It’s Not All in the Mind of Britain: Will Self’s Umbrella

Études Britanniques Contemporaines

卷:49

关键词: William Blake;    brain;    Thomas Carlyle;    condition-of-England-novels;    M. Foucault;    D. H. Lawrence;   

DOI  :  10.4000/ebc.2733

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

The article purports to discuss the connection between Will Self, the author of Umbrella and the condition of England question, in other words, it intends to focus on Self's fictional handling of the pathology affecting the body politic of England. An initial comparison, between Will Self the semiologist cum journalist (after the fashion of Roland Barthes) and Will Self the novelist (deep into anti-psychiatry and most conpiscuously obsessed with the reality and the imagination of disease) will shed light on the neurological and psychic condition of his characters, but of the English nation too. Unlike neuro-novelists, however, the author of Umbrella refuses to dissociate the case study of an individual (namely, Audrey Dearth), who is likely to stand for a human collectivity or a class (the working class, for that matter) from the great historical forces that have shaped the social fabric, for better or for worse, since WW1. Despite giving the appearance of souding like a Laing- or Foucault-inspired discourse, his novel relies on William Blake and D H Lawrence to denounce the ills of mechanization and alienation. Despite the presence of many modernist narratological devices, Self's novel is at one with the ethical concerns which were already those of his Victorian predecessors. Beyond its harsh criticism of technology (frequently of a military nature) Umbrella leaves pending the question if not of soul-searching—Self has no truck with bourgeois aesthetics—at least of care, of the kind of concern felt for and towards the most vulnerable. In the meantime, the question regarding the nature of the contemporaneous (with or without Agamben) remains a moot one.

【 授权许可】

Unknown