of normal places

Ack! Every post gets longer. I will try to keep this last one more succinct.

The last critical article we looked at was Michel Foucault's "Of Other Spaces," wherein he assigns the term 'heterotopia' to a number of different cultural spaces. He defines these as places of otherness or difference, constituted by a set of temporal associations that are outside of "normal" ordering. It was noted in class that a recurring criticism of Foucault's concept is the difficulty of defining 'normality.'

It's interesting to think about suburbs in relation to some of the ideas Foucault discusses. They perform the function of bringing together disparate elements, notably 'country & city,' 'private & public,' 'work & home.' Yet unlike the theatre stage as a heterotopia, or the garden, suburbs don't merely place these concepts side by side, but attempt to meld them. In a way they are actually creative spaces, endeavoring to mythically reconcile conflicting ideas within a single context.

Furthermore, the temporality associated with suburbs expands beyond Foucault's requirements for a heterotopia. While places like libraries and museums are heterotopic because they accumulate layers of time within an immobile place, suburbs are seen as places where time actually is immobile. Conceptions of past and future are again creatively hybridized, engulfed in a sense of the endless present.

As his last point in a list of ever expanding examples, Foucault asserts that heterotopias "have a function in relation to all the space that remains." One way they can achieve this relation is to "create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled." He calls this type of space a heterotopia of compensation, citing certain Puritan and Jesuit colonies as examples.

I wonder if suburbs might be a more extreme example of the heterotopia of compensation. They are places that attempt to create order out of real space. They do so not only by ordering differences, but by blending, and essentially eradicating them. Maybe, then, suburbs aren't heterotopias at all, but represent the elusive 'normal ordering' that escapes Foucault's definition.

how to care for your fingernails

I have a small observation to make about some of the imagery at work in Jane Gardam’s The Queen of the Tambourine. It was mentioned in class that for most of the novel the central events go unnamed. Eliza’s miscarriage, her hysterectomy, and Henry’s affair with Annie are evident only through symbols that represent the traumatic events. One example of these recurring signs is Eliza’s preoccupation with fingernails. Her frequent references to her own and others’ “chalky half-moons” (73) hold an obscured significance that fluctuates throughout the book.

One way in which fingernails are significant is with regards to the trajectory of Eliza’s mental health. Upon the first signs of her growing obsession with the elusive Joan, Eliza proclaims: “’I understand Joan now to the ends of her fingernails’ … Looking at my own fingernails at this point, I noticed a strangeness in them” (42). If Joan is a manifestation of Eliza’s ‘Other,’ Eliza’s unfamiliarity with her own fingertips reflects her growing mental dissociation. In fact, many of her subsequent episodes and hallucinations are accompanied by a comment on the uncanny vividness of her nails. During her encounter with Dr. Hookaneye, she remarks: “I examined my fingernails and found them interesting. They had a hazy green line beneath each rim, pale, marine and eerie” (55). Similarly, on a particularly wild visit to the hospice she says of her fingernails: “They have begun to look unfamiliar lately” (109).

As the novel progresses, Eliza has a number of experiences that contribute to her growing sense of autonomy. She begins to speak up for herself and to take ownership of her place in the world. After the episode when she drops Annie’s sewing bag and Henry’s money into the lake, and gives a neighbour’s baby a bizarre baptism, the fingernail imagery changes. She now calls them ‘my nails,’ writing: “I shall have to cut these pretty flowers” (205). When Barry dies and Eliza admits that the hallucinations were all her own creations, her fingernails return to normal. She says: “I looked at where number thirty-four used to stand. Nothing. I examined my clean fingernails, thin white arcs” (224). The repossession and the renewed purity of Eliza’s nails corresponds with the return of her mental health.

While the progression of Gardam’s fingernail imagery in some ways reflects linearity in the plot, its use also contributes to the sense of circularity. The fact that fingernails are comprised of half-moons or circles, that they are associated with flowers, and that they may look immobile but are always growing, has a significance for Eliza's story, where growth and escape take place within a seemingly stagnant environment.

Furthermore, fingertips are a point of mediation between ourselves and the outside world. Though Eliza's experience of madness may have been triggered by external events, her reaction to those events takes what is internal and projects it outwards. Even as the disturbing changes in her fingernails reflect the toxicity of her secrets, their regenerative growth seems to carry it out of her body.

body politics

In his novel The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi associates display with the search for identity. Almost every character in the book struggles to define themselves, whether through the clothes they wear, the books they read, or the politics they support. One way in which Kureishi explores this link between identity and the physical world is through his portrayal of bodies, as characters exhibit different ways the body may be used to shape individuality.

