Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction

Also by Fiona McCulloch

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE IN CONTEXT

THE FICTIONAL ROLE OF CHILDHOOD IN VICTORIAN AND

EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
Cosmopolitanism in
Contemporary British
Fiction
Imagined Identities

Fiona McCulloch
Head of English, University of Bradford, UK

Palgrave
macmillan
© Fiona McCulloch 2012
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For Heather
If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else,
you will have succeeded.
Maya Angelou

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a

sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
Oscar Wilde

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again

and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of

mankind.
Albert Einstein

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating

your words and following your methods but by finding
new words and creating new methods.
Virginia Woolf

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our

circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures
and the whole of nature and its beauty.
Albert Einstein
Contents

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction 1
Part I Queer Frontiers
1 ‘Cross that Bridge’: Journeying through Zoe Strachan’s
Negative Space 21
2 ‘Boundaries. Desire’: Philosophical Nomadism in
Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods 45
Part II Cosmopolitan Cartographies
3 ‘Fellow Humans’: Cosmopolitan Citizens in
Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers 77
4 ‘The Bridge to the Stars’: Travelling Home in
Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials 109
Part III Time-Travellers
5 ‘Around We Go’: Transpositional Life Cycles in
David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 141
6 ‘Remember You Must Live. Remember You Most
Love. Remember You Must Leave’: Passing through
Ali Smith’s Hotel World 164
Conclusion: World Without Frontiers? 185

Notes 195

Bibliography 197

Index 203

vii
Acknowledgements

My interest in writing this book has been developing ever since read-
ing, as an undergraduate, Virginia Woolf’s famous proclamation that ‘as
a woman, I have no country [...] As a woman my country is the whole
world.’ That coupled with an upbringing in Thatcher’s Britain has sus-
tained a belief that there must be more to life than individualism and
global enterprise. My discovery much later of Rosi Braidotti’s philoso-
phical nomadism helped to shape this thinking into a critical response
that engages with contemporary British fiction. Some of the chapters
in here started life in different guises and have suitably evolved. An
extract from Chapter 2 was originally published in English: The Journal
of the English Association (2007), an earlier version of Chapter 4 was
included in Laurie Ousley’s edited collection To See the Wizard: Politics
and the Literature of Childhood (2007) and Chapter 1 appeared in article
form in Journal of Gender Studies (2008). The subtitle, Imagined Identities,
clearly stemming from Benedict Anderson, was a module that I wrote
at MMU Cheshire and later developed at the University of Bradford.
The students of that module over the years were inspirational in their
enthusiastic discussions and undoubtedly helped to navigate some of
this journey. I would also like to thank colleagues and friends who
have been supportive, particularly Mark Currie who read the Ali Smith
chapter and offered much needed encouragement. Thanks to Katherine
Ludwin and James Gregory at the University of Bradford for encourage-
ment and support. I owe much gratitude to Ben Doyle, Paula Kennedy,
Monica Kendall and Palgrave for all their support and enthusiasm.
Thanks to my family, particularly my mother, and in memory of my
father. As ever, thanks go to Gail Ashton for her much needed humour,
friendship and support, and to Kim MacDowall, lifelong friend and
compulsive texter. Finally, and most particularly, thanks to Heather
Price for her spectacular editing skills, friendship, endless conversations
about this book and, above all, love.

viii
Introduction

In discussing our connectivity to the cosmos, astronomer Brian Cox

writes that ‘there was very complex carbon chemistry happening out
there in space, forming the building blocks of life, over four and half
billion years ago’ (Cox and Cohen 2011, p. 135). It is that carbon chem-
istry that is responsible, in turn, for our own evolutionary development
and very much positions human beings as ‘children of the stars’ since
‘written into every atom and molecule of our bodies is the history of
the Universe’ (p. 135). Not only are we composed of the same elements
that are found on our planet from every tree to every rock to every fish
but we are, in effect, produced in the heart of dying of stars out there in
alien space. This has a phenomenal impact upon, not just our position
in the universe, but also our individual and national sense of identity:
with advancing scientific discoveries, it is increasingly problematic to
talk in the language of self/other when connections within humanity
are brought ever closer and, in turn, we are all, cosmologically speaking,
ultimately aliens. It is from this starting point that I want to consider
the timeliness of an increasing interest in cosmopolitanism with the
consideration that we are not only citizens of the world but, rather, of
the cosmos. Interestingly, ‘Cosmopolitanism dates to at least the Cynics
of the fourth century BC, who first coined the expression cosmopolitan-
ism, “citizen of the cosmos”’ (Appiah 2007 [2006], p. xii). Historically,
then, ‘The cosmos referred to the world, not in the sense of the earth,
but in the sense of the universe’ in that it was a ‘rejection of the conven-
tional view that every civilized person belonged to a community among
communities’ (p. xii). These Cynics coined the term because they felt
‘skepticism toward custom and tradition’ (p. xii), and this ancient
rejection of traditional thinking is most appropriate for considering

1
2 Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction

contemporary cosmopolitan thinking, given the empathetic shift away

from entrenched national territorialism towards an all-encompassing
planetary impetus, in which we are interconnected with our world
and that beyond. Thus, perceiving ourselves within a larger cosmos
involves expanding ontological being beyond the frontiers of territorial
boundaries that locate humanity within the minutiae of nationhood
and instead broadening our horizons to encompass a cartographical
journey into the uncharted expansion of space. Continually dynamic
in an expansion of unmappable infinity, ‘The scale of the Universe is
almost impossible to comprehend’ (Cox and Cohen 2011, p. 22). Such
spatial cosmopolitan thinking posits that human empathy should reach
far beyond community cohesion with our planetary neighbours and
strive to connect with the intergalactic beyond because ‘as our knowl-
edge of the Universe has expanded, so the division between us and the
cosmos has melted away’ (p. 8). Thus, ‘it is clear that we are connected
in a very real sense to the whole of the Universe [...] because we are
all intrinsically made of the same stuff’ (p. 101) and, as such, to insu-
larly comprehend borders of difference is ultimately reductively futile.
Instead, humanity must begin to comprehend itself as indistinguishable
from cosmological matter that served as our cradle until its nomadic
journey reached our current planetary home. The infinite cosmos,
uncharted and without territorial borders, serves as an ideal trope for
cosmopolitanism’s capacity to dismantle divisions and mobilize itself as
an endless and renewable energy.
Politically, cosmopolitanism is regarded as a potentially curative
human empathetic response to capitalist globalization and its alienating
entropic affects on our ever-shrinking planet. In his call for a ‘convivi-
ality’ that encourages a ‘planetarity’ of ‘cohabitation and interaction’
(Gilroy 2004, p. xi), Paul Gilroy argues that ‘race has been a cipher for
the debasement of humanism and democracy’ (p. 9). He regards ‘race as
moral as well as political’, arguing that it must be understood ‘as part of
a cosmopolitan understanding of the damage that racisms are still doing
to democracy’ (p. 35). This planetary outlook involves recognizing ‘our
relationship with the biosphere’, which ‘supports an appreciation of
nature as a common condition of our imperiled existence, resistant
to commodification and, on some level, deeply incompatible with
the institution of private property that made land into a commodity’
(p. 84). Contrary to the predatory avarice of global capitalism, ‘The
world becomes not a limitless globe, but a small, fragile, and finite place,
one planet among others with strictly limited resources that are allo-
cated unequally’ (p. 83). Our own decentralized position in the universe,
 Introduction 3

then, requires a response to aggressive territorialism that maintains

divisions and prevents a coordinated response to global issues, which
can potentially be addressed by cosmopolitan resistance. The ‘other’
planets, however, must also be recognized as our neighbours in order to
appreciate our connectedness not just to Earth, but to the infinite space
beyond and to acknowledge the other as integral to rather than sepa-
rate from the self. Capitalism, argues Rosi Braidotti, is an entropic and
thanatic machine that threatens the future of humanity and its planet,
and which thrives upon hegemonic narratives such as nationalism
and sexism ‘Because the proliferation of local differences for the sake
of marketability is one of the features of the global economy’ and, as
such, ‘globalization functions through the incorporation of otherness’
(Braidotti 2008 [2006], p. 55). Her particular cosmopolitical solution is
‘Philosophical nomadism’ which can ‘destabilize dogmatic, hegemonic,
exclusionary power structures at the very heart of the identity structures
of the dominant subject through rhizomatic interventions’ (p. 69).
Rather than maintaining rigidly fixed identities, philosophical nomad-
ism would involve ‘the relocation of identities on new grounds that
account for multiple belongings, i.e. a non-unitary vision of a subject’
(p. 69). Instead of fixity, the selfhood would exist as a ‘transposition’
or ‘in-between space’ (p. 6) of ‘a fluid flowing of becoming’ (p. 9) that
continually defers any discursive positioning. Just as Gilroy recognizes
the need to acknowledge our dependence upon our biosphere, Braidotti
regards her outlook as ‘a nomadic eco-philosophy of multiple belong-
ings’ since ‘A sustainable ethics for a non-unitary subject proposes an
enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including
the non-human or “earth” others’ (p. 35). She advocates ‘removing the
obstacle of self-centred individualism’ (p. 35) and laudably critiques
anthropocentricism as a destructive blight on the ecosphere. However,
we need to extend this decentralizing approach to encompass Earth’s
interdependence upon an ever-expanding cosmos and acknowledge the
non-Earth others as being integral to nomadic thinking.
Such transpositional thinking offers ‘its potential as the grounds for
a new political ontology’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 8) that ‘refers to mobility
and cross-referencing between disciplines and discursive levels’ (p. 7).
Refuting the traditional separateness of such disciplines, the synergized
approach of philosophical nomadism looks to ‘engendering other,
alternative ways of knowing’ (p. 6) that ‘defeats any pretence at avant-
garde leadership by any group’ (p. 8). Instead, such an approach is
‘centreless’ and ‘non-linear’ (p. 8). Intending to ‘set up dialogues’ of
intellectual and political engagement, she ‘wonder[s] why scholarship
4 Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction

on globalization tends to ignore feminist theory’ (p. 138). It is indeed

worth pondering the risk that feminist debate could be silenced within
current cosmopolitical thinking rather than seeing it as fundamental to
the discussion of human empathy and mutual understanding. There is
a danger that cosmopolitanism regards its fellow ‘ism’ feminism to be
somehow redundant and thus subsumed by androcentric discourse that
pays little more than lip service to gender concerns. Instead, a transpo-
sitional fusion of these ‘isms’ is required in order to fully embrace the
cosmos of cosmopolitical thinking and allow it to remain nomadic in
its intellectual becoming.
Indeed, nomadic fluidity is vital to cosmopolitanism and is in keep-
ing with its deterritorializing resistance. According to Bruce Robbins,
pinning down or ‘Situating cosmopolitanism’ is dangerously reductive
and, instead, it should remain ‘unlocated in order to preserve its sharp
critical edge’ (Robbins 1998, p. 2). Thus, ‘Like nations, cosmopolitan-
isms are now plural’, for ‘worlds, like nations, come in different sizes
and styles. Like nations, worlds too are “imagined”’ (p. 2). With that
different imagining of worlds, then, comes a plethora of cosmopolitan
approaches to it, none of which can be regarded as dominant. It is not
only our shared Earth, of course, that is open to multiple outlooks but
alien worlds beyond can be regarded with cosmopolitan connectedness.
Cosmopolitanism thus exists as a transpositional space of dislocation,
always in the process of becoming in its nomadic thinking but never
arriving at a final destination. In that sense, it mirrors the dynamic
cosmos that is infinite in its expanse yet interconnected in its cyclical
structure, just as cosmopolitanism is evolving and varied yet shares a
common heritage of empathy and understanding for others. As such,
‘cosmopolitanism is yet to come, something awaiting realization’ inso-
far as its ‘conceptual content and pragmatic character are not only
as yet unspecified but also must always escape positive and definite
specification, precisely because specifying cosmopolitanism positively
and definitely is an uncosmopolitan thing to do’ (Pollock et al. 2002,
p. 1). As with Robbins, ‘We propose therefore that cosmopolitanism
be considered in the plural, as cosmopolitanisms’ (Pollock et al. 2002,
p. 8). Significantly, this approach regards cosmopolitanism in relation
to feminism insofar as both recognize the dispossession generated by
‘able-bodied, white, heterosexual, men’ (p. 7) who territorialize and,
consequentially, centralize themselves within a cartographical locative
of power. At the same time, the diversity existing within both schools
of thought is considered, since ‘recognition of the plurality of femi-
nisms (and their own need for internal debate and differentiation) has
 Introduction 5

now become a commonplace alternative to the idea that there exists

a singular, universal feminism’ (p. 8). Pluralized feminism opens up
spaces for a multiplicity of dimensions within gender debates, includ-
ing sexuality, race and class, to name a few. By the same token, ‘so also
cosmopolitanism must give way to the plurality of modes and histories
[...] that comprise cosmopolitan practice and history’ (p. 8). By impli-
cation, a transpositional approach offers the potential to fuse both of
these outlooks in a bid to fully encompass all citizens of the world
rather than a phallocratic discourse that silences feminist concerns. As
yet, ‘Cosmofeminism is a space yet to be well inhabited’ (p. 9), but it
nevertheless encapsulates a nomadic becoming that is vital to ensuring
an in-between continuous dialogue for the otherwise dispossessed.
The problems caused by globalization that are addressed by cosmo-
politanism cannot be separated from feminist concerns, for ‘they are
gendered. Ecological destruction, unequal development, and militarism
disproportionately affect women’ (Lorentzen and Turpin 1996, p. 2).
Thus, ‘Deforestation and desertification, for example, increase the
burden women bear in being responsible for finding fuel and food for
their families’ (p. 3), while ‘In much of Africa, colonial laws and devel-
opment policies generally allocate land only to men. Women have lost
their traditional rights to the land, even though they do up to three
quarters of the agricultural labour’ (p. 4). An undeniable link exists
between the territorial divisions of nationhood and the dispossession
of women that can only be responded to by a synergized transposi-
tional cosmofeminist outlook. Clearly, ‘Concerns about women do not
exclude concerns about the whole society,’ for ‘Understanding gender
divisions implies looking at both men and women from a feminist
perspective and with a special emphasis on women’s subordination
and the pursuit of gender equality’ (Beneria 2003, p. 161). In keeping
with a cosmopolitan outlook, ‘If anything, globalization and increas-
ing world tensions have created an enormous challenge for women to
think globally and to search for solutions affecting not only women
but humankind’ (p. 161). Part of the requirement for cosmofeminism
involves enabling women to participate fully as citizens in the global
world and removing their perpetual exclusion to domestic spheres as
well as cosmopolitically thinking beyond the boundaries of the home
nation. Ultimately, ‘The nationalist discourse of women as “mothers
of the nation” banishes them [...] to the private sphere of the family’
(Werbner and Yuval-Davis 2005 [1999], p. 14), their bodies policed as
rigidly as the nation’s territorialized borders. In rejecting the parameters
of nationhood, it is more cosmopolitan to think in terms of citizens
6 Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction

of the world ‘because unlike nationalism which grounds itself in past

myths of common origin or culture, citizenship raises its eyes towards
the future, to common destinies. Its politics are aspirational, a “politics
of desire”’ (p. 3). As such, ‘the work of citizenship becomes a work for
the future, for generations yet to be born’ because ‘Global citizens have
nothing less than the peaceful survival of the planet and its multifari-
ous biological and cultural variety as their telos (pp. 3–4). This can be
equated with Braidotti’s philosophical nomadic concept of transposi-
tions (2006), where cosmopolitan communities work together selflessly
for a sustainable planetary future rather than remain divided by the
destructive avarice of globalization. A key feature of cosmopolitanism is
that the rights of citizenship need to be restored to women across the
globe by an active ‘premise of agency’ (p. 12).
As a response to anthropocentric tendencies in some cosmopolitan
theory, and to elaborate on Braidotti’s view that nomadic thinking
should embrace non-human planetary life as well as human, ‘it could be
suggested that global citizenship is not restricted to human beings’ but
should incorporate ‘living creatures such as animals and plants’, each
interdependent ‘as fellow citizens of the planetary biosphere’ (Attfield
2008 [2003], p. 160). Attfield continues that ‘global citizens will need
a cosmopolitan stance [...] and with a biocentric position at that if
they are to avoid the limitations of anthropocentrism’ (pp. 167–8), for
a tendency towards ‘cosmopolitan anthropocentric’ theories (p. 168)
must be resisted. Cosmofeminism is a viable response to ways in which
both the planet and women have been sidelined and acted upon by
masculinist discourses in order to counter ‘this identification of nature
with the female and the female as nature, and thus an inferior being’
(Roszak 1995, p. 293). Rather than ghettoizing women and nature as
feminine and making ‘assumptions that women are in some sense
“closer” to nature than men and therefore more intuitive, caring, and
specially called to “save the Earth”’ (p. 298), cosmofeminism must oper-
ate at a transpositional level of collective ethical responsibility between
all citizens. Redressing the phallocratic narrative that relentlessly acts
upon feminized resources, we must cosmopolitically acknowledge the
urgency of respecting our planetary home. Only then can cosmopoli-
tanism ‘move beyond anthropocentrism and the instrumentality of a
male-centred universe’ (Hawthorne 2002, p. 181). This would generate
an outlook that responds to Braidotti’s call for philosophical nomadic
ethics that desire a sustainable tomorrow because ‘With a relation-
ship of connection between people and the land, there would be great
reluctance to do things solely for short-term profit, when the long-term
 Introduction 7

consequences are destructive’ (p. 375). An urgent aspect of creating a

sustainable future includes responding to climate change, which has
been consensually scientifically agreed to be accelerated if not caused
by human consumption. Such capitalist enterprise of immediate profits
and disregard for tomorrow needs to be addressed by a cosmopolitan
effort that works at the level of planetary empathy rather than anthro-
pocentric avarice.
A key way of considering cosmopolitanism and its intellectual
nomadic mobility is to address its potential for creativity and imagina-
tion in terms of how it can be represented through fictional discourse.
Braidotti argues that those who envisage hope for a better ‘tomorrow’
(Braidotti 2008, p. 273) utilize imaginative intellect in order to create
transpositional spaces of possibility, as ‘This critical freedom mobilizes
the work of the creative imagination as well as more traditional intel-
lectual resources’ (p. 271). As such, ‘Prophetic or visionary minds are
thinkers of the future’ (p. 273). Certainly, just as the nation has been
regarded by Benedict Anderson (1983) as being intertwined with liter-
ary representation and, thus, an imagined identity, then it is worth
considering ways in which fiction is currently attempting to envisage
the world. In The Cosmopolitan Novel (2009) Berthold Schoene ponders
‘whether, in our increasingly globalised world, the novel may already
have begun to adapt and renew itself by imagining the world instead of
the nation’ (Schoene 2009, p. 12). Apparently concurring with observa-
tions that it is a fluid entity, he concedes that ‘what cosmopolitanism is,
or might be, remains as yet to be clearly defined’ (p. 2). However, rather
than recognizing the benefits of this transpositional mobility, he sets
about the rather phallocratic business of attempting to pin down and
fix a definition to a concept that should remain open to dynamic syn-
ergies. By disparaging traditional cosmopolitanism (as though the term
had somehow previously been subject to an agreed meaning) as ‘strik-
ingly naïve’ in its ‘lack of political purpose, commitment and ethical
responsibility’ (p. 2), Schoene favours ‘the new cosmopolitanism’ since
it ‘is rooted in the realities of the present rather than mobilising for
the future fulfilment of any one or other set of utopian ideals’ (p. 10).
This ‘contemporary cosmopolitanism’ (p. 7), apparently ‘inspired by
the events of 1989’, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall and end
of the Cold War, ‘was forced to undergo significant recasting in the
aftermath of 2001’ (p. 7). The sobering events of 9/11 signal that ‘these
days all of us are aware that in order to serve any relevant purpose at all
cosmopolitanism must always mean “realistic cosmopolitanism”’ (p. 7).
Believing that ‘US American academia’s cosmopolitan engagement with
8 Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction

the cultures and living conditions of the whole of “the rest of the world”
is virtually non-existent’, he argues ‘that we may currently be witness-
ing the emergence of a new British cosmopolitanism, whose emergence
is accompanied by the rise of a new kind of novel – “the cosmopolitan
novel”’ (p. 11). Undeniably there has been a major post-9/11 shift in
global relations, but this attack on Americanization and reverence for
British ethical humanism seems equally based on reductive hierarchical
binaries, while simultaneously trivializing earlier historical moments of
cosmopolitan intervention, including cosmopolitical global revulsion
at genocides like the Holocaust, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or Rwanda. If noth-
ing else, to what extent can cosmopolitanism be nationalized and, as
such, territorialized as British? Even that term ‘British cosmopolitanism’
is fraught with uncertainty, given that it assumes a unity of national
identity when in fact Britishness, particularly since the decentralization
of power through devolution, encompasses a plethora of fluid becom-
ings. Clearly there is a glocal impetus to cosmopolitanism as each
localized community creates empathetic links beyond its own borders,
but to reduce a planetary ethical outlook to a national singularity is
problematic. Further, to demonize ‘utopian ideals’ (p. 10) as dangerous
naivety and privilege the need to get real, begs the question of whose
reality will be favoured in the race to ‘own’ cosmopolitanism. All of this
entirely contradicts the claim that ‘Any unilateral declaration or pursuit
of cosmopolitanism, however well-intentioned, is no cosmopolitanism
at all’ (p. 5). To assign a particular moment in time to the emergence of
a contemporary cosmopolitanism flouts the ethos of cosmopolitanism
existing as a nomadically fluid, free-flowing composite way of thinking
that queerly defies spatiotemporal fixity. Associated with the cosmos
and its infinitely expanding dimensions, there can be no unified con-
cept of time or space applied to its multifarious outlook. Finally, there
seems a certain irony in refuting the potential of utopian envisioning
only to devote his study to the imaginings of fictional works which,
through narrative spatial possibilities, have the capacity to create alter-
native aspirational worlds. In British Fiction Today, Rod Mengham and
Philip Tew acknowledge ‘a series of global traumas, such as the 9/11 dis-
aster’, observing that ‘although ephemeral in its nature and scintillating
in its possibilities, literature coexists with such hard external realities;
it offers a zone of mediation, reflection, and perhaps, as some assert,
transcendence’ (Mengham and Tew 2006, p. xv).
While Schoene berates traditional cosmopolitanism as a misdirected
voyeuristic voyage of the privileged classes, and is ‘reassured that the
new post-1989 cosmopolitanism has shed its starry-eyedness and grown
 Introduction 9

realist’ (Schoene 2009, p. 9), this ignores the fact that ‘In the past the
term has been applied, often venomously, “to Christians, aristocrats,
merchants, Jews, homosexuals, and intellectuals”’ (Robbins 1998, p. 1).
Serving as a euphemism for homosexuality, then, it is no accident
that Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) mentions the way
in which pianists become ‘foreigners’, even ‘those that are born in
England’ since they are ultimately ‘quite cosmopolitan’ (Wilde 2008
[1891], p. 41). The link forged between art, foreigners and cosmopoli-
tanism highlights an outsider status from mainstream society in which
fringe positions, like homosexuality, can be considered. Far from belong-
ing to a cushioned starry-eyed elite, cosmopolitanism ‘has had a long
and painful history’ and ‘That cosmopolitanism has been forgotten,
that it has been transformed and debased into a pejorative concept, is
to be ascribed to its involuntary association with the Holocaust and the
Stalinist Gulag’ (Beck 2007 [2004], p. 3). Contrary to Schoene’s assess-
ment, ‘In the collective symbolic system of the Nazis, “cosmopolitan”
was synonymous with a death sentence. All victims of the planned mass
murder were portrayed as “cosmopolitans”’ (p. 3). Influenced by such
ghettoized alterity, cosmopolites ‘to this day’ are ‘regarded in many
countries as something between vagabonds, enemies and insects who
can or even must be banished, demonized or destroyed’ (p. 3). This is a
far cry from the luxurious lifestyle and wrong-headed fantasizing that
Schoene attributes to citizens of the cosmos. In his misreading of cos-
mopolitanism’s history, one cannot help wondering again whose reality
this new cosmopolitanism is serving. Even Schoene’s dust jacket cover
image displays a man’s face covered by a map of the world, signalling
the study’s homage to anthropocentric and androcentric phallocratic
narratives and reinforcing his choice of predominantly male theorists,
including Jean-Luc Nancy, as well as mainly focusing upon male writers.
In his study, cosmopolitanism becomes a necessary defensive response
to global risks like terrorism in the wake of 9/11 and involves commu-
nities that come together at an inoperative level long enough to dispel
any immediate threat, for the ‘new cosmopolitanism had come of age;
it had lost its carefree innocence in response to a paroxysm of atrocious
violence followed on its heel by a period of oppressive worldwide duress’
(Schoene 2009, p. 8). Instead, cosmopolitanism should remain open in
its queer defiance of interpretation and endeavour to ethically and col-
lectively empathize with ‘“habitants of a vast universe”’, thus enabling
‘a sense of positive if complex and multiple belonging’ (Robbins 1998,
p. 3). In that sense, Braidotti’s view of intellectual philosophical nomad-
ism is crucial to understanding cosmopolitanism’s ability to transcend
10 Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction

phallocratic interpretation, just as geopolitically nomadic citizens can

range from those engaging in the luxury of world travel, to those engag-
ing in instant electronic communication across vast spatiotemporal
planes, to transnational peoples forcibly relocating due to conflict, envir-
onmental disaster or economic necessity. In its refusal to be pinned
down by fixed meaning or territorialized by geographical location that
dynamic cosmopolitical mixture offers a vibrant spatial energy. Upon
such a canvas contemporary fiction can paint its own endless imagin-
ings and mobilize a variety of responses to cosmopolitanism within
the interstices of fictional narratives. Far from starry-eyed escapism,
‘A transformative utopian vision will challenge hegemonic structures of
political power and totalising ideologies by revealing the ways in which
human needs and agency are restrained by existing institutional, social,
and cultural arrangements’ (Bradford et al. 2008, p. 16). As such,

A transformative utopian vision will explore a character’s human

aspirations to gain the agency which might make it possible to attain
his or her desires, and seek to define some notion of optimal practice
in terms of social formations, gender relations, and economic and
ecological sustainability. (Bradford et al. 2008, p. 17)

Instead of escapism, by utilizing the political capability of cosmopolitan

empathy, ‘a transformative utopian fiction will build in some notion of
attainability’ (Bradford et al. 2008, p. 17).
An attainable utopian premise is that our common humanity can be
revealed through love’s ability to build bridges across territorial divides,
which is a key theme in the texts addressed in the following chapters.
After all, cosmopolitan empathy is love for others beyond our self.
Recurrent tropes, such as the heart, love, bridges, journeys, stars, time
and space, feature throughout the books in this study, all attempts to
find ways of connecting with rather than remaining isolated from our
world. According to Katherine Stanton, cosmopolitan fiction recognizes
that ‘Closeness and connectedness are potent forces’, offering ‘a reason
for making our connections to the world’ (Stanton 2006, p. 23). In my
choice of contemporary British fiction, I will demonstrate that these
texts are not content to concern themselves merely with the insularity
of national imaginings but, on the contrary, envision alternative world
and intergalactic perspectives that envisage cosmopolitan empathy.
Insofar as cosmopolitanism should be regarded as a queer fluid entity,
it is worth noting that these novels endlessly flout any attempts at
closure and in themselves offer queer perspectives that question and
 Introduction 11

refuse to endorse social norms like patriarchy, heteronormativity and

global capitalism. They continue to mobilize themselves against phallo-
cratic authority, displaying a ‘critical consciousness that resists settling
into socially coded modes of thought and behaviour’ and, as such, are
very much in keeping with philosophical nomadic outlooks insofar as
it is the ‘subversion of set conventions that defines the nomadic state,
not the literal act of traveling’ (Braidotti 1994, p. 5). Often, though,
these novels are literally nomadic in their geopolitical desire to journey
beyond familiar thresholds and seek new ontological realities. Even the
boundaries of Britain itself are dynamically shifting since the decen-
tralization of power brought about by devolution. In this discussion,
I will locate these novels within current debates surrounding the British
nation as it decentralizes power from the rigid control of Westminster
to the devolved fluidity of Holyrood, Stormont and the Senedd, moving
continually towards a diversification of Britishness. Inevitably, ques-
tions surrounding self and home emerge from these political shifts, as
increasing demographic migrations occur. Ultimately, a shifting British
terrain within a wider European Union and, indeed, global climate leads
to reshaping home beyond cartographical borders in favour of mobi-
lized nomadic becomings. In these fictional works, home, then, under-
goes relocation, liberated from fixed geopolitical positions towards the
aspiration of transformative utopian possibilities. Like the ultimate
nomadic time-traveller, Doctor Who (albeit another man dominating
time and space as the Time Lord), the texts uproot the familiarity of
fixed locatives and replace it with the spatiotemporal premise that
travel really does broaden the mind. I will argue that my chosen texts
effectively demonstrate that ‘As an intellectual style, nomadism consists
not so much in being homeless, as in being capable of recreating your
home everywhere’ (Braidotti 1994, p. 16). Just as cosmopolitanism can-
not be fixed in time and space, in the following chapters it will be seen
‘that fiction has been one of the places in which a new experience of
time has been rehearsed, developed and expressed’ (Currie 2007, p. 6).
Cairns Craig has challenged Benedict Anderson’s (Imagined
Communities, 1983) view of nationhood as imagined with his contention
that Scotland is an intended nation (Intending Scotland, 2009), based on
his reading of the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray’s thesis of the
nation being composed of active persons. Thus, the intentions of its
citizens involve action that secures links across communities rather
than divisions between them. Devolution is a recent development in
the history of Britain, which is consequently undergoing fundamental
changes in its conceptualization of citizenship and nationhood.
12 Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction

