which are both the way of narration and the means of revealing of the hero's consciousness's dynamic and of his moral feelings. As we show later, Intimacy is just the case when the structure of narration 'is mostly determined by the concept of individuality, acts as the means of psychological analysis. It seems that the aim of this analysis is just exhaustive reconstruction of the details and nuances of individual psychology. But at the same time it reflects the state of the world' [Leites, p.57).
In Kureishi's Intimacy the text of the novel represents the self-analysis of Jay, the hero, his analysis of life before the evening we meet him, and we do that at the moment when he, through real pain and sufferings, has already made up his mind to leave the woman, with whom he has been living for a decade, and, what is more painful for him, - to leave his two sons. It must be noted that the text is organized in the form of oral discourse, and it once again puts the novel in some solid confessional tradition of the second half of the twentieth century Quantum principle of artistic speech's structure is obvious even at the level of script: one prosaic 'stanza' is separated from another by a blank line. There are no chapters in this Kureishi's book; the narrative is organized as a series of 'clots' of lyrical experiences,
each cemented by a separate thought, emotion, mood. Quite often in accordance with the laws of oral speech, a 'quant' may consist just one sentence, for example, ‘Dear God, teach me to be careless'.
What we have in the case with Intimacy is a novel about a night of confessional summing up. The reader is put in the flow of the inner speech of the narrator, who all of a sudden even for himself makes a conclusion that despite his unwillingness he turns into a grown-up (as many of us remember that is the start-point for the novel of Nick Hornby About a Boy). This recognition of his becoming a grown-up occurs for a hero-narrator a sort of understanding that he has lost his selfness, that he is absorbed by the milieu which he used to think about as hostile. I think that some summing-up conclusions of the hero are remarkable in terms of the genre context: 'For most of my life, until tonight, I have been young'[Intimacy, p.115); 'I think I have become the adults in The Catcher in the Rye [ibid, p.116).
The content of thinking is nothing else but a reflection of the essence of time. Out of Jay's monologues it is easy to understand why he is so nostalgic about the past times: he is no longer 'young' (i.e. stormy, radical in change, frantic as it used to be in the end of the 1960s - beginning of the 1970s) and he is no longer achieving anything 'great and meaningful'. He asks 'What is wrong with maturity?' 'In the late sixties and seventies I did feel that I belonged to something, to other young people, and to some sort of oppositional movement. <...> I was too awkward to join things. But there is something I miss: losing oneself, yes, in a larger cause' (ibid, p.116). Kureishi depicts a hero who still lives with the ideas of rebelliousness of the 1970 s in his mind, and who understands that it does not correspond with the current times. But what makes the hero's situation more dramatic is his understanding that he has lost his courage to rebel and is full of compromises and foolish tolerance towards his present life, where he is supposed to be a successful well-paid, professionally and socially established person, happy with his fatherhood and comfortable family life. In this narrative of identity there is not a word about Jay's professional troubles; we only know that Jay is a prominent radio and film script writer. Intimacy is not a Kunstelroman, it's a novel about ontological torments, searching after life meanings: 'I am in at least three minds about all questions' - the statement given at the very beginning of
the novel. At the same time it's a novel about understanding oneself in the situation of a sharp and painful break with the idealized past.
The fact of 'oral presentation' of the process of confession and self-identification brings in more lyrical tunes and tones, the sincerity and openness of a person who revises his life. It means unrestricted movement of his mind from one temporal level to another. The novel is a temporally complicated narrative - past, present, future exist mixed together in it. Jay does not want just to show off; he tries to be as sincere as he can, at least for himself. He tries to be extremely honest in his analysis of his own feelings and states of mind which have brought him to the necessity to leave not only the family but himself, who dangerously, as he thinks, shamefully is used to comforts and wellbeing of his current life. Jay identifies himself through the rules of contraries: he keeps his attention on the things that he does not accept and does not like in himself and in his way of life he had before. In this respect Kureishi is quite close to 'the angry young men' of the 1950s with their emphasis on the negative and belittling of the positive; but Kureishi's discourse is more lyrical.