For Jamila, the body is a site of political action. She exercises and trains her muscles through running and karate, "preparing for the guerrilla war she knew would be necessary" (56). Jamila's asserts her body in a way that challenges Haroon's belief that female children are produced by "weak seed" (57), making her father uncomfortable when he sees her on her long runs through the neighbourhood. Physical strength endows Jamila with an agency that allows her to dominate her life and relationships, as she continualy shapes her identity into what she wants it to be. She provokes in Karim the feeling that "she was so powerful ... so in control and certain what to do about everything" (55).

Interestingly, Anwar also uses his body for political purposes, using a completely opposite approach. In an attempt to force his daughter to obey his wishes, Anwar starves himself and deprives his body, proclaiming: "She must do what I say or I will die. She will kill me" (60). His actions, or inactions, provide an extreme example of the power of the body's visibility. As he grows thinner and thinner, Jamila is forced to make the decision to comply to her father's wishes. Without actually doing anything, Anwar is able to exert control, albeit in a way that is ultimately unsuccessful.

Karim provides a mediating example between these two extremes. He recognizes the potential of physical action, and respects Jamila's sense of agency, writing: "Like her I wanted to express myself physically in some way" (60). However, at other times Karim seems content to revel in the world of surface appearances, thrilling in the power of being looked at. He writes: "At that moment I glimpsed myself in a shop window and was pleased with what I saw. I had no job, no education, and no prospects, but I looked pretty good, oh yes" (99). Physical appearance allows Karim to manoeuvre among the world of artists and theatre directors, creating possibilities for him in the world of acting.

Karim's main advantage in the novel is his ability to move in and out of different ways of being. Perhaps gaining knowledge of the different ways bodies shape and can be used to shape one's character is another way in which Karim benefits from the fluidity of his identity, and constitutes a further possibility that may allow him to "live more deeply" in the future (284).

no future for you, no future for me

In an article entitled “Negotiating the Gnome Zone,” Andy Medhurst explores ways in which suburbia has been represented in British popular culture. While he undertakes an extensive examination of examples from cinema and television, he touches only briefly on a wealth of material in popular music that wrestles with the anxieties and contradictions of suburban life.

I am interested particularly in the relationship between punk rock and the suburbs. There is (or was [?]) perhaps no social ideology so opposed to the ideals of suburbia than punk, as evidenced by its subcultural style, music, and behaviour. Yet punk’s contempt for suburbia does not come from the removed perspective of some of its other elitist critics. As Medhurst keenly observes, “most of the groups who castigated the suburbs did so because they knew them all too well from the inside” (265).

In punk rock suburbia is portrayed as a kind of holding-pen. Songs like the Descendents’ satirical 'Suburban Home' echo the Kinks’ 'Shangri-La,' associating the suburbs with stagnancy and a sense of suffocation. Yet unlike many of the films or sitcoms that Medhurst describes, the source of suburbia’s oppressive force is not in a fear of feminization or in “threats from outside or below” (252), but from within. In this case, the culprits are “Mom and Dad.” I’m reminded again of Abigail’s Party, which deals with similar anxieties about the failure of the nuclear family. However, while in Mike Leigh’s play the loss of communication between generations provokes a sense of menace or fear, in punk rock the reaction is anger. (See also the somewhat melodramatic film Suburbia, by Penelope Spheeris.)

Another feature of suburbia that is expressed saliently in punk culture is its association with the inescapable present. Central to many suburban youths’ experience of punk is Medhurt’s depiction of “all those teenagers skulking in the bedrooms of Hendon and Beckenham, [latching] on to this as a sign that escape was possible, that glamour was attainable once suburbia had been transcended” (265). Only in the future, somewhere away from the suburbs, does it seem possible to really live. This vision of escape is so powerful that it often manifests itself as only a dream. Aaron Cometbus of Berkeley, California observes this difference between suburban and city punks:

Pseudo-city kids like me were always giving the suburban punks so much shit, but in a way they were more punk than any of us. They were more lost and fucked up. We were all kids of professors trying to be apathetic, trying to hide from the future. No matter how much glue we sniffed, we would never be able to lose our past. The suburban punks really didn't have any future. They didn't even have a past. (Cometbus zine #40).