No longer sufficient to consider the individual as a coherent entity,

contemporary British literature faces the challenge of where to place
identity amidst a nascent new world of millennial terrain. Considering
hybrid supranational selfhood, this book will examine the dissolved
thresholds of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, childhood, class and environ-
ment by providing a comprehensive study of contemporary fiction and
how it struggles to articulate the dilemmas facing the shifting nation
amidst its citizens’ intentions. The subtitle of the book dually refers to
the fiction itself containing imagined identities, as well as to the cul-
ture which it responds, producing citizens who are formulated through
multiple discourses and, thus, equally dependent upon mediated
language for their existence. But it is through those imaginings, often
envisaged in the spatial dimensions of fiction, that very real existences
are forged. Concerned with dismantling hierarchical boundaries, I wish
to explore books that would not usually be discussed together and may,
at first glance, seem unusual bedfellows. But, following Braidotti’s call
for a truly transpositional academic discourse and to approach this
topic through a cosmopolitical lens, it is appropriate to discuss adult
fiction and children’s or young adult fiction within the same study, just
as it is important to address women’s writing as well as male-authored
texts. Equally, those on the traditional geopolitical hinterlands of
British fiction are addressed in the inclusion of some Scottish writers,
while lesbian and queer identities are encompassed, as well as Anglo-
Asian fiction.
Tapping into current debates and anxieties regarding, for instance,
ecological and ethnic concerns, this book positions itself at a crucial
crossroads in the mapping of Western identity in the face of global
uncertainties. What each chosen primary text has in common is its use
of the imaginary space provided by fiction in order to envisage alter-
native futures. At a site where known subjectivity can be dislocated, it
is within the landscape/mindscape of contemporary literature that an
identity more suited to modernity can be located. Theoretically explor-
ing and extending Virginia Woolf’s claim that ‘as a woman I have no
country’ and Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theories, I will demonstrate that
British fiction often dislocates regional borders to envisage nomadic
transnational citizens who fluidly chart a cosmopolitan route through
the interstices of heteronormativity’s cultural discourse. That is not to
say that cosmopolitan citizenship leads to the demise of community
but, rather, as Gerard Delanty’s Community (2003) argues, community
contains ‘an ambivalence’ since ‘On the one hand, it expresses local-
ity and particularness [...] and, on the other, it refers to the universal
 Introduction 13

community in which all human beings participate’ (Delanty 2006, p. 12).

He continues, ‘This double sense of community, all the more acute
today with cosmopolitanism at the forefront of political debate, has
always been central to the idea of community’ (p. 12). Rather than
retaining a divisive threshold, then, these texts seek to integrate both in
a blurring between self and other, enriching cosmopolitanism through
‘the mixing of the local and the global’, known as ‘glocalization’
(p. 149). This notion of glocalization corresponds to Craig’s view of
the nation’s diverse intentions led by Macmurray’s community of active
persons. Like communities, ‘Contemporary fictions are anything but
homogenous’, but ‘are interesting precisely for their ability to locate
themselves in the interstices – the spaces between national cultures,
genders and histories’ (Morrison 2003, p. 7).
In terms of structure, while it is tempting to offer no chapters or
sections in favour of fluid continuity, much like a modernist novel
might have done, in the end one must offer clarity. It is imperative
that the reader finds a navigational route through the following discus-
sion and, as such, there is a cartographical element to it. That said, it
would be regrettable if the chapters or sections are read as isolationist
separate entities: rather, the crossovers, transpositions and interstices
of the work insist that it is regarded as an interrelated whole. This is in
keeping with the fictional writing that is being addressed. The theme
of repetition that is so often considered in the following discussion of
each text is also a fundamental structural aspect of this book. Identity
is not singular or unified but, rather, prone to shifts and transpositional
becomings, just as the nomadic enterprise of reading the following
chapters ought to offer a cyclical criss-crossing rather than linear pro-
gression towards a single destination. That is not to say that it does
not conclude, but merely that its beginning, middle and end are not
a cartographically sequential A–Z but a fluid interconnected pattern of
multiple considerations.
Part I, ‘Queer Frontiers’, charts cosmopolitan’s queer potential regard-
ing its capacity to defy being pinned down by locatable definition. As
well as this, a queering of standardized norms or grand narratives of
identity is considered at the interstices of geopolitics, sexuality and gen-
der. The first chapter serves to exemplify post-devolution Scotland in
relation to a reconfigured British citizenship insofar as the text engages
with theoretical debates surrounding cosmopolitan community, glo-
calization and nomadism. It sets the tone for the rest of the chapters
by setting up important debates surrounding British citizenship. The
first chapter discusses the discordance of Zoe Strachan’s Negative Space
14 Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction

(2002), as it utilizes bereavement as a metaphor to develop the psycho-

cultural move towards rebirth, just as post-devolution Scotland is itself
experiencing a new dawn. Losing her sibling, the young narrator finds
herself at sea, psychologically losing her preconceived structured sense
of home, and must reconcile herself to her irrevocably altered bounda-
ries of selfhood. Serving as a trope for her inner growth from object to
subject, the narrator geographically relocates from Glasgow to Orkney,
with the novel finishing in London, suggesting a need to nomadically
dismantle one’s enclosed borders of nation/self in order to healingly
reassemble a multifaceted millennial citizen. Crossing the bridge from
self to external otherness, the narrator embarks upon a sexual and cul-
tural journey through a lesbian relationship with an Asian woman.
Chapter 2 analyses the multiple interactive sites within Jeanette
Winterson’s The Powerbook (2000) and The Stone Gods (2007). Utilizing
the textual space of hybridic oscillation, her novels are concerned with
dismantling the hierarchical boundaries of Western heteronormativity
and discovering new possibilities of queer desire. Prising open uncharted
windows of utopian possibility, Winterson’s texts encapsulate what
Susan Stanford Friedman’s Mappings refers to as ‘the new geographics of
identity’, as each nomadically ‘moves between boundaries of difference
and borderlands of liminality’ (Friedman 1998, pp. 17–19). Winterson
rejects grand narratives and envisages infinite potential in the imagined
interstices of utopian nowhere. As with cosmopolitanism, ‘nothing is
solid, nothing is fixed’ (Winterson 2001b [2000], p. 44). Writing from a
marginalized position within the fixed locatives of nationhood, capital-
ism, history and heteropatriarchal norms, Winterson seeks to decentre
these axes of signification in a bid to relocate new modes of subjective
positioning outwith the available maps – known in The Powerbook as the
uncharted space of ‘the wilderness’ (p. 78).
Part II, entitled ‘Cosmopolitan Cartographies’, examines in Chapter 3
the ways in which Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) navigates
through the interstices of racial and religious divisions in contemporary
British society. Rather than passively accepting cultural divisions, Aslam
actively critiques multicultural isolation and attempts to reposition his
‘fellow humans’ at the interface of cosmopolitan connectivity. Despite
differences inherited from hegemonic narratives, Aslam emphasizes
love as a recurring human trait that has the potential to create fusion
and empathy for one’s fellow citizens. In that sense, Maps for Lost Lovers
adheres to Gilroy’s concept of planetarity and cosmopolitical convivial-
ity in order to defy the destructive binaries of racial division. Like love,
Aslam considers the imagination and the art produced by this to be a
 Introduction 15

vital component of cosmopolitanism insofar as it is the beating heart

in an otherwise alienating and, at times, menacing world. Love’s losses,
however, can often lead to destruction in the text as it focuses upon
the urgency for it to be liberated as a site of connectivity rather than
wielded as a patriarchal weapon to police Others. Aslam’s novel ulti-
mately encompasses a cartography of the human condition as it strives
to communicate through the interstitial narratives of love.
The fourth chapter discusses Pullman’s trilogy in its consideration of
how, through children’s literature, Pullman is using childhood inno-
cence as a trope to dramatize a lack of knowledge at the heart of society
and its need to participate in a learning process through comprehend-
ing the power of stories. He says that ‘Children’s books still deal with
the huge themes which have always been part of literature – love,
loyalty, the place of religion and science in life, what it really means
to be human. Contemporary adult fiction is too small and sterile for
what I’m trying to do’ (Tucker 2003, p. 184). In applying a metaphorical
intergalactic exchange of ideas, these texts chart the necessary journey
of society, dramatized through the use of childhood development, from
innocent naivety to the wisdom of a mature millennial outlook. As
such, each cultural norm is permeated in a quest to create new mean-
ings through stories existing in these inter or in-between spaces, echoing
Homi K. Bhabha’s belief in The Location of Culture (1994) that new selves
can emerge through negotiation. The traditional division between adult
and children’s fiction is dismantled in this young adult fiction (The
Amber Spyglass is the first children’s book to win the Whitbread Prize in
the adult category) which utilizes the concept of childhood ignorance
and naivety and its necessary growth towards adult maturity and wis-
dom. The nomadic journey, both geographically and psychologically,
of the hero and heroine provides a metaphor for the desired advanced
enlightenment of British society as cosmopolites of an inter-planetary
framework.
Part III, ‘Time-Travellers’, discusses the occurrence of spatiotemporal
shifts and overlaps in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) in Chapter 5,
a novel that charts the cyclically repetitive will to power interweav-
ing our historical past, present and future, through the ideological
domination of the culturally dispossessed, referred to as ‘a vast tribe
of duped slaves’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 361). Erasing literary and cultural
boundaries, Mitchell presents a kaleidoscope of genres, such as detective
story and dystopian novel. This nomadic journey of six interconnected
or intratextual narratives, including the metafictional inclusion of
a musical composition Cloud Atlas Sextet by Robert Frobisher, provides
16 Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction

a cacophony of voices that sound the note of global avarice. The motif
of the journey threads itself through this text, coming full circle with
the voyage of Adam Ewing (echoing the biblical first man to fall prey
to the moral corruption of another), which emphasizes Mitchell’s mes-
sage that if ‘you travel far enough, you meet yourself’ (Mitchell 2004,
p. 336). Though often a negative text, insofar as its social outsiders like
Timothy Cavendish are disposed of by being incarcerated in an elderly
institution, there are often positive elements, including Cavendish’s
retention of his ‘soul’ and eventual escape, as well as a perpetual drive
for freedom against the dehumanizing figures of authority. The struggle
for liberty forms part of the text’s cyclical structure, as the motif of
reincarnation demonstrates the need for repetition until a difference
is made, thus ‘Luisa Rey is this Robert Frobisher chap reincarnated’
(Mitchell 2004, p. 373). In order for people to avoid being duped slaves
or ‘joints of meat’ (p. 523), the peak note of this novel is the nomadic
loosening of ideological nooses and the cosmopolitan recognition that
‘All boundaries are conventions, national ones too’ (p. 479). The link
between spatiotemporal planes reminds us that ‘The present is always
the future present’ and that ‘Only the yearning for sustainable futures
can construct a liveable present’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 273). Mitchell links
this hope of a sustainable future directly to each character, whose cos-
mopolitan ethics rather than individualist avarice will ensure that this
can be achieved, for ‘The anticipation of endurance, of making it to a
possible “tomorrow”, transposes energies from the future back into the
present’ (Braidotti 2008, pp. 273–4).
Chapter 6 considers Ali Smith’s Hotel World in its portrayal of a hotel
in the Global Hotels chain, focusing upon the temporality of its travel-
ling guests who arrive and depart through its revolving door, a meta-
phor for the nomadic transnationalism of globalized British society.
Rather like the circularity of the revolving hotel door, the five female
characters’ stories are interwoven within the text’s cyclical structure,
with the deceased hotel chambermaid Sara Wilby serving as an overseer
to their lives. Like the circular sweeping of a watch face beating out the
precious moments of life, Smith continually reminds us that time rav-
ishes the minutiae of our lives’ narratives, just as the late Sara recognizes
too late the urgency of declaring her lesbian love for the female shop
assistant to whom she gave her broken watch for repair. The text’s spatio-
temporal shifts are a significant feature, weaving between past and
present, as well as offering a glimpse of the future through the narrative
use of prolepsis. Smith insists that we must ‘remember to live’ since we
do not have an infinite supply of time to squander and delay decisions
 Introduction 17

out of fear. Queering the conventional parameters of here and hereafter,

Sara seeks to warn us of life’s fragility by demonstrating the futility of
her hesitation in the face of an untimely demise. Though her family
and friends feel her loss keenly, her passing remains coldly unremark-
able for the world beyond, much like the harsh anonymity endured by
the homeless sheltering in the shadows of Global Hotel’s outside walls.
As a low-paid casual worker, Sara is merely one among many who will
serve to boost the hotel’s profit yet will remain insignificant to its global
expansion. Smith remedies this by centralizing Sara’s narrative impor-
tance, thus insisting that life’s value must be acknowledged over global
enterprise: in a scathing critique of capitalism, the text insists that life
rather than wealth is the truly rare currency for citizens of the world.
Repeatedly, these novels urge an intellectual nomadism that allows
a queering of established norms, often portraying cosmopolites who
strive to connect within planetary and cosmological relations that
invoke empathy and love rather than aggressive territorialism and car-
tographical division. Love, then, is an ethical communitarian concept
that offers a viable future, for ‘This is the love for the world that frames
a horizon of sustainability and hence of hope’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 277).
Part I
Queer Frontiers
1
‘Cross that Bridge’: Journeying
through Zoe Strachan’s Negative
Space

