“Julian Barnes’s England, England and the Theme Park as Literary Genre”
It has been almost 30 years since Jean Baudrillard declared that “simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’” (5)1 and, as evidence, observed that “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation” (25). While this is obviously a rhetorical exaggeration, Baudrillard had a point, and it is this: that there is a trend towards the hyperreal—the blurring of reality and fantasy—in Western culture. From film and television to video games and theme parks, simulacra are becoming more prevalent and more integral to our lives all the time. Theme parks are perhaps the most ambitious, and often the most successful, products of the drive to create simulacra. The fiction isn’t just on a page or a two-dimensional screen. In theme parks, it’s everywhere—they are worlds unto themselves; the fiction is the reality.
For many, of course, simulacra are preferable to reality. Millions come to Los Angeles and Orlando, Florida, from all over the world not to see America but to see Disneyland and Epcot Center. These theme parks are the purest manifestations yet of American capitalism. They are not just places where we buy commodities and pay to go on rides. Instead, we buy access to an alternative, idealized world where every aspect of the experience is a commodity.2 With Disneyland, Magic Mountain, Universal Studios, and numerous other theme parks, Southern California is unquestionably the epicenter of such commodified simulacral worlds. And with the recent additions of EuroDisney and Tokyo Disneyland, it’s clear that the disease is spreading.
Ralph Cohen, an American literary theorist, has suggested that literary genres “arise, change, and decline” in response to specific social, cultural, and historical conditions (“History and Genre” 204;3 “Postmodern Genres” 19).4 I have noticed that a new literary genre which I call “theme park fiction” has begun to emerge. It is a genre that parodies our trend towards commodifying the hyperreal as manifested in theme parks.
What I’m calling “theme-park fiction” might be considered the offspring of a coupling between parody and the carnivalesque. There are many recent, notable examples of this genre,5 including George Saunders’ brilliant short story collections Civil War Land in Bad Decline6 and Pastoralia.7 In Civil War Land in Bad Decline, for example, a motley assortment of down-and-outs work low-level jobs in bizarre theme parks that showcase such things as the American Civil War, life among cave men, an orgiastic recreation of medieval times, a cow with a plexiglass window in its flank, and a collection of pickled babies.
Another prominent work of theme park fiction is Julian Barnes’s novel England, England, in which Sir Jack Pitman, a British media tycoon in the mold of Rupert Murdoch, undertakes the crowning capitalistic endeavor of his career: to convert the Isle of Wight into one gigantic theme park that is its own country—a simulacrum of England itself which will be rechristened England, England. (This is not as far-fetched a notion as it may at first seem. A precedent already exists in Disney’s new “California Adventure,” a distillation of the entire state of California into a 55-acre theme park.) The rationale for building the simulacrum of England is that it will celebrate and profit from what little remains of England’s significance—its history. Jerry Batson, one of Sir Jack’s most expensive consultants, suggests that the decline of empire has led to England’s relative insignificance as a political and economic power. He proposes that the one commodity England has left to offer the world is its history:
So England comes to me, and what do I say to her? I say, ‘Listen, baby, face facts. We’re in the third millennium and your tits have dropped.’ . . . The days of sending a gunboat, not to mention Johnny Redcoat, are long gone. . . . We are no longer mega. . . . But what we do have, what we shall always have, is what others don’t: an accumulation of time. . . . England . . . is . . . a nation of great age, great history, great accumulated wisdom. Social and cultural history – stacks of it, reams of it – eminently marketable, never more so than in the current climate. . . . We must sell our past to other nations as their future! (38-41)8
Of course, this begs the question of which concept of English history should be packaged for potential consumers.
Barnes’s work has always been fundamentally concerned with the question of how we can truly know history—or how we can know history truly. In Flaubert’s Parrot, for example, Geoffrey Braithwaite, an amateur Flaubert biographer, contemplates this question and emphasizes history’s devious capacity to obscure the truth:
How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at an end-of-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet. (14)9
Like Braithwaite, Martha Cochrane, the protagonist of England, England who is hired by Sir Jack to be the project’s designated cynic, similarly concludes that our knowledge and memories of the past cannot be considered reliable: “If a memory wasn’t a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself” (6).