Representations of suburbia in punk culture seem to evoke the desperation of George Bowling’s “mental squalor” at the end of Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (246). Suburbs are liminal spaces with “no future,” disconnected from or disillusioned with the past, while the present stretches endlessly on.

the anxiety of everyday objects

In his novel The Cement Garden, Ian McEwan creates a setting in which many of the aspects of suburban life that are conventionally considered to provoke feelings of safety, comfort, and familiarity, in fact provoke their opposites. In the world of Jack and his siblings, family life is disrupted by death and incestuous desire. The stability of community is removed by the destruction and slow decay of the surrounding houses and tower blocks, and the supposed reverie of childhood summers is portrayed as a festering wasteland of garbage and concrete.

In the absence of the stability that is meant to be provided by the orthodoxy of suburban life, a new context is created for even the smallest of things. Objects as commonplace as pipes, garden gloves, chests, mirrors, and bedroom furniture become disassociated from their former contexts and take on a sinister significance. In some cases inanimate objects become signifiers, and even take on the animate characteristics of their signified. This may be observed in the line “He replaced the pipe between his teeth like a missing section of his own anatomy” (11), and in Jack’s observation that “It struck me as funny at the time that [Julie] addressed the gloves and not me” (13). Repeatedly, similar uncanny instances provoke what Freud calls an “intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not.”

As the novel progresses, the sense of objects accumulating and encroaching intensifies to the degree where they mirror the tangling weeds and vines that Jack’s father once worked so hard to keep out of his garden. In the kitchen, “Cigarette ends, plastic cutlery, old magazines, coffee cups and spilt coffee hung untidily about the room.” It is a scene that reminds Jack of the fictional Space Commander Hunt’s reminder that, in this foreign environment, “we do not have gravity to keep things in their place” (82). Similar to the absence of gravity, the absence of certainty in Jack’s environment allows it to take on a dreamlike life of its own, where the familiar landscape of domestic objects is no longer predictable.

Perhaps in as far as McEwan’s novel sets up distinctions between order and disorder, the natural and the artificial, it also blurs them, by allowing the static minutiae of the everyday to take on characteristics of the incontrollable.

What it really means to be a fifth-wheel

As I was reading the text to Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party, I found myself drawn not to the louder and more obnoxious participants in Beverly and Laurence’s cocktail party, but to the obvious odd-one-out: the quiet and reserved Susan. In a number of ways Susan brings to the gathering a personality and set of life experiences that clash with her coupled hosts and the newly married Angela and Tony. In addition to her longer residence in the community and her older house, Susan is not only unmarried, but divorced, and is the only member with children. This token of Susan’s difference is ever-present throughout the play, through reference to the party her daughter Abigail is hosting just a few doors down.

However, while the foreignness of Susan’s lifestyle to the two couples is apparent to an outside observer, the other characters seem unwilling to acknowledge this difference. Rather, they attempt to suppress it, refilling her drinks and arranging pillows behind her back despite her obvious but ignored reluctance. Even when she expresses ideas in conversation that differ from her hosts’, she is met with stifling replies such as Laurence’s “Well, that’s a matter of opinion. Would you like another drink, Sue?” (40).

As the drama progresses and tension among the characters rises, the threat presented by this notion of ‘the other’ becomes more apparent. Laurence disappears from the scene at several intervals, at one point along with Tony in order to check on the gathering at Susan’s house, an idea with which Beverly is becoming more and more preoccupied. Their separate returns are never explained, and Laurence’s vague reassurances that "everything seems to be all right" (35), along with Tony’s mysteriously damp shirt only add to an unexplained threat. Among the gathering there is rising a sense of menace that is becoming associated not only with Susan's lifestyle and her daughter’s party, but with the increasingly apparent instability of each couple’s suburban lives.

When the tension finally culminates in an explosion between Beverly and Laurence, and Laurence’s subsequent heart attack, the disturbed nature of the initially demure situation is finally brought into the open. While the threat of the unknown had previously been attributed to things exterior to the tidy setting, as it had been with Susan and the omnipresent Abigail, the chaos in each of the other characters’ own lives can no longer be contained by their attempts to ignore it.

Perhaps Susan is the most intriguing character because in the suburbanites’ seemingly generic existence, she represents the link between the unknown ‘out there,’ and the unknown that exists just below the surface.

post number one

This is a student blog for English 382 at Simon Fraser University, Fall 2005.