Post-feminism is a dangerous term because it allows us to gloss

over what is really going on. There exist many androcentric places
in literature where women still appear as simulacra for Scotland
and bear the brunt of masculine frustration at its own intransigent
Scottishness [...] I thought that, as a feminist, I should write about
women, and particularly to claw back some of the experiential
potential which seemed to have been packaged up and labelled
‘male’. That was a driving force behind the writing of Negative Space
(2002) [...]
Now I have given myself permission to tackle those sacred thistles
of Scot Lit – masculinity and class – head on [...] In the future, I hope
the labels I mentioned above will disappear. How nice it would be to
be known not as a ‘woman writer’ or a ‘lesbian writer’ or even as a
‘Scottish writer’, but simply as a writer! (Strachan 2007a, pp. 52, 55)

Zoe Strachan outlines here the political journey taken in her novel
Negative Space (2002), in which the female protagonist, Stella (whose
name, pointedly, remains undisclosed until the novel’s penultimate
page), moves out of the shadow of her recently deceased brother,
Simon, to forge her own identity. By doing so, she exudes Strachan’s
feminist ‘driving force’. For Strachan, postfeminism is a fictive term
that conceals the ongoing objectification of women ‘as simulacra for
Scotland’, victimized by ‘masculine frustration’. This is clearly signalled
by the narrator’s lack of selfhood: she haunts an erased negative space
forever debilitated by a phallocentric gaze, until ‘I struggle to recognize
myself in my reflection’ (Strachan 2003 [2002], p. 12). Charting the
heroine’s growth, the novel mobilizes Stella away from urban Glasgow
to rural Orkney ‘as a kind of recuperative space in female-authored
21
22 Queer Frontiers

writing’ (Schoene 2006, p. 95). As a feminist writer indicating the need

for such a healing space, Strachan challenges the delusion of postfemi-
nism in an ongoing heteropatriarchal society and draws attention to
‘what is really going on’.
However, Anne Cranny-Francis et al. point out that:

The development of a notion of identity as multiple and fragmented,

rather than essentialist and unitary, has been critical for contempo-
rary feminisms [... and] has given rise to the claims that we are in
a postfeminist era. For many women, this seems a silly claim since
it suggests that gender relations and gender identities are no longer
problematic, and they know that is not the case. However, another
way of reading the term ‘postfeminist’ is more like ‘post-second-
wave-feminist’: that is, it is a challenging of earlier feminisms which
locked women into silences and repressions of critical aspects of their
subject positionings (for example non-white, working class, lesbian).
‘Postfeminism’ is one term for the freeing of women from the ideo-
logical straitjackets imposed by some feminisms, enabling them to
recognize their differences from other women and so to eradicate
the silences within feminism; to form new, respectful alliances with
women different from themselves, and to learn from those women;
to position their own feminist critique specifically in relation to their
own cultural background. (Cranny-Francis et al. 2003, p. 68)

This alternative way of perceiving postfeminism from Strachan’s, who

warns against its shortcomings of duping society into believing that
equality exists, posits that it is a term for contemporary feminists
to identify with while simultaneously negotiating their differences.
Despite Strachan’s critical polemic warning against postfeminism, her
novel nevertheless moves towards the diversification of women in a
postfeminist era that more strongly resonates with Cranny-Francis
and her co-authors’ position. Stella’s multiple layers – female, lesbian,
Scottish and working class – are more safely explored when she is
removed from the suffocating heteronormativity of Glasgow and relo-
cated to the remote spacious Highlands amidst a diverse company of
women where she forms ‘new, respectful alliances’ (Cranny-Francis
et al. 2003, p. 68). Focusing on the multifaceted identities of a group
retreat, Strachan’s novel in fact helps to ‘eradicate the silences within
feminism’ (p. 68), with Stella recognizing the importance of females
learning from ‘women different from themselves’ (p. 68). Negative
Space is clearly a postfeminist text that envisages exactly what Strachan
 Zoe Strachan’s Negative Space 23

desires in her opening statement: ‘In the future, I hope the labels [...]
will disappear’ (Strachan 2007a, p. 55). While she aspires to create social
equality and plurality within her future fiction, Strachan ironically fails
to recognize that this journey has already commenced in Negative Space
and its thoroughly cosmopolitan heroine.
Scotland may still suffer from the malaise of patriarchal masculinity,
but Strachan’s novel looks forward to a possible postfeminist remedy for
its ills, where women no longer ‘bear the brunt of masculine frustration’
(Strachan 2007a, p. 52) at being the impotent neighbour of English
dominance. Economic policies enforced by a remote Westminster led to
a ‘wave of redundancies in the Scotland of the 1980s and replacement
jobs for men in particular were not always to hand [...] Despair, drink
and drugs often took over’ (Devine 2006, p. 598) and many felt
emasculated: ‘During the Thatcher years personal dependence on the
state, far from declining, became a way of life in many working-class
neighbourhoods’ (p. 599). This ‘haemorrhage of men from the older
industries’ (p. 598) led to the so-called feminization of labour, where
light industries ‘increased the employment of women’ (p. 598) so that
‘They now form the majority of the paid labour force in Scotland’
(p. 598). In Strachan’s opening comments she identifies the brutal
scapegoating of women, which must surely be accentuated by their
marked ‘majority’ of Scotland’s workforce. However, Scottish women
have simultaneously fallen victim to patriarchal capitalism’s menial
enterprise, for ‘large numbers are in part-time jobs and average wages
are around 70 per cent of the male rate’ (p. 598). Experiencing the
hostility ‘of masculine frustration’, a significant proportion of women
working in Scotland are doubly punished for their gender by suffering
wage inequality. While women are traditionally held up as the negative
space or lack reflecting male superiority, Strachan argues that Scottish
women are further distorted into a grotesque inferior mirror image
of men to compensate for their ‘intransigent Scottishness’ (Strachan
2007a, p. 52). Her novel attempts to redress the ‘androcentric places
in literature’ (p. 52) by casting an otherwise marginalized queer female
in the central role of narrator: Stella steps out of the negative space
allotted to working-class women from Thatcher’s Scottish hangover
and attempts to redefine her relationship to society in the confidence
of a reborn post-devolution nation. Being queer allows her to resist het-
eronormative definition, just as Strachan herself wishes to transcend
social labels.
Importantly, Simon’s death occurs in 2000, marking a millennial
death/rebirth which signals the demise of traditional patriarchy and
24 Queer Frontiers

a resultant shift towards a new all-encompassing Scottish nation. In

the same year the devolved Scottish Parliament at Holyrood took the
historic step of repealing Clause 28 (2A): ‘[Donald] Dewar told the
Parliament that Clause 2A had to go because it “singles out a minor-
ity in our community for stigma, isolation and fear”.’ The decision to
legislate was announced in autumn 2000 by Wendy Alexander, the
Communities Minister (Devine 2006, p. 636). Clearly this is a key
moment in forging a contemporary Scottish nation based on inclusion,
and Strachan adds her own voice to that future aspiration in her novel
published only two years afterwards. Negative Space portrays a complex
multi-layered character who queries identity and defies categorization
by transgressing traditional boundaries and, in doing so, exposing their
artificiality. Strachan’s message is clearly cosmopolitan insofar as she
advocates that to allow citizens to be defined by social labels impedes
their common humanity, just as Bruce Robbins believes that ‘cosmo-
politanism’ is ‘understood as a fundamental devotion to the interests
of humanity as a whole’ (Robbins 1998, p. 1). In her online article ‘Sad
to be Gay’, Strachan expounds: ‘I can’t help yearning for a future in
which we don’t have such a propensity for categorisation. In which
sexuality just isn’t an issue at all’ (Strachan 2007b). Strachan’s ‘yearning
for a future’, based on human equality and diversity rather than het-
eronormative bigotry, equates with the premise that post-devolution
Scotland must transcend its insular straitjacket and broaden its out-
look. Importantly, she notes that: ‘Same sex couples have full legal
recognition in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and legislation is pend-
ing in Canada. Scotland is perfectly poised to move with the times’
(Strachan 2007b). This aspirational future is mirrored constitutionally,
for ‘There is a strong consensus that the Scottish Parliament must be
a different type of legislature, one which is accessible to women and
others traditionally excluded from formal arenas of politics’ (Brown
et al. 1998 [1996], p. 197). It is also worth noting that in August 2007
Wendy Alexander became the first female leader of the Scottish Labour
Party, further signalling a sea change in the socio-political landscape,
as an articulate intelligent woman led both her party and, potentially,
her nation forward into a post-devolution future (while both the SNP
deputy leader and Conservative leader are also female, though one
may worry whether the latter will have the same impact as Thatcher’s
Conservatism). Alexander’s controversial failure to declare a party
donation and resultant one-day ban from Parliament, which she has
denounced as ‘partisan’,1 led to her resignation on 27 June 2008. While
she was temporarily replaced by her deputy, Cathy Jamieson, both
 Zoe Strachan’s Negative Space 25

women declared at a press conference to announce her resignation that

Alexander’s departure, after being relentlessly pursued by the Scottish
National Party (SNP), was highly regrettable and ‘wise heads will ask
at what price’.2 Wise heads may indeed question this apparent witch-
hunt where significantly, in responding to the judgement of the stand-
ards committee on 26 June 2008, Alexander had lost her voice from
laryngitis. Thereafter, Labour under the leadership of Iain Gray was
resoundingly defeated by Alex Salmond’s party majority in the Scottish
Parliament Election of May 2011. Nevertheless Scottish women, at
both political and literary levels, are writing a new Scottish story in
which individuals are not prejudiced by the identity limitations of
gender, sexuality or ethnicity, for instance, but are equal citizens in
a supranational democracy: ‘Supranationalism as an ideology looks
to the replacement of the nation-state paradigm by a more pluralistic
framework within which sub-nations, ethnic minorities, religious com-
munities and indigenous peoples could have the opportunity to come
more into their own’ (Campbell 2005).
The desire for representation, then, clearly involves gaining a political
voice: Negative Space’s publication in 2002 (just three years after
Scotland gained a devolved parliament) suggests that the uncertainty of
a post-devolution future – which mirrors Stella’s own newly liberated or
devolved selfhood – may assist in the curative process of renegotiating
Scottish identity beyond patriarchal dominance and towards a more
so-called feminine balance. Writing in an evolving cultural climate,
Strachan’s text crosses a bridge away from the gendered negative
space perpetuated by traditional masculinity to discover new possible
Scotlands – in her words ‘to claw back some of the experiential potential
which seemed to have been packaged up and labelled “male”’ (Strachan
2007a, p. 55) – that will allow for the positive diversity of supranational
citizenship. By looking forward to the infinite potential of her own
future and finding her own narrative voice, Stella encapsulates the need
for Scotland to accommodate the cosmopolitan citizens of its post-
devolution era. Likewise, Pnina Werbner and Nira Yuval-Davis (1999)
argue that citizenship moves away from the masculine-driven insularity
of nationalism:

Unlike nationalism which grounds itself in past myths of common

origin or culture, citizenship raises its eyes towards the future, to
common destinies. Its politics are aspirational, a ‘politics of desire’
[...] As a political imaginary, discourses of citizenship constitute hori-
zons of possibility. (Werbner and Yuval-Davis 2005, p. 3)
26 Queer Frontiers

Michael O’Neill suggests that this should be:

A new inclusive British citizenship, one that embraces all the com-
posite nations, ethnicities and creeds of these islands [...] Linda
Colley has alluded [... that] ‘Instead of being mesmerised by debates
over British identity, it would be far more productive to concentrate
on renovating British citizenship, and on convincing all of the
inhabitants of these islands that they are equal and valued citizens
irrespective of whatever identity they may individually select to
prioritise.’ (O’Neill 2004, p. 369)

Far from erasing individuality, this equates with Strachan’s polemic that
there should be a celebration rather than stigmatization of diversity. By
striving towards a cosmopolitan future, post-devolution Scotland can
allow multifarious citizens a new space to be united under the umbrella
of common humanity. Though they do not discuss Strachan, as their
book precedes her first novel Negative Space, Aileen Christianson and
Alison Lumsden (2000) similarly argue that ‘The breadth of work of
contemporary Scottish women writers now ensures the redrawing of the
literary map of Scotland’, as they pose a formidable challenge to ‘a cul-
ture previously more accessible to male Scottish writers’ (Christianson
and Lumsden 2000, p. 1).
As though responding to Christianson and Lumsden, in her cinematic
narrative, Strachan presents a road novel (from the opening chapter it
goes ‘On the road’) where Scottish women literally must mobilize
themselves in order to reposition their multiply silenced subjectivity (in
terms of gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality) and undermine patriar-
chy. Achieving this, Stella learns the value of sisterhood and escapes the
traps of masculinity that have been holding her back in the snares of
repetitive familiarity, where ‘now it seemed as if I had been doing noth-
ing for years’ (Strachan 2003, p. 72), and ‘I always forgot how confident
Alex had become [...] as if she’d been changing and developing and I’d
been staying still and stagnating [...] maybe not even just since Simon
died’ (p. 96). While clearly traumatic, her brother’s demise nevertheless
provides a catalyst to jolt her from routine – ‘Change [...] I can’t wait
to ... – Change’ (pp. 166–7) – and opens a space to develop her potential
and emerge reborn after journeying through the healing process:

I know this place like the back of my hand, but I feel as if I don’t
know where I’m going, don’t know what’s ahead, as if any moment
I might see something strange and new [...] this quiet sense of
 Zoe Strachan’s Negative Space 27

sadness that enfolds me is not a new thing, it seems as much part of

this road as everything else. (Strachan 2003, p. 174)