Martha suggests that we lie to ourselves about the past to avoid painful truths. This works on two levels—personal and collective. On the personal level, Martha deals with her father leaving her and her mother by telling herself that he has merely gone away to find a missing piece of a Counties of England jigsaw puzzle. Less innocently, her employer, Sir Jack, is a monstrous narcissist who deals with the fact that he is universally disliked by buying the appearance of social approval: To perpetuate his fantasy of himself as the well-liked feudal lord, his chauffeur habitually pays off the owner of a pub to offer Sir Jack drinks “on the house.” A journalist whom he subsequently employs writes a profile of him for the Times that he then has edited and revised by another writer. He has the final text engraved on a slab of stone, portraying him as nothing less than a mythological titan: “a man whom it takes a leap of the imagination fully to come to terms with. . . . Less a captain of industry than a very admiral, Sir Jack is a man who walks with presidents. . . . Sir Jack makes the head spin with his energy, dazzles with his larger-than-life charm” (30-31). Modesty is clearly not one of his virtues. In addition, although he is not a member of the MCC or the Garrick Club, never attended Eton or served in the Guards, Sir Jack owns “braces which implied as much” (31). And, finally, Sir Jack employs a full-time “Ideas Catcher”—a scribe to record (and edit) his every utterance so that it is preserved for the “benefit” of future generations. All of this attempts to redress a clear subconscious sense of lonely desolation, fear of his own insignificance, and a psycho-sexual infantilism revealed by his regular visits to a specialty brothel in which he plays “baby” to the prostitute’s “nurse.”
Untruths are also crucial on the collective level. As Benedict Anderson has argued, nations are “imagined communities”—they lie about their past, creating a mythology that unifies and masks a lack of essence in national identity. In England, England, then, Barnes asks: How do we know a nation?—a question that echoes his concern in Flaubert’s Parrot about how we can know the past. Sir Jack assembles a crew of concept developers, including Martha, to come up with an answer. The theme park will have to transform the essence of English history and culture into a consumer product. An initial survey of potential punters reveals a list of “Fifty Quintessences of Englishness,” including predictable items such as the Royal Family, Big Ben, pubs, cricket, the white cliffs of Dover, Shakespeare, Stonehenge, and Queen Victoria as well as less savory things such as the class system, imperialism, snobbery, hypocrisy, whingeing, emotional frigidity, not washing, bad underwear, and flagellation in public schools. Needless to say, the simulacra, like Sir Jack’s idealized public persona, would need to be a sanitized reality devoid of such unpleasantries in order to court what Sir Jack salaciously calls “top dollar and long yen.”
Sir Jack’s goal with England, England, then, is not to create a veridically faithful replica of England, but to reify a historically mythologized, idealized England. This project is intellectually legitimated by an unnamed French scholar that Sir Jack brings in to address the development team: “nowadays we prefer the replica to the original,” he tells them. “We prefer the reproduction of the work of art to the work of art itself, the perfect sound and solitude of the compact disc to the symphony concert in the company of a thousand victims of throat complaints, the book on tape to the book on the lap” (55). Whereas real-life cultural theorists like Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin (see Illuminations10), and Fredric Jameson (see Postmodernism11)lament these social changes, this French intellectual positively celebrates them: the re-presentation of the world as simulacra, he argues, “is not a substitute for [the] plain and primitive world, but an enhancement and enrichment, an ironization and summation of that world. . . . Is this our loss? No, it is our conquest, our victory” (57). In characteristic postmodern fashion, he suggests that the idea of an original, pure essence of reality is a fantasy; replicas are the only truth we can lay claim to: “We must demand the replica, since the reality, the truth, the authenticity of the replica is the one we can possess, colonize, reorder, find jouissance in” (57). This scholar is of course a parodic figure—Barnes seems to have temporarily drifted from his habitual reverence for all things French—and his pronouncements reflect the novel’s harsh view that, in the near future, capitalism will triumph completely over aesthetics.
Sir Jack goes even further than this French scholar, suggesting that not only do we prefer simulacra, but that simulacra, once history has obscured the memory of their origins, reach a point where they cannot be distinguished from the truth. Sir Jack tells the development team that he recently stood on a hill and looked out over a copse towards a river, a view most would assume was just “Dame Nature . . . going about her eternal business.” But in fact it was all the product of human intervention:
The hill was an Iron Age burial mound, the undulating field a vestige of Saxon agriculture, the copse was a copse only because a thousand trees had been cut down, the river was a canal, and the pheasant had been hand-reared by a gamekeeper. We change it all . . . the trees, the crops, the animals. . . . That lake . . . on the horizon is a reservoir, but when it has been established a few years, when fish swim in it and migrating birds make it a port of call, when the treeline has adjusted itself and little boats ply their picturesque way up and down it . . . it becomes, triumphantly, a lake. . . . It becomes the thing itself. (62-63)
This notion proves prophetic: towards the end of the novel, England, England utterly eclipses Old England. Once the Royal Family, Big Ben, the houses of Parliament, Dr. Johnson, the Brontes, the national gallery, the RSC, Sherlock Holmes, and the Manchester United Football Team—the “quintessences of England”—have been relocated to or recreated in England, England, how can one consider Old England to still be England? It is divested of its essence and falls back into a bucolic, pre-industrial state with a name change to something more appropriately atavistic: “Anglia.”