In this novel, as well as in the majority of his works, the plots of heroes' losses and gains personify their protests against dogmatism of current society, its ostentatious rightness, everything that has an English name of 'straight'. Practically all Kureishi's main characters are notable for their deviation from the norm (or what is generally is agreed to be a norm) in both social, national, sexual aspects: for instance the bi-sexuality of Karim from The Buddha of Suburbia or of the two main characters in his film My Brilliant Laundrette, or the romantic lover Shahid's inclination to violence in The Black Album, or the deviant social behaviour of Rex, the father of the title hero in Gabriel's Gift’. In this deliberate protest of Kureishi's characters against rigidly imposed norms, regularities and rules we should see the source of the author and his characters' angry rejection of Thatcherist social discourse.
Because the hero does not fit into current social life with its standards, order and social correctness, he is full of fear towards the present: 'Unfortunately, to get to the future one has to live through the present' [ibid, p.17), he states in the very beginning of the novel. He sadly notices that during the latter decade he has not
advanced in deciding on any serious question and that he feels himself running round as a squirrel in a cage. 'How can I move beyond this? I am moving out. A breakdown is a breakthrough is breakout. That is something' (ibid, p.44). Quite remarkable is the grammatical structure of the leading sentence in the phrase. Kureishi's characters when analyzing themselves and searching for their identities are doing that to begin a new life. They believe in the future and they are optimists in this respect. This is quite a crucial thing that differentiates the anger of Kureishi's heroes from that of the 'angry young men' of Kingsley Amis and John Osborne, and from a sort of protest cynicism of the protagonists of Martin Amis' novels.
Eventually, from one narrative 'quantum' to another there springs up the theme of love. It gets quite dramatic and at the same time, because of the confessional tone of the whole narrative, quite lyrical and exposed colours. Love is the thing which Jay lacks very much in the world of consumerism and the furious fight for success which his partner Susan and the like personify. More and more often, his mind addresses itself to remembering his dates with his girl-friend Nina. These recollections intensify rapidly, mostly because Nina, as he sees it, loves him without any terms and obligations. Kenneth Kaleta rightly argues that love, for Kureishi, is one of the most powerful means of identification. In this respect we must cite Jay's: 'Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately' [ibid, p.77). The last word is very challenging in terms of understanding the depth of Jay's inner fight in making his decision to leave his family, and first of all his two, much loved, sons. (There is a very powerful scene with his younger son in the novel which reveals the striking skill of Kureishi as a psychologist.) When we mean love and its role in the novel we may say that the whole plot of the book is enclosed in one phrase of Jay: 'In a hurry for love after all this time...' (ibid, p.70). That's why one of the key ideas is put in the question of Jay - a question to himself and to the world; 'Is it too much to want a tender and complete intimacy' [ibid p. 64). It is obvious that Kureishi puts not only sexual meaning into the title word - intimacy. Let's look at the phrase where Jay explains his principled alienation; to be alone is as much 'necessary to me as the Beatles, kisses on the back of my neck and kindness' [ibid, p.47). Throughout the whole novel the recollection
of his father's kissing of the back of his neck is mentioned as the brightest picture in his past. (There are no 'fathers - sons' conflict in this novel.) Because of that the pain which he brings to himself in leaving his sons, and the ways he reveals this pain show how strict and severe the hero is to himself while analyzing his life. What is more he inflicts on himself serious responsibility for the absence of love in contemporary life. He stresses quite insistently; 'not loving Susan I insist on seeing as a weakness, as my failure and my responsibility' (ibid, p.53). Just when his anger towards Susan was at its peak? Being deprived of her love, he exclaims; 'Susan, if you knew me you would spit on my face. I have lied to you and betrayed you every day' (ibid, p.109).
In other words, Jay is absolutely honest about himself, and his sincerity is beyond any doubt. By some specialists in 'oral narration' (Deidrick, Keulks, Lodge), the so-called 'oral narrator' induces his recognition by a reader. In the case with Jay, it happens due to the lyrical revelation of himself and uncompromising uncovering his contradictions and shortcomings. On the other hand, Jay is not rushing to tell everybody about his inner state; because of that he condemns his friend Victor who at any moment of his troubles is ready to hurry up to the psychoanalyst. Jay says of Victor: '...he hates me for being myself [ibid, p.63). Thus, one of the intentions of self-analysis which the narration of a confessional novel is based on, is to go back to oneself, to the very essence of oneself, to the ontological background of oneself, in order to start a new stage of life; at least it happens with Jay and with many personages of Kurueisi's works. His leaving the family Jay defines with the following words addressed to his friend: That would be the start, you see, of a new attitude' [ibid, p.102). He is sure that it gives him new belief 'in the possibilities of intimacy. In love...' (ibid, p. 106). When in the end of the novel he begins to live with Nina, we read a sort of summing up quanta; The best of everything had accumulated in this moment. It could only have been love' (ibid, p. 123).
So, to conclude we may say that the critical view of Kureishi as a writer dominated by the problem of cultural, and above all, racial, religious, and ethnical identification of an individual in the state of multicultural structure of contemporary Britain, is not adequate. In
the process of his creative life it is replaced by the issues of Englishness, which provide his works with more moral and even ontological tints. Sara Upstone writes in her recent work; 'To read Kureishi as an upholder of multiculturalism ... does not offer the most accurate rendering of his position. For Kureishi does not subscribe to the concept of multiculturalism as a toleration of individual communities and ethnic differences. (Upstone, 48). I think that we should read Kureishi as an interesting and a very talented successor of a leading tradition of English literature - that of depicting of a person who is in the deep process of self-analysis and self-understanding, who is in a dramatic search for his or her identity.
References:
Bentley N. Contemporary British Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
Джумайло О. За границами игры: английский постмодернистский романа. 1980-200011 Вопросы литературы. 2007. Сентябрь - Октябрь. Лейтес Н.С. Конечное и бесконечное. Размышления о литературе XX века: Мировидение и поэтика. Пермь: Пермский ун-т, 1992.
Kaleta К. Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller. Austin: Texas University Press, 1998.
Kureishi H. The Buddha of Suburbia. Penguin, 1990.
Kureishi H. Intimacy. Midnight All Day. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 2001.
Moore-Gilbert B. Hanif Kureishi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.
Upstone S. British Asian Fiction. Twenty-First Century Voices. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2010.
Романы Ханифа Курейши как дискурс идентичности
Борис Михайлович Проскурнин
Пермский государственный национальный исследовательский университет, профессор
614990, Россия, Пермь, ул. Букирева, 15; bproskurnin@yandex.ru
В статье анализируется роман известного английского писателя и киносценариста, ранее в отечественной англистике не рассматриваемый. Роман демонстрирует отход автора от преимущественно постколониальной проблематики. В нем писатель обращается к традиционной для него теме самоидентификации человека, что вписывает его в национальную традицию литературного
дискурса самопознания, с одной стороны, с другой - иронического и сатирического осмысления героем окружающего мира и самого себя в контексте времени. В произведении определенно просматривается перекличка с героем литературы «сердитых молодых». Оно отличается высоким уровнем интенсивности психолого-аналитического рисунка, свойственного английской литературе второй половины XX века.
Ключевые слова: английская литература; роман; Ханиф Курейши; психологизм; дискурс; «новые сердитые»; повествование; характер; постколониальность; нравственность
*
УДК 821.133.1+821.111
Игра с тождеством: испытание героя на прочность (сравнительный анализ романов Т.Готье «Капитан Фракасс» и Б.Ансворта «Моралите»)
Людмила Робертовна Татарникова
Забайкальский государственный университет, доцент 672039, Россия, г. Чита, ул. Александро-Заводская, 30; radmila66@inbox.ru
Статья представляет собой сравнительный анализ романов Теофиля Готье «Капитан Фракасс» и Барри Ансворта «Моралите». В этих произведениях, принадлежащих различным эпохам, странам и авторам, тем не менее, содержатся некоторые типологические схождения и параллельные мотивы, имеющие важное значение для понимания природы персонажей. Особенно это касается идентичности героя и его маски, метафоры театра как отражения реальности, рыцарства и его роли в культурно-историческим контексте эпохи. Автор также применяет положение М.М.Бахтина об авантюрном хронотопе, определяющим специфику художественного пространства и времени в романах и задающем тон в разрешении коллизий противостояния добра и зла.
Ключевые слова: игра с тождеством; маска; метафора театра; рыцарство; хронотоп авантюрного романа.
Идея взаимовлияния и взаимопроникновения театра и жизни, известная со времен античности, обыгрывалась во множестве художественных произведений. Это неудивительно: одним из самых популярных
сюжетообразующих приемов в мировой литературе является
® Людмила Татарникова, 2012