Ultimately, Simon’s wake awakens the narrator to start living fully

after admitting how empty her life has so far been. Strachan employs
the novel’s title as a metaphor for this emptiness: during a life model-
ling class the tutor talks ‘about the gaps in the composition, between
arm and body, leg and leg, the empty areas’ (Strachan 2003, p. 173),
informing the students that they must ‘remember the importance
of the negative space. You must capture the negative space’ (p. 173).
Stella is a shell exuding negative space insofar as her identity is erased,
continually defined and captured by society, just as ‘negative space is
a photographic term for empty space that contains no subject mat-
ter’ (Ang 2007, p. 28). However, the silhouette itself often becomes
the main artistic image, which is comparable to Deleuze’s (1968) view
that a simulacrum is not merely an ineffectual imitation but, rather, a
vehicle to challenge and overturn hegemonic discourse. If women are
‘simulacra for Scotland’ (Strachan 2007a, p. 52), then Stella becomes a
formidable cosmopolitical force waiting to emerge from her brother’s
shadow, just as post-devolution Scotland can allow its citizens release
from heteronormativity’s shade (for a discussion of cosmopolitics, see
Robbins 1998). Stella’s familiar route home emphasizes her claustropho-
bia, fuelled by destructively drunken heterosexual encounters, suggest-
ing that it is only by travelling down hitherto unknown roads that she
will potentially ‘see something strange and new’ in her future, just as
the direction of post-devolution Scotland’s journey is uncertain. Both
personally and politically the progress will map out a new dawn, emerg-
ing stronger after a period of weakened mourning to take up her place as
a hybrid citizen open to new encounters in a repositioned nation.
Unable to reside comfortably within the traditional fixed nuclear fam-
ily home (her remarried mother’s new family relegated Stella and Simon
to its peripheries), Stella casts off the weight of her alienation to locate
home through an evolving journey towards inner self-value and peace.
Recognizing too her displacement in terms of her gender, sexuality
and ethnicity, the narrator rotates these negatives into a positive space,
unclaimed by traditional boundaries and free to explore new territories.
When Stella’s ship comes in, it is no surprise that it transports her north:
‘Finally the ferry docks at Stromness [...] in a place that’s nearer the Arctic
Circle than it is to London’ (Strachan 2003, p. 193). Strachan utilizes the
imaginative space of a wild northern hinterland in order to allow her
heroine to explore a new emerging selfhood, as she shifts from female
28 Queer Frontiers

object to supranational citizen. Stella’s Orcadian journey draws on a her-

itage noted by Peter Davidson, for ‘The idea of north as a place of purifi-
cation, an escape from the limitations of civilization, has echoes in early
writers’ (Davidson 2005, p. 21). Having served ‘as a place of purification’,
importantly she does not settle in Orkney, however, but continues to
journey and broaden her horizons, indicating that this is a novel that
crosses many bridges in its quest for postfeminist representation. While
it may be a ‘recuperative space’ (Schoene 2006, p. 95), Strachan ensures
that Stella does not drop out of society in an ecofeminist greenwood; it
is a temporary respite until she returns fully embodied to claim her right-
ful citizenship in a reconfigured post-devolution Britain. Val Plumwood
identifies the lure of escaping to a pastoral female idyll ‘where women
live at peace with themselves and with the natural world’ while warning
of its dangers, ‘surviving against the hostile intent of men, who control
a world of power and inequality’ (Plumwood 1993, p. 7). For Plumwood
this utopian retreat marginalizes women further to the peripheries of
civilization, leaving them clinging on while men wield authority, which
merely serves to further polarize gender dichotomies:

Is ecofeminism giving us a version of the story that the goodness

of women will save us? Is it only women [...] who can know the
mysterious forest, or is that knowledge, and that love, in prin-
ciple, accessible to us all? Do we have to renounce the achieve-
ments of culture and technology to come to inhabit the enchanted
forest? [...] is ecofeminism inevitably based in gynocentric essential-
ism? (Plumwood 1993, pp. 7–8)

As a writer clearly engaging in Scotland’s contemporary social and

political climate, Strachan has no intention of allowing her heroine to
retreat from society. She is given appropriate distance and time to reflect
upon its negative impact on her and to remedy this.
In comparison to the liberating untamed open spaces of Orkney’s island
remoteness, Stella is constrained and defined by civilization’s impinging
norms in the densely populated urban spaces. On the mainland she is
subject to the scrutiny of heterosexist disapproval, overhearing in a pub
such prejudice as: ‘ah’m all for live and let live, but the thing you’ve got
tae bear in mind is that it could be one of them teaching your wean, ah
mean they homosexuals get everywhere, ken?’ (Strachan 2003, p. 20).
Strachan’s humour achieves political ends, pointing out the hilarious
absurdity of such a comment while simultaneously demonstrating just
how dangerously entrenched hysterical heterosexist psychosis is in
 Zoe Strachan’s Negative Space 29

Scottish society, undoubtedly fuelled by a religious doctrine that refuses

to see beyond surface labels. Similarly, upon Alexander’s announcement
to quash a homophobic Clause:

It was not long before fierce opposition began to emerge. An alliance

of the Daily Record, Scotland’s biggest-selling tabloid, the Catholic
Church, led by the high-profile Cardinal Tom Winning, and the
millionaire bus tycoon, Brian Souter, an evangelical Christian,
orchestrated a massive protest. This included a postal vote, funded
by Souter, in which 87 per cent of respondents voted to keep the
Clause [...] Amid the hysteria, the Executive stuck to its guns and the
Clause was abolished. The episode showed that, whatever one’s point
of view, a Scottish Parliament could indeed make a difference [...
Dewar] proudly proclaimed [...] ‘We stood firm in the blizzard [...]
section 28 is no more.’ (Devine 2006, p. 636)

Strachan alludes to Holyrood’s disposal of Clause 28 and the public

backlash against its so-called promotion of homosexuality, with the
publican’s paranoia that ‘it could be one of them teaching your wean’.
Her challenge in this post-devolution novel is that the new Scottish
Government (formerly the Scottish Executive), having stepped out of
the shadow of Westminster, continues to build upon its bold step and
help to educate a future balanced Scotland, eradicating divisive bigotry
and welcoming the synergy of cosmopolitan diversity. Interestingly, ‘in
the past [cosmopolitanism] has been applied, often venomously, “to
Christians, aristocrats, merchants, Jews, homosexuals, and intellectu-
als”’ (Robbins 1998, p. 1). Strachan’s text overwrites such palimpsestic
negativity with an optimistic cosmopolitical positive: Stella’s lesbian
desire renders her a citizen of the world insofar as she is a welcome and
vital prismatic contribution to a spectrum of global diversity. Prior to
moving on, Stella is as stagnant as her deceased brother, emphasized by
the lack of movement demanded in her modelling job: ‘The tutor makes
rough charcoal scores around me so that I can find the pose again [...]
it looks like the chalk outline marking where a corpse was discovered’
(Strachan 2003, pp. 169–70). Similarly, it is only by moving forward and
seizing the potential of its devolved future to develop a more mature
nation that Scotland will rid itself of its patriarchal dead wood. On
recent related legislation, Strachan notes that:

many registrars in Scotland are being allowed to opt out of conduct-

ing gay ‘marriage’ ceremonies. At least two local authority areas
30 Queer Frontiers

will deny gay couples the right to anything more than the legal
minimum of partnership registration – none of the registry office
ceremonies that straight couples enjoy. As far as I’m concerned, this
isn’t a matter of choice, it’s the law. The only decision these whing-
ing homophobes should be able to make is whether to like it or lump
it [...] Spain [...] saw its first gay marriage between two men who’d
been partners for 30 years. It was attended by Pedro Zerolo, the top
government official for social issues. I won’t hold my breath for simi-
lar recognition for the first Scots whose councillors deign to favour
wedding style ceremonies. (Strachan 2007b)

To further the objectives begun with the retraction of Clause 28,

Strachan clearly wants Holyrood to continue its journey on the road to
supranational equality and not fall by the wayside. Worryingly perhaps,
though the SNP’s clear majority signals a new direction in devolution’s
strengthened route against Westminster’s ConDem government rela-
tions, accepting continued financial donations from Brian Souter sim-
ply cannot be a positive move for the democratic rights of cosmopolitan
queer citizens.
To overcome debilitating bereavement and become a complete
individual with self-worth, it is vital that Stella moves away from the
familiar urban civilization and explores the alien liminal island space
of Orkney, with its wild landscape: ‘housing schemes flitted by [...] we
were out of the city and off. Relief washed over me, and I suddenly felt
calm. There was no going back now’ (Strachan 2003, p. 2). While thank-
ful to be departing from the city’s restrictive boundaries, her entrenched
patriarchal fears must be surmounted by a willingness to trust in an
unfamiliar territory that will allow self-healing. Initially, her expecta-
tions of partying with bohemian types is a source of disappointment,
commenting that ‘When a group of artists got together you expected
some kind of wild time, with all those artistic temperaments [...] Maybe
things had changed, and people did just want to [...] get on with their
work’ (p. 198), and ‘The others hadn’t proved to be big drinkers [...]
I still thought this must be unusual in a group of artists away from
home’ (p. 210). Since these women do not fit a particular cultural drink-
ing model, ‘Within ten minutes we’d reduced five people’s lives, all of
them longer than ours, to nothing out of the ordinary, no exciting gos-
sip so far’ (p. 213). For Stella, her social crutch to compensate for feeling
dislocated and lacking confidence is alcohol (including, presumably,
Stella lager, otherwise known as wife beater: ‘The name and brand have
been absorbed into popular culture and it is believed that it earned its
 Zoe Strachan’s Negative Space 31

nickname “Wifebeater juice” from the film A Streetcar Named Desire

after the character Stella, Stanley Kowalski’s abused wife.’3). By choosing
the name Stella, Strachan is accentuating the link with violence, given
her view that Scottish women ‘bear the brunt of masculine frustration’.
Stella’s insecurity is evident upon her and Alex’s first arrival in Orkney:

A woman in a parka [...] holds up a hopeful hand-printed sign which

says ALEX MCDIARMID + FRIEND [...] I let Alex slip into the lead,
and suddenly feel awful nervous about being + FRIEND. I’m worried
I won’t be that welcome, won’t fit in, have done the wrong thing.
(Strachan 2003, p. 194)

Socially awkward, she immediately falls behind as though a shadow or

appendage (‘+ FRIEND’) rather than a complete person in her own right.
As a life model, Stella demonstrates the constant pressure of social scru-
tiny here and throughout the text, which leaves her feeling judged and
inadequate, sprawling on a pin like the protagonist of T.S. Eliot’s poem
‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, and reduces her personality to that
of a photographic negative. Inhabiting a negative space, she is an empty
vessel or muse whose identity or meaning is dependent upon (and,
consequently, erased by) the various interpretations bestowed upon her
various artistic poses: ‘I can’t see myself like they can, from the outside’
(Strachan 2003, p. 170). Resultantly, she is reduced to the anonymity of
a surface image, in much the same way as Clegg views Miranda in John
Fowles’ The Collector (1963). She feels ‘Trapped somewhere in between
artist and audience. Being a muse, that’s the romantic way of saying it’s
someone else who’s looking and creating, someone else who’s the artist
[...] maybe I should start knitting or something’ (Strachan 2003, p. 183).
Being dehumanized in this way, it is little surprise that Stella does not
give much of her inner self away to others and feels ‘detached’ (p. 145).
Just as Strachan longs for a day when she is not defined by her gender
or ethnicity or sexuality, Stella wishes to transcend the restrictions
placed upon the female body: ‘It wasn’t me, this object, it shouldn’t be
attached to me so intimately. I should be able to shed it, move out of it
when it got constrictive’ (p. 133). Alluding to a snake’s (with the added
impetus of Eve’s appetite for knowledge) ability to shed its skin, she
wants society to attain the wisdom of defining women’s inner values
not a bodily façade.
However, in a relocated environment only containing women, she
no longer suffers the belittlement of patriarchal conditioning and com-
mences a healing process of becoming comfortable in her own skin.
32 Queer Frontiers

In many ways she grows from utter self-deprecation towards the wisdom
and maturity of valuing her self-worth, not as female object but as human
citizen. She ceases from hostilely judging her female counterparts, with
the Woolfian epiphany that women in fiction should be able to befriend
one another. Having reached a higher level of understanding, she notes:

I’d thought before we came to Orkney that it might be odd, spending

so much time in all-female company, but I realized I quite liked it [...]
I had felt less rather than more female being here. Less of a woman,
more of a person. There seemed to be a release in it, in an odd sort of
way, which pleased me. I wanted to try and explain this to Alex, to
see what she thought, but I wasn’t sure what I meant, so I kept quiet.
(Strachan 2003, p. 257)

While epiphanic, the realization that one’s worth as a human being

ought not to depend upon the voyeuristic scrutiny and judgement of
the masculine gaze remains unspoken to Alex. The narrator’s hesitancy
to impart this might suggest a residual lack of confidence, but Strachan’s
decision as a politicized (post)feminist/lesbian/devolution writer to leave
a silence, allows it to fly free of phallogocentric language’s constraints.
Resultantly, the unspoken gap invites the reader to engage in an ongo-
ing textual conversation and recognize the resonance of this point in
challenging contemporary British society. The women artists’ retreat is
funded by the Minerva Fellowship, after ‘Minerva [Athene], the Roman
goddess of wisdom and patroness of the arts and trades, fabled to have
sprung [...] from the brain of Jupiter [Zeus]’ (Evans 1990, p. 731), and it is
where the narrator learns to move from art object to creator. By relating
through her narrative the dispossessed limbo experienced as the muse,
she becomes the artist who ‘start[s] knitting’ (Strachan 2003, p. 183) this
story together. Just as Stella is liberated from her gender identity while in
Orkney, it is notable that Strachan is concerned with identifying women
artists (including herself ) through their intellect and creative activity.
This refutes the association of women with their bodies, shattering hetero-
patriarchal constructions of passive female beauty existent in the muse or
the model, which echoes Minerva’s cerebral equality with her Father.
The political impetus of redressing the gender imbalance in Scottish
society is evident even in the early stages of the novel when the narrator
recalls Simon’s funeral and its oppressive effect on her:

The minister’s voice is really grating through my head, as he drones

on in his harsh, Presbyterian accent [...]
 Zoe Strachan’s Negative Space 33

He’s reading again now, monotonously, oh God, I recognize this

one, a funeral favourite [...] Fuck, is he going to do the whole thing?
And in God’s house [...] hang your head and look like you believe.
A-fucking-men [...] I feel really sick [...] I haul myself to my feet any-
way, our father which art in heaven, it’s getting louder and louder,
I want to put my fingers in my ears, thy will be done [...] oh God,
no ... I’m going to be sick, I can’t breathe [...] thank God I’m nearest
the aisle [...]
I retch into my hand, push into the toilet. (Strachan 2003,
pp. 9–10)

While describing the ensuing claustrophobia of the crematorium serv-

ice, the grand narrative of Scottish patriarchal religion is effectively
undermined by the female narrator interjecting her own counter-
discourse to biblical doctrine. Stella’s vomit and all-consuming grief
parallel the ultimate abjection of Simon’s cremated corpse, which soci-
ety tries to sanitize through empty ritualistic dogma. A schism ensues
between the law of the Father and the text’s feminine interruption with
the narrator’s own story, whose appeals are not to a Christian God.
Again, in the depths of despair, Strachan utilizes humour – ‘Making
a crematorium too hot, that’s what I call insensitive’ (Strachan 2003,
p. 9) – while magnifying the hollowness of the funeral, with its recycled
old hymns – ‘a funeral favourite’ – and ‘monotonous’ biblical passages,
regardless of appropriateness to individual circumstances. In her rejec-
tion of the heavenly Father’s grand narrative, Stella is sickened by the
ritualistic monopoly held by ‘A-fucking-men’, the heteropatriarchal
alpha and omega endemically blighting Scottish society.
The comparison between such suffocating civilized tradition and
the open air of Orkney is almost palpable in the text. For Stella, the
difference between patriarchal Scottish traditions and Orkney’s restora-
tive space is also due to the island’s pagan past, which offers a further
cosmopolitan dimension free from masculine control: ‘With only the
cries of birds carrying over from the water I could have gone back in
time’ (Strachan 2003, p. 286). Going back in time signals that part of
Stella’s journey is a fugue beyond the snares of masculine Scotland
to immerse herself in its fluid pagan heritage and landscape, free to
grieve beyond Christian duty and to emerge reborn and replenished. It
is no accident that ‘archaeologists believed that this cluster of prehis-
toric sites made up a vast ceremonial landscape’ (p. 240), as it allows
her immersion in an environment that pre-dates divisive patriarchal
history and to mourn her brother amidst the connectedness of this
34 Queer Frontiers

ceremonial landscape. Notably, too, the journey to Orkney ‘coincide[s]

with the Easter vacation’ (p. 162), the time associated with Christ’s
resurrection. Suffering the social crucifixion of being marginalized by
Scottish heteronormativity, Stella bares the stigmata of ostracism – ‘the
palms of my hands bled’ (p. 26) – as the text aligns queer female suffer-
ing with Christ’s outcast martyrdom. Strachan again revises Christian
doctrine from a feminist perspective, as the spring’s associations with
rebirth and growth are appropriated for Stella’s self-development in
a prehistoric pagan site. Crucially, she visits St Magnus Cathedral,
‘the martyr of Orkney, who was murdered at Easter’,4 which is starkly
contrasted with the stifling crematorium because ‘I can tune into the
history of the place rather than the religion’ (p. 231). Like the vastness
of the landscape, where ‘it’s so open, you can see the sky’ (p. 227), the
sheer ‘scale’ (p. 229) of the building allows Stella to freely explore its
historical architecture and ‘imagine people from past centuries’ (p. 230)
frequenting the place. Magnus, a Viking turned Christian (yet undoubt-
edly retaining many Viking traits), is a figure who serves as a bridge
linking paganism with Christianity, just as Strachan envisages a new
Scotland that can forge links with its pre-Christian past in order to
create a balanced post-patriarchal cosmopolitan nation. Importantly,
‘St Magnus Cathedral is unique in that it actually belongs to the City
and Royal Burgh of Kirkwall. It is not, and has never been, the property
of the Church’,5 which allows Stella to enjoy the space without being
stifled by religion.
Journeying to Orkney during Easter serves as a reminder that it was
originally a pagan festival, erased by Christianity. This pagan festival is
linked with a feminine not a masculine deity, namely the goddess of
the dawn, Eostre (Aurora), who was associated with the spring. Strachan
resurrects this feminine cultural absence or negative space as a palimp-
sest informing her own particular political vision of post-devolution
citizenship. After a long walk to the pub, Stella remarks that ‘It made
it all seem a bit more worthwhile when we saw the aurora borealis’
(Strachan 2003, p. 212), emphasizing its symbolic use in Stella’s jour-
ney towards a new dawn. At this point she also mentions that ‘The
stars were so bright as well [...] I scanned the sky for a star of my own
to wish on’ (pp. 212–14), forging a link between outer space’s stella(r)
phenomena and Stella’s inner space: ‘I looked up at the hundreds of
thousands of bright twinkling icy stars and felt as though somewhere
deep inside me there might be space for something still, something
calm and peaceful’ (pp. 214–15). Awed by astral phenomena the nar-
rator finally finds inner peace and accepts Simon’s death: ‘he couldn’t
 Zoe Strachan’s Negative Space 35

come back from the dead [...] what was there left to wish for, except
that he was okay, wherever he was. That he didn’t die in pain [...] That
he knew how much I loved him’ (p. 214). According to Inuit folklore
the northern lights are ‘the spirits of the dead’,6 and it is in this ancient
sacred place surrounded by its vast openness that Stella is finally able
to let go and face tomorrow, now that she has positive space to breathe
unrestricted by claustrophobic society: ‘It was beautiful, eerie and beau-
tiful [...] I’d never seen anything like it before [...] Usually you’d only see
wee patches of them, showing through gaps in the clouds, or nothing at
all, like at home’ (p. 212). Stella is reborn phoenix-like from the ashes
of her brother’s cremation, ready to embrace a positive postfeminist
citizenship (notably, ‘The phoenix is also a symbol of the Resurrection’
[Evans 1990, p. 849]), just as Scotland itself is re-emerging in its post-
devolution nationhood. Upon witnessing the aurora borealis, she has
metaphorically crossed a bridge between her old self and a new outlook,
just as the Inuit believed that ‘The way to heaven leads over a narrow
bridge which spans an enormous abyss. The spirits that were already in
heaven light torches to guide the feet of the new arrivals. These torches
are called the northern lights.’7 While reference to ‘spirits’ immediately
associates itself with Simon, it also acknowledges Stella’s crossing-over
from a living death to the ‘heaven’ of a new life.
Furthering the symbolism of this journey, Strachan again reinscribes
Christian mythology with postfeminist commentary when Stella wears
Simon’s St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers, and eventually
buries it among the standing stones of Orkney as an alternative tomb-
stone for her brother. In the cathedral the ‘centuries-old tombstones’
(Strachan 2003, p. 230) leave her ‘awed by the power of other people’s
loss, these beautifully carved slabs’ (p. 232), culminating in a sense
of connectivity in the helplessness of humanity’s collective grieving:
‘Death levels all’ (p. 232). Acknowledging that ‘I can understand, in fact
I share, this urge to leave a more permanent mark on the world to com-
memorate someone passing through it’ (p. 233), Stella feels compelled
to mark Simon’s passing as significant not only to her but to humanity.
Hoping that ‘it would enhance rather than deface’ (p. 288) the ancient
standing stone, she reasons that ‘if Vikings had etched graffiti about
treasure hunting and how pretty their girlfriends were [...] then hope-
fully I could get away with this one’ (p. 288). This is no selfish act of
effacement but, rather, an attempt to express her connection to her
recently deceased brother and to Scotland’s ancestral heritage: even the
stone is deliberately chosen as ‘a more perfect shape than any other.
When I put out my hand and touched it, it was as if I could sense the
36 Queer Frontiers

quivering of all the atoms under my hand’ (p. 287). It is that ‘urge to
leave a more permanent mark’ in memoriam that drives her actions
because ‘All Simon got was a service in a religion he didn’t believe in,
taken by a man who’d never met him’ (p. 232). Rejecting the impotence
experienced by this passive ritual, Stella personalizes and thus ‘preserves
the sanctity of the ceremony’ (p. 289) by engraving her own act of
remembrance. No longer subject to a masculinist religious grand narra-
tive, she creates and interprets her own postfeminist ritual: ‘It took me
a little while, as I gently etched away at the stone, to realise that in this
instance I was both the individual performing the ritual and the person
doing the seeing; giving this event its meaning, and making any truth
it contained all my own’ (p. 289). The inscription reads ‘SIMON FLETT
1976–2000’ (p. 289) and ‘Flett [is] the oldest surname in Orkney.’8
After feeling alienated in Glasgow and Ayrshire, Stella Flett’s journey
to the place where her family name originates indicates a return to her
ancestral spiritual home, where she has found herself amidst a sense of
belonging and laid her brother’s memory to rest. As well as being the
oldest recorded surname in Orkney, ‘“Flett” is thought by some to be
derived from the Old Norse flagth meaning, “witch”.’9 Though Stella
Flett is ostracized in heteronormative society (‘the lesbian resembles the
witch in both her exclusion from mainstream society and the threat she
poses to hetero-patriarchal values and conventional models of feminin-
ity’ [Palmer 1999, p. 29]), being a witch offers an alternative positive
cosmopolitan association with Orkney’s pagan heritage and its wise
‘spae-women’10 who were often healers. It is also worth noting, given
Stella’s visit to St Magnus Cathedral where she observes that ‘Stained
glass saints look down from the windows’ (Strachan 2003, p. 230),
that one of those stained-glass windows bears the Flett family crest.11
Presumably, while ‘imagin[ing] people from past centuries’ (p. 230) in
the cathedral, she must also be envisaging her ancestors.
The grief Stella experiences on the civilized mainland shifts from
Freud’s concept of healthy mourning to destructive melancholia, where
she is subjected to Simon’s gothic haunting (‘He’s spent the day haunt-
ing me’ [Strachan 2003, p. 15]) as a Freudian return of the repressed.
Drawing on a Scottish, female and lesbian gothic tradition, Strachan’s
text utilizes this ‘hybrid form of fiction’ (Palmer 1999, p. 22) to uncover
repressed ‘emotions and anxieties’ (p. 10). Stella’s unconscious drives
allude to Freud’s libidinal association with grieving when, during
masturbation, ‘I kept seeing Simon, even as my fingers moved faster’
(Strachan 2003, p. 51). Significantly, while asleep, ‘he arrives [...] This
dream is graphic [...] she’s really into it as she feels his cock ramming
 Zoe Strachan’s Negative Space 37

into her [...] suddenly it’s not her, it’s me. I feel the button of his trousers
scraping my thigh, and his tongue squirming in my mouth and it’s too
much, it’s suffocating’ (p. 125). Just as Freud’s return of the repressed
incorporates the taboo of incest, so too does this feature in Stella’s
unconscious. Importantly, however, desire quickly turns into a horrific
‘suffocating’ trauma in which her selfhood suffers a schizoid disloca-
tion between ‘her’ and ‘me’. At the level of political metaphor, Strachan
adopts the gothic mode here to discuss Stella, as a queer Scottish woman,
being gagged and trapped within patriarchal discourse. Critically, ‘les-
bianism/homosexuality’ is often regarded as ‘signifying “the repressed”
at the heart of phallocentric culture’ (Palmer 1999, p. 12), while Stella’s
‘mouth’ is stopped with a phallogocentric ‘tongue’, triggering a physi-
ological response that mirrors the nausea she experiences during the
funeral. Her debilitating silence and suffocating melancholia are only
resolved through a psychogeographical journey away from social con-
straints where landscape/mindscape merge and allow her own voice to
be found. Palmer points out that ‘Fuss, discussing the relation between
heterosexual and homosexual economies, describes “each as haunted
by the other”, with “the other” representing “the very occurrence of
ghostly visitation”’ (pp. 12–13), just as Stella is haunted by Simon and,
in turn, is regarded as a witch by Caledonian insularity. Even her broth-
er’s name (Simon) alludes to the biblical grand narrative that underpins
Scottish society and bears its suffocating weight down heavily upon
Stella, socially crucified for her cosmopolitanism. Society’s solution to
her bereavement is to label and contain her depression in a Foucauldian
discourse where ‘out of a sense of duty to the superior knowledge of the
medical profession I tried to remember to swallow my antidepressants
twice a day’ (Strachan 2003, p. 93) because, significantly, ‘He knew best’
(p. 132). Just as Stella’s mouth is silenced by the masculinist culture of
‘A-fucking-men’, she is subjected to further oral aggression by swal-
lowing drugs prescribed by a male doctor. Such obediently regulated
consumption will, of course, render her passively inactive: her voice is
swallowed up by a modern opiate of the people. However, Simon also
alludes to several possible individuals, including the brother of Christ,
for ‘In the canonic New Testament Simon the Zealot is never identified
with Simon the brother of Jesus.’12 This refers to the obscurity as well as
dubiousness surrounding the many possible Simons mentioned in the
Bible. For instance, because Simon Magus is associated with ‘trafficking
in sacred things, the buying and selling of ecclesiastical offices is still
called simony’ (Evans 1990, p. 1022). Strachan’s choice of biblical name,
then, might well allude to the corruption and hypocrisy associated with
38 Queer Frontiers

Christian civilization in her text. But, more poignantly, if Simon is read

as the brother of Christ, then in Strachan’s postfeminist reinscription,
Stella is Christ-like in her suffering and social stigmatization. Just as
‘women still appear as simulacra for Scotland’ (Strachan 2007a, p. 52),
Stella represents the martyrdom of a marginalized gender and sexuality
within a deformed national psyche, but also signals that salvation is
attainable. Her reborn self allows Stella to find her voice which, in turn,
brings hope that a post-devolution Scotland can exorcize its demons.
Poignantly, Simon of Cyrene purportedly assisted Jesus by carrying his
cross on the road to Calvary. Similarly, on their journey Simon shares
Stella’s burden as outcasts in their new step-family home, although
it is worth noting that Simon of Cyrene was ‘compelled to bear his
cross’ (Matthew 27:32), suggesting that it was not a voluntary act of
kindness. More crucially, however, in the Gnostic tradition Simon of
Cyrene is believed to have been mistakenly crucified instead of Christ,
where he ‘takes the place of Jesus’ (Barnstone and Meyer 2003, p. 470).
In Strachan’s vision, though women have suffered social crucifixion as
simulacra, an overshadowing patriarchal masculinity must ultimately
perish to allow an enlightened cosmopolitan Scotland to arise.
The journey back to the ancestral roots of her country’s past indicates
that progress can only be made in a continuum that recognizes one’s
place in an ongoing historical narrative. Similarly, the text’s cyclical
structure adds to the weight of movement between past, present and
future: it opens with Stella and Alex journeying to Orkney and spirals
back to earlier events to conclude with the open-ended potential of them
travelling to London, thus creating layers of depth in the narrative. For
Cairns Craig one’s personal and national stories are interconnected:

the narrative of the nation and the narrative of their own existence
are imaginatively intertwined [...] The imagination is the medium
through which the nation’s past is valued, and through which the
nation’s values are collected, recollected and projected into the
future [...] The condition of living in history, in the expectation or
the angst of knowing that the future will be necessarily different
from the present, required a medium by which a common past and
a common stock of cultural memories can be defined, and by which
a possible route towards that future can be charted without loss of
continuity with a founding past. (Craig 1999, pp. 10–11)

Strachan’s text clearly makes associations between Stella’s personal

narrative and its place within post-devolution Scotland’s story, both
 Zoe Strachan’s Negative Space 39

moving forwards with a strong sense of where they have been, includ-
ing their respective past mistakes. Negative Space asks that we look
beyond the patriarchal insularity of the Caledonian nation, however,
to remember Scotland’s feminine pagan heritage in a bid to create a
more balanced androgynous future of cosmopolitan citizenship. The
narrative’s circular technique and its gothic allusions further enhance
this diverse vision by shifting away from the linear realism of tradi-
tional working-class Scottish patriarchal fiction to a more experimental
fluid structure that can open up the interstices of a reimagined and
reconfigured nation. Eleanor Bell notes that ‘we are now existing in an
in-between state, where new forms of citizenship may be emerging, yet
where the older versions should not be underestimated or dismissed
either. The task, then, is to preserve what is valuable in past models
while trying to anticipate what prospective forms might involve’
(Bell 2004, p. 5).
Without a fusion of identities, the warning is that Scotland will con-
tinue to dislocate its people in a bipolar perpetuation of destructive self/
other binaries. Referring to Scotland’s schizophrenic collective psyche,
Douglas Gifford et al. point to:

a school of Scottish fiction which has its own particular and almost
obsessive preoccupation with divided self and divided family within
divided community and nation [...] older Scotland in tension with
the new [...] this recurrent symbolic patterning of opposites clearly
expressed dualism deeply felt and long-lasting in Scottish culture.
(Gifford et al. 2002, pp. 327–8)

While alluding to this negative space of gothic duality, where ‘I can’t

rid myself of this constant little presence, my doppelganger dogging
my every footstep’ (Strachan 2003, p. 15), Strachan’s postfeminist text
inserts its own positive identity to remedy a literary heritage of divi-
siveness identified by Gifford and Strachan herself in this chapter’s
opening quotation. Only when Stella recognizes the self-destruction
wielded by her comfort zone of familiarity does she strive to step out
of her brother’s shadow: ‘in the end I wondered if I had turned into
Simon [...] I thought that if it wasn’t already too late I didn’t want to die
here, like this’ (p. 30). Like the drugs overdose which hospitalizes her,
continuing to be dogged by the doppelganger of her deceased brother
will perpetuate a dissolution of selfhood: breaking away from routine
becomes an act of self-preservation. The sense of being dislocated is
further evident in Stella’s division between her internal and external
40 Queer Frontiers

identities. The split alter ego of the narrator between I and She is again
symptomatic of a Scottish bipolar psyche that needs to be restored:

I stagger uncoordinated into the kitchen to look in the mirror

because I’m disintegrating and I need to know what it looks like on
the outside. Predictably it’s not even me in the mirror, it’s someone
I don’t know, her, looking back at me, all black mascara smears over
wet face [...] She’s broken. (Strachan 2003, p. 124)

For Strachan the dislocation at the heart of Scottish patriarchal society

indicates that it is ‘broken’ and in desperate need of a remedy that
might be available in the unwritten potential of a more balanced post-
devolution future.
Writing her story as a Scottish citizen, Stella moves the nation’s nar-
rative away from its destructive schizophrenic binaries towards the
queer potential of its outer regional limits. In doing so, she herself
shifts from being a passive muse subjected to society’s set scripts to
become the instigator of her destiny, just as Craig argues that Scotland’s
future depends upon the creative intentions of its citizens, being ‘the
medium for translating into action our communal intentions’ (Craig
2004, p. 251). Likewise, in ‘Going Cosmopolitan’ Schoene comments
that ‘Scottish identity has become performative, at once solid and “in
process”, clearly intelligible and impossible to pinpoint, historically
embodied and promisingly suspended in the grasp of the people’s
intentions’ (Schoene 2007, p. 12). Put another way, Stella changes
from being a passenger on life’s journey to taking the helm and chart-
ing new waters. Metafictionally, Strachan’s novel alludes to the act of
reading and writing, as Stella discards another author’s text to tell her
own tale. Setting out on the journey to Orkney that will transform her
life, Stella notably ‘Couldn’t read my book, because whenever I lowered
my eyes to the page I felt horribly carsick [...] I cast my mind back [...]
It was as good a place to start as any’ (Strachan 2003, pp. 2–3). Rather
than settling for being the passive reader of another fiction, she opts to
actively impart and shape her own story. Only when her story reaches
its conclusion does the narrator disclose her name: the end of her physi-
cal and literary journey allows Stella to embark upon a new unwritten
chapter of self-discovery. Her narrative is a type of travel writing, related
during the protagonist’s journey and presumably written in her blank
journal so that it becomes the novel which we read. The blank sheets
of paper offer room for Stella to create and recreate her own evolving
identity just as post-devolution offers the infinite potential of future
 Zoe Strachan’s Negative Space 41

Scotlands: ‘the hardback notebook I got especially for coming here, with
the idea of keeping some kind of diary, writing down what we did. It’s
still pristine and empty, apart from Iram’s phone number and address’
(p. 282). Her desire for Iram marks a cultural shift towards the ‘aspira-
tional, a “politics of desire”’ (Werbner and Yuval-Davis 2005, p. 3) that
is evident within contemporary Scottish fiction and attainable in the
post-devolution socio-political arena.
Including Iram’s details in Stella’s otherwise blank pages offers a new
dimension to her self-discovery and another as yet unwritten story in
her physical and emotional journey. Significantly, Iram is studying
journalism and visits Orkney as ‘a travel writing option on her course’
(Strachan 2003, p. 260), mirroring Stella’s narrative, which is a travel
log of her geographical and psychological journey. In turn, Strachan’s
novel compares strongly with Rosi Braidotti’s notion in Nomadic Subjects
of ‘nomadic writing’ (Braidotti 1994, p. 16). Rather than a geographical
place, Stella finds a sense of home and belonging in her relationship
with Iram. Immediately after their sexual encounter she ceremonially
buries the St Christopher (removed during their lovemaking) among the
Neolithic standing stones, signalling that she has found an inner still-
ness and peace in her resolution of this stage in her journey. Similarly,
Braidotti argues that: ‘As an intellectual style, nomadism consists not
so much in being homeless, as in being capable of recreating your
home everywhere’ (p. 16). Crucially, Stella records this moment by
taking photographs: ‘I was both the individual performing the ritual
and the person doing the seeing, giving this event its meaning, and
making any truth it contained all my own’ (Strachan 2003, p. 289).
Being respected and loved as an individual has enabled her to cast off
the passive muse and become an artist capable of interpreting her own
life. Importantly, Stella finds that confidence through her relationships
with women artists beyond the negative impact of patriarchy, particu-
larly Iram, who epitomizes supranational citizenship. Countering the
claustrophobic cremation, a secular burning of Simon’s belongings
occurs outdoors on an Ayrshire beach, where Stella rescues his penknife
which lay ‘glittering in the ashes’ (p. 103). Holding the phallic symbol
he used ‘to sharpen pencils’ (p. 104) signifies that she is an emerging
artist. Mentioning that ‘I [...] rubbed it over my scarred palms’ (p. 104)
reminds the reader that Stella must suffer for her art to challenge the
mindsets of heteropatriarchy. Just as Dewar’s withdrawal of Clause 28
was to remove the ‘stigma’ from gay Scots, she bears her stigmata-
like scars yet travels forward along a healing path which is plotted by
her: ‘I was aware that something was changing [...] This was only the
42 Queer Frontiers

beginning’ (p. 104). Interestingly, though Stella finds belonging within

a relationship, it is worth noting that Iram ‘was spoken of in folk tales
as a trading centre [...] It became, according to legends, fabulously
wealthy [...] The city became lost to modern history, and was thought to
be only a figment of mythical tales.’ However, ‘Recent [archaeological]
discoveries have brought Iram out of the realm of myth into history.’13
Having studied archaeology and philosophy at Glasgow University,
it is quite possible that Strachan would have knowledge of this place
where, according to the Koran, ‘King Shaddad defied the warnings of
the prophet Hud (in the Bible Eber or Heber) and God smote the city,
driving it into the sands, never to be seen again.’14 Utilizing a space that
parallels the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah and veers between imagi-
native myth and history, Strachan establishes a positive homosexual
cosmopolitan loving union between two characters from Christian and
Asian cultures that defies the prejudice of their respective scriptures.
While Stella represents social otherness in terms of her gender, sexual-
ity and Scottish ethnicity, Iram is marginalized as a female British Asian.
The narrator observes that: ‘It suddenly strikes me [...] that she’s the only
Asian person here [...] she said that two ned girls had shouted Paki bitch
after her in the street in Kirkwall, and I was surprised because for some
reason I thought, even here?’ (Strachan 2003, p. 274). Though Orkney
serves as a place for Stella to recuperate, this is a reminder that it is not
simply a pagan pastoral idyll but is prone to similar prejudices as those
existing in urban settings. Stella’s reference to ‘two ned girls’ (a deroga-
tory term used in Scotland that is equivalent to ‘chav’) who racially
abuse Iram is problematic as it replaces a racial prejudice with a class
one and suggests that Stella’s journey towards cosmopolitan tolerance
is still ongoing. Unlike her sister Rizwana who ‘had a slight Pakistani
accent [...] Iram’s voice was a strange mixture of Leeds where she grew
up, and London where she’d lived for the past few years. It was her con-
fidence that struck me most of all’ (p. 260). This young student oozes a
confidence that attracts the narrator to a union representing hopeful-
ness for a future decentralized Britain of post-devolutionary possibili-
ties: within Iram’s alluring mixture of hybridity, the narrator finds that
‘I recognized a tiny fragment of myself in her’ (p. 260). Transcending
Scotland’s schizoid heteronormative mindset that has hitherto haunted
Stella, she embarks upon a journey towards cosmopolitan citizenship
and finds unity in a lesbian lover who ‘stands there my mirror image,
with bare breasts and nipples darker than my own’ (p. 277). Such opti-
mism is symbolized when Alex lends Stella her mobile phone to call
Iram on their journey to London: ‘A little green light blinks at me in
 Zoe Strachan’s Negative Space 43

time to the rhythm of the train’ (p. 294). The rhythmic train and pul-
sating green light sweep Stella’s previous psychocultural barriers aside
and signal the go-ahead for a new destination in the narrator’s life:
the traditional closure of a happy-ever-after ending in a relationship is
averted by allowing it to remain open to possibility, leaving a sense of
continuation and energy in the space beyond the narrative.
After journeying north to a place that is nearer the Arctic than London,
it is significant that the text concludes with Stella and Alex travelling
south to London. Healed in the wilderness of a northern landscape,
Stella imports a cosmopolitical outlook to the capital of a reconfigured
and devolved British society. Intending to resume her acquaintance with
Iram, Stella crosses the border from Scotland to England, embarking on
a cosmopolitan relationship that undermines heteronormative society,
as well as signalling the demise of Scotland’s aggrieved inferiority com-
plex to its neighbour and the emergence of a new equal post-devolution
relationship where both nations can harmoniously co-exist within a
supranational United Kingdom within Europe. In a novel that dissolves
thresholds throughout, Stella’s comment that ‘we should cross that
bridge when we come to it’ (Strachan 2003, p. 291) relates not only to
uncertain future plans beyond living ‘for three months virtually rent
free in London’ (p. 291), but also to the continued bridging of divides or
borders that, as citizens on life’s journey, we are compelled to undertake.
It further echoes Stella’s earlier comment that: ‘I had no idea what I’d do
when I got back from Orkney [...] I supposed I’d cross that bridge when
I came to it’ (pp. 178–9). This nomadic text overturns the status quo
of settling (for less), associated with a settled way of life in patriarchal
Scotland and, instead, favours the dynamics of post-devolution’s desires.
Negative Space is nomadic in terms of structure and content, constantly
mobile in its transportations (buses, ferries, cars, trains, mobile phones
litter the text) from Glasgow to Kilmarnock to Orkney to London, with
brief mentions of Edinburgh and Paris, just as the novel itself is a trans-
portable world that can be read anywhere.
By actively inscribing her own journey, Stella finds space for endless
possibilities to arise: ‘It makes a change imagining all the things which
might happen in the future’ (Strachan 2003, p. 293). In the scarred
hands of the female artist, hitherto phallic tools are remoulded. Bearing
the stigmata of past suffering, her rebirth involves a personal and cul-
tural salvation for, having weathered the storm, she heralds the ‘imag-
ining’ of a new Scotland that includes all citizens, transcends identity’s
labels and responds to Strachan’s opening aspiration that ‘In the future,
I hope the labels [...] will disappear’ (Strachan 2007a, p. 55) as well as
44 Queer Frontiers

Angus Calder’s desire of becoming ‘A nation empowered by accept-

ance of the realities of its past and ready to generate new Scotlands of
the mind, and recreate itself as a land without prejudice’ (Calder 2004
[2002], p. xvi). Negative Space mobilizes its narrator, who recreates her
position psychologically and socially by nomadically travelling beyond
boundaries, just as Gifford et al. see ‘the overall mood of Scottish fic-
tion’ containing ‘a mixture of optimism, uncertainty and a desire to
challenge [...] The results of this new eclecticism are unpredictable; the
story of Scotland and Scottish culture is clearly being rewritten’ (Gifford
et al. 2002, p. 980). As such, Stella’s uncertain destination echoes the
fluid malleability of post-devolution’s optimism.
Strachan’s text offers a postfeminist remedy to the destructively neu-
rotic Caledonian antisyzygy by transcending its binary parochialism
in favour of a supranational citizenship that journeys outwards in the
search for new horizons. Bell writes that

Bhabha uses the idea of ‘wandering peoples’ as a metaphor for those

‘who will not be contained within the Heim of the national cul-
ture’ [...] The nomadic subject always eludes cultural fixity, and in this
way represents a fundamental threat to essential formulations and the
ability to stereotype or characterize the nation. (Bell 2004, p. 32)