In contrast, the theme park’s unqualified success seems to “prove” the complete irrelevance of truth to most people. Although Sir Jack hires an official project historian, Dr. Max, it quickly becomes evident that his function is not to insure a truthful representation of English history. Jeff, a concept developer, stresses to Dr. Max that “the point of our history—and I stress the our—will be to make our guests . . . feel better. . . . We want them to feel less ignorant. Whether they are or not is quite another matter. . . . Most people don’t want what you and your colleagues think of as history—the sort you get in books—because they don’t know how to deal with it” (73). The project heralds the contemporary irrelevance of truthful historical knowledge, a point that is later emphasized by the fact that once the theme park is in operation, no guests ever take the opportunity to learn from or debate Dr. Max. Dr. Max’s role in the project, Jeff concludes, is “to advise [them] on how much History people already know” (74). This, it turns out, is precious little: Dr. Max interviews an average Englishman about his knowledge of early English history and specifically the Battle of Hastings. The most definitive comment this man makes is that “They wore chainmail and pointy helmets with noseguards and had broadswords” (84). This man’s ignorance typifies a socially pervasive ahistoricism and opens the door for history to be reshaped with impunity: if people aren’t knowledgeable enough to distinguish myth from truth, then truth can be anything you want it to be.
The development team takes full advantage of this to develop the most marketable “reality,” not the most authentic reality. For example, with Martha’s guidance, Nell Gwyn— King Charles II’s underaged, Protestant, lower-class mistress and mother of his two illegitimate children—becomes irreproachably older, childless, religiously neutral, and middle-class (97-98). And to appeal to a modern, politically correct audience, they recast the traditional roles of some of the characters in Robin Hood’s band of merry men to be disabled or homosexual.
Authentic and inauthentic are further conflated when the development team discusses how the local islanders will fit into the plan: Sir Jack mandates that the islanders will learn the “traditional warm-hearted hospitality” of bucolic bumpkins and that “by being learned, it will be the more authentic” (110). One of the developers, Mark, protests that their plan to have employees fraternize with visitors like good-natured yokels could push the boundaries of comfort. He spars with Martha who tells him that the prospect makes him uneasy because he’s English:
“You think being touched is invasive.”
“No, it’s about keeping reality and illusion separate.”
“That’s very English too.”
“I fucking am English,” said Mark.
“Our Visitors won’t be.” (114)
What Martha means when she says that Mark’s desire to maintain the distinction between reality and illusion is “very English” is that it is, like contemporary England itself, out of touch with the contemporary values backing “top dollar and long yen.” The distinction between reality and illusion is not important in the global economy: if a replica of an attraction or product can offer the same pleasures as an original but without the inconveniences of crowded tourist buses, vast geographical areas to cross, poor infrastructure, ill-timed opening hours, and rude taxi-drivers, it wins. According to its advertising billboards, England, England “is everything you imagined England to be, but more convenient, cleaner, friendlier, and more efficient” (188).
This fictional theme park is Barnes’s portrait of a country that, from a cynic’s standpoint, has been reduced on the global stage to the status of a tourist attraction. The real England, Barnes suggests, is on the verge of following in the footsteps of its royal family. Sir Jack lures the King and Queen of England to the island with the promise that they will be reestablished as objects of reverence. But in moving to the theme park, the Royal Family literally becomes what they already tacitly are— “the country’s top cash crop” (147). Ironically, although Sir Jack secures the real King and Queen for the Island, it is “very good replicas [that] will shoulder most of the burden” (171). Another ironic substitution of simulacra for reality is that if visitors want to see the mid-century bungalow style houses of the original Isle of Wight, they can visit “a perfectly re-created street of typical pre-Island housing” (184-85, my emphasis).
Such substitutions confuse the distinction between truth and simulation to the extent that the simulations actually become more real than veridical reality, as was foreshadowed by Sir Jack’s lecture on the artificiality lurking under the surface of what appears to be nature. A couple years after the park opens, park employees begin to become their roles. Smugglers actually start smuggling. “Johnie” Johnson and his Battle of Britain flying squadron set up camp in huts beside the runway, waiting for the call to scramble against the Germans. Dr. Johnson begins to suffer from melancholy and behave boorishly, like the historical Dr. Johnson. And Robin Hood, one of the park’s most popular attractions, leads his band in a rebellion against the political correctness that has them eating simulated game meat rather than the real thing, and has forced them to accept homosexuals and disabled members in their band. In short, the actors playing Robin Hood and his men become what they historically were—outlaws. Sir Jack suppresses these glitches easily enough, however, suggesting that if you take a big enough stick to history and reality, it will do what you want it to do.
But history or fate, in the form of Barnes, does exact an ironic price on Sir Jack for his hubris: we learn towards the end of the book that, after Sir Jack’s death, his successors cast an actor to take his place. Sir Jack lives again, “good as new” (258), and the real Sir Jack, who lies at rest in a grand mausoleum designed to be a major tourist attraction, is completely ignored, made irrelevant by his own market philosophy—that replicas are preferable to and more real than originals.
* * *
England, England raises the question of whether there is any inherent value attached to authenticity. When Martha asks Dr. Max, the historian, whether he thinks the project is “bogus,” he replies: “Bo-gus implies... an authenticity which is being betrayed. But... Is not the very notion of the authentic somehow, in its own way, bogus?... What we are looking at is almost always a replica... of something earlier” (134-35). This observation is reminiscent of the scenario in Flaubert’s Parrot when Braithwaite seeks the “real” stuffed parrot that inspired Loulou in Un couer simple, hoping it will somehow give him a definitive insight into Flaubert’s life and works. He doesn’t find it, leading him to the conclusion that the “truth” about Flaubert is as elusive as the authentic parrot. So what is the “real” or “true” England? Is it the England of history texts? If so, which history texts? This dilemma does not merely suggest that people confuse truth with fiction. It reveals a more global criticism of how we perceive the past that Barnes has been making throughout his career—that there is no such thing as a pure truth to get at. History, Barnes implies, can be as malleable in real life as it is in this book: “On the Island,” he writes, “they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the downland with the breeze in your face” (208). There’s almost a sense of admiration here. Barnes’s writing has always been about the frustrations of wrestling understanding from a fundamentally chimerical history. How liberating it must be, Barnes suggests, to treat history without concern for its integrity.
It may seem liberating, but for Barnes it is also irresponsible. If we do abandon truth, Barnes warns, then we pave the way for the construction of something like England, England, the purpose of which is not to duplicate Old England but to repackage a country and its history as a commodity. This is the final triumph of American imperialism over its former colonizer. A financial analyst in the novel provides a meta-commentary, calling England, England “a pure market state. There’s no interference from government because there is no government. So there’s no foreign or domestic policy. It’s a pure interface between buyers and sellers” (187-88). As such, it represents the ultimate trivialization of the country and its history. The nation has been transformed into a kind of prostitute—the debased remnant of a once great nation now gaudily re-clothed and selling itself for the cheap titillation of tourists.
In contrast, Anglia—the remnant of Old England to which Martha returns in her old age—seems to represent a rebirth of innocence. There, time gradually erases the ravages of industrialization and modernity: “Chemicals drained from the land, the colours grew gentler, and the light untainted; the moon, with less competition, now rose more dominantly. In the enlarged countryside, wildlife bred freely” (264). Although Anglia resembles an almost pure, pre-industrial England, Barnes doesn’t let us stay with that notion. Even this return to a pre-modern era is a simulation. Among the villagers in the town where Martha settles is a city-bred American named Jez Harris who feigns being English and, to the consternation of the purist schoolmaster Mr. Mullin, delights in fabricating and telling new local myths as if they are an accepted part of the local cultural heritage. The irony is that he is “one of the most convincing and devoted villagers” (270). Society in Anglia may have taken on the form of an earlier, “authentic” reality, but it is nevertheless, in Dr. Max’s words, “a replica . . . of something earlier.”
While ultimately this retro-society may be as fanciful as England, England, Barnes clearly celebrates its beauty and simplicity, indicating nostalgia for an era long past. It may not be the real or true thing—whatever that is—but it is an admirable alternative to the debased postmodernity of England, England. As if anticipating this conclusion, Martha has a revelation at the end of her brief tenure as CEO of the theme park: “The seriousness lay in celebrating the original image: getting back there, seeing it, feeling it. This was where she parted company from Dr. Max. Part of you might suspect that the magical event had never occurred, or at least not as it was now supposed to have done. But you also celebrate the image and the moment even if it had never happened. That was where the little seriousness of life lay” (245). To lose sight of the fact that there is truth underlying all our fictions, all our seeming-realities, Barnes suggests, is to trivialize our lives—to “fall into beguiling relativity,” as he once put it in his novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (246).12 Truth cannot be abandoned, despite all the postmodern theories of the death of authenticity or the real.
Notes
1 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983).
2 Susan Willis, “Disney World: Public Use/Private State” in South Atlantic Quarterly 92. 1 (Winter 1993): 119-138.
3 Ralph Cohen, “History and Genre” in New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 17.2 (1986): 203-18.
4 Ralph Cohen, “Do Postmodern Genres Exist?” in Postmodern Genre, edited by Marjorie Perloff (Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1989), 10-27.
5 For a good list of exemplary works, see: http://www.overbooked.org/booklists/subjects/themes/amusement_parks.html
6 George Saunders, Civil War Land in Bad Decline (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997).
7 George Saunders, Pastoralia (New Yorks: Riverhead Books, 2001)
8 Julian Barnes, England, England (New York: Vintage, 2000).
9 Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (London: Picador, 1985).
10 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, 1968).
11 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991).
12 Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (London: Picador, 1989).