Stella is one of these ‘wandering peoples’ who defies ‘cultural fixity’ and
charts the rebirth of Scotland’s intention. Her journey towards cosmo-
politan completion allows her to transcend the insular shackles of het-
eronormative Scotland and embrace a rainbow of broadened horizons.
No longer a negative space subject to masculine erasure, she inscribes
a citizenship of diverse multiplicity, just as Braidotti argues that: ‘Non-
unitary subjectivity here means a nomadic, dispersed, fragmented
vision, which is nonetheless functional, coherent and accountable,
mostly because it is embedded and embodied’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 4).
Continuing to nomadically cross bridges, Stella ensures that she will be
an ambassador of cosmopolitan understanding that must be reverber-
ated in her reborn nation.
To achieve cosmopolitical inclusion, Scottish society must cease
demonizing others, including women and queer citizens, as inferior
simulacra and return to those who are repressed the ‘full humanity’
(Palmer 1999, p. 12) of supranational citizenship. Strachan points
out that ‘our country is made up of many different Scotlands’ and, to
respond to this, ‘In our new nation, we need to hear these voices loud
and clear’ (Strachan 2007a, p. 54).
2
‘Boundaries. Desire’: Philosophical
Nomadism in Jeanette Winterson’s
The Powerbook and The Stone Gods

In this space which is inside you and inside me I ask for

no rights or territories. There are no frontiers or controls.
The usual channels do not exist. This is the orderly
anarchic space that no one can dictate, though everyone
tries. This is a country without a ruler. I am free to come
and go as I please. This is Utopia. It could never happen
beyond bed. This is the model of government for the
world. No one will vote for it, but everyone comes back
here. This is the one place where everybody comes.
Most of us try to turn this into power. We’re too
scared to do anything else.
But it isn’t power – it’s sex. (Winterson 2001b, p. 175)

The narrator asserts in Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook (2000)

that the body’s inner-space, a site of orgasmic pleasure, is an ‘orderly
anarchic’ world without frontiers that is free to exist in harmonious
equilibrium beyond the death-dealing binaries imposed by nation
states, where a sense of belonging is often constructed at the expense
of an alien other. Of course, this inner-space is simultaneously
acknowledged to be ‘Utopia’, meaning a non-existent no place, or an
ideal good place. Indeed, it is interesting that Winterson applies this
metaphor of the inner body ‘space which is inside you and inside me’,
for, according to Chris Ferns in Narrating Utopia, ‘utopia embodies the
longstanding human dream of a return to paradise – a paradise which
is in its turn a metaphor for the prenatal security of the womb’ (Ferns
1999, pp. 4–5). I would argue, however, that it is Winterson’s particu-
larly socio-political treatise in this text – in her application of the body
as ‘the model of government’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 175) for the Body

45
46 Queer Frontiers

Politic – to throw down the gauntlet to Western culture and beyond in

seeking to promote a utopian land of make-believe through the equally
ideal space of fiction. In doing so, she urges us to ‘imagine there’s no
countries’ in a cosmopolitical vision of deterritorialized citizens of the
world. Such deterritorialism is similar to Rosi Braidotti’s (1994) view of
philosophical nomadism as a political challenge to the fixed borders of
patriarchal hegemony.
‘The model of government for the world’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 175)
is not instigated by a brotherhood of man. Rather, The Powerbook envis-
ages an alternative to patriarchy’s will to ‘power’ in its obsession with
clarifying, labelling and controlling. As a marginalized female/lesbian
voice within the fixed locatives of nationhood, capitalism, history and
heteropatriarchal norms, Winterson seeks to decentre these axes of
signification in a bid to relocate new modes of subjective positioning
outwith the available maps – referred to in the text as the unknown
space of ‘the Wilderness’ (p. 228). Responding to the Woolfian feminist
perspective that ‘as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no
country. As a woman my country is the whole world’ (Woolf 1993 [1929
and 1938], p. 234), Winterson’s cosmopolitan nomadic text rejects any
interpellative reflections of self and nation in favour of embracing the
utopian non-locatable space of fluid infinite experimentation (Woolf’s
assertion rotates towards the positive act of defiant dispossession in a
lesbian ideal). Thus, ‘Sex between women is mirror geography [...] You
are a looking-glass world. You are the hidden place that opens up to me
on the other side of the glass. I touch your smooth surface and then
my fingers sink through to the other side’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 174).
As such, ‘Utopia must be transformative if it is to imagine a better
world than the one that readers/audiences currently know’ (Bradford
et al. 2008, p. 4). Winterson’s text seeks to offer a transformative
utopian alternative to hegemonic norms, for it is within such fiction
that ‘spatiality is a site of struggle over competing visions of social and
political orders’ (p. 5).
Lesbian desire, then, dissolves the boundaries and lack associated
with the symbolic order to embrace the potential plenitude held in the
Kristevan semiotic space ‘on the other side of the glass’: to pass through
the looking-glass is to wander amidst a territory uncharted by phall-
ogocentric discourse in which the penetrative frontier of inside/outside
is blurred and power dichotomies liquefied on a bed of pleasure (for
further discussion regarding the ways in which queer sexuality can dis-
rupt inner/outer dichotomies, see Fuss [1991]). Such an assertion flouts
Lacan’s belief that all desire stems from the lack experienced in the
 Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods 47

Oedipal severance from the mother (perhaps further intensified given

Winterson’s own separation from her biological mother and resultant
adoption) towards identification with the Law of the Father in the
process of socialization, where we forever strive to plug the gaping hole
in our soul. In The Powerbook lack is part and parcel of the patriarchal
mindset that can be disassembled and filled in a lesbian utopian space.
Indeed, Elizabeth Grosz argues in her essay ‘Refiguring Lesbian Desire’
that:

to understand desire not in terms of what is missing or absent, not

in terms of a depth, latency, or interiority but in terms of surfaces
and intensities [...] In contrast to the negative model that dooms
desire to consumption, incorporation, dissatisfaction, destruction
of the object, there is a tradition [...] of seeing desire primarily as
production rather than as lack [...] So, in attempting to go the other
way, I want to be able to provide a reading of lesbianism, or at least
lesbian sexuality and desire, in terms of bodies, pleasures, surfaces,
intensities. (Grosz 1994, pp. 74–6)

Agreeing to an extent with Grosz’s interpretation, The Powerbook

nevertheless reclaims ‘depth’ from a heterosexist notion of penetra-
tion towards an endless free play of interiority, identified as ‘this space
which is inside me and inside you’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 175), where
there is no set role of active/passive in a book which seeks to dismantle
the power structures embedded in ideology and digested by the indi-
vidual’s psyche as natural. What Winterson’s text seeks is to overthrow
the dominance of ‘bodies’ by providing a blissful imaginary state of
outer-body experience, where the subject is fluidly metamorphic and
the inside/outside parameters of desire are multiply indistinguishable.
Claire Colebrook reminds us in Gender that:

the boundary between self and other, or self and world, is produced
through desire [...] I become a subject or ‘I’ only through my relation
to an other who addresses me [...] The self is gradually built up of
these bordering experiences [...] the rudimentary relation between
self and other has also to be formed through body boundaries, where
experience gradually differentiates an inside self from an outside
world. (Colebrook 2004, p. 195)

In order to undermine that system of learned difference, this text invites

us into an imaginary space where bodies do not matter, and there is a free
48 Queer Frontiers

exchange of desire. In order to experiment with possibilities – ‘Freedom

just for one night’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 26) – The Powerbook applies a
variety of labyrinthian metaphors including cyberspace, outerspace and
alien cities in foreign countries in order to travel through uncharted ter-
ritory, finding new terrain where one can develop another self or selves
and uncover the ‘buried treasure’ (p. 109) that forever eludes us when
trapped in dominant discourses. Thus, the narrator ‘was happy with
the lightness of being in a foreign city and the relief from identity it
brings’ (p. 45). Cities in the text are described as mazes through which
one must navigate, just as the reader must travel through the story,
entering the fictional spaces that are opened up, for ‘The stories are
maps’ (p. 53). To read the map that is The Powerbook requires an element
of critical decipherment in order to unlock its linguistic hieroglyphics
that resemble the ‘secret alphabet’ of love and ‘read the plain text of
our hearts’ (p. 78). Reading for Winterson, then, is akin to a romantic
relationship. She says:

It’s something that you do privately […] and that does make it pecu-
liarly intimate […] I like the reader to feel that for that time, at least,
nothing else exists and they are entering a world – a bit like the
Ancient Mariner, I suppose – where somebody is stopping them on
their busy way and saying, ‘Listen to this. Here’s a story’. (Quoted in
Reynolds and Noakes 2003, pp. 14–15)

A ‘Jehovah’s Witness’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 50) is mentioned in

The Powerbook as a comparison with the narrator, whose initials echo
Winterson’s – each detains us, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner prevents
the wedding guest entering in order to tell his tale. JW’s mission in the
text is to persuade the reader to enter into an unfamiliar world in order to
be susceptible to the potentiality of difference and shift beyond their com-
fort zone towards numerous alternative freedoms. It is a compulsion to
interrupt our workaday lives with the creative question of ‘what if’. To an
extent, though, it becomes a masturbatory fantasy done ‘privately’, where
the mind connects in an ‘intimate’ manner with the text, but nevertheless
remains solitary in its disembodied disconnection from others.
Of course, the question is whether this ultimately frees the reader
or entangles them in yet another discourse of power. I would suggest
that, ultimately, Winterson indeed wishes to tie down her reader and
tell her tale, but the intention is to unloosen their Blakean ‘mind-forg’d
manacles’. The result is a kind of Carrollian ‘let’s pretend’, which seeks
to demonstrate just how powerful narrative can be. The Powerbook,
 Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods 49

then, contemplates discursive ideology, whilst simultaneously provid-

ing its own narrative counter-perspective to the norm. In an interview
with Peggy Reynolds, Winterson informs us that:

I think I started writing before I could read because I wanted to

write sermons, because I was driven by a need to preach to people
and convert them which possibly I still am, except that now I do it
for art’s sake, and then I did it for God’s sake. Being brought up by
Pentecostal Evangelists meant that there was a tremendous drive to
go out there and make a difference, and I think that literature does
make a difference. I think that that’s its purpose – to open up spaces
in a closed world – and for me, it’s a natural progression which seems
bizarre perhaps – from those days of preaching the Word to these days
of trying to make people see things imaginatively, transformatively.
(Quoted in Reynolds and Noakes 2003, p. 11)

Winterson indicates an almost evangelical drive to create a fictional

space which can counteract ‘a closed world’, one that can imagine alter-
natives, precisely like that envisaged in The Powerbook. Interestingly,
this drive and belief in the power of story to ‘make a difference’ is
very similar to views expressed by Philip Pullman regarding the trilogy
His Dark Materials:

All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They
teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They
teach it more effectively than moral precepts and instructions […]
We don’t need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do’s and don’ts:
we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten,
but Once upon a time lasts forever.1

Both writers, then, purport the necessity of resisting prewritten scripts in

favour of envisaging new creative possibilities. Whilst reading might be
‘intimate’ insofar as ‘It’s something that you do privately’, nonetheless
if word spreads wide enough, then it can be a culturally transformative
act. Thus, ‘utopian narratives are, more than anything else, concerned
with the present, and with the values, politics and social practices con-
veyed in these texts as desirable possibilities for a transformed world
order’ (Bradford et al. 2008, p. 8). Winterson’s work, like Pullman’s then,
is concerned with ‘society itself: the political systems, the networks of
power and resistance, and the discoursal regimes, which constrain and
enable identity-formation’ (p. 8).
50 Queer Frontiers

It is not only location that is fluid and outwith the control of maps in
The Powerbook, but identity too is shown to be very much an imagined
state. Selfhood remains elusive, oscillating between numerous character
positions of gender and sexuality, like the divisions between narrator,
reader and character that shift continually, to even incorporate the sto-
ries of characters beyond the text, such as Lancelot and Guinevere. Just
as Winterson dislikes referring to her works as novels (she claims in her
essay ‘A Work of my Own’ that ‘I do not write novels. The novel form is
finished’ [Winterson 1995, p. 191]), it would be fair to say that the char-
acters in The Powerbook are more shapeshifting functions of language
than pertaining to the air of flesh-and-blood rotundity. Indeed, the
voices in the text are hybrids, composed of multiple possible identities
in a fictional space navigating a route beyond gender divisions. From an
early age the narrator identifies herself as ‘A changeling child. A child
without past or future. A child outside of time who could cheat time’
(Winterson 2001b, p. 137). To exist outside of time is to defy the con-
ventions of patriarchal hegemony and relocate oneself in a queer car-
tography. This is ‘the wilderness’, the wild otherness that has not been
subjected to the mapping out of divisive borders. As such, Winterson’s
text is not simply concerned with lesbianism. Rather, it is more accurate
to describe The Powerbook as a queer text insofar as it seeks to remain
at an angle from mainstream culture regarding gender, sexuality and
ethnicity and evade the heteronormative impulse to define it in such
terms. In using the term queer, of course the homosexual element is
applied, but the text is queer in the sense that it cannot be inscribed by
phallogocentric interpretation but, instead, remains fluid and hybridic.
Winterson’s use of hybrid states of being is something that Susan
Stanford Friedman discusses in Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural
Geographics of Encounter. With a title which echoes Winterson’s discus-
sion of maps and borders, Friedman writes of the need to move ‘beyond
gender’ towards ‘what I am calling the new geographics of identity [...]
the liminal spaces in between [...] and hybrid interfusions of self and
other [...] the geographics of identity moves between boundaries of
difference and borderlands of liminality’ (Friedman 1998, pp. 17–19).
In The Powerbook, each subjective border is permeated and rendered
performative as the individual is allotted the ‘freedom [...] to be some-
body else’ – albeit ‘just for one night’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 4) – enabling
interaction with whom they desire in an imaginative site of inter-
activity. It is in these inter or in-between spaces of international fusion,
as Homi K. Bhabha suggests in The Location of Culture (1994), that new
possible hybrid selves – referred to by Friedman as ‘the new geographics
 Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods 51

of identity’ – can emerge beyond the rigid definitions imposed by

restrictive discourses in the symbolic dimension. Friedman’s analysis of
‘the liminal spaces in between’ is where The Powerbook positions itself:
‘This is a virtual world. This is a world inventing itself’ (Winterson
2001b, p. 63), in which ‘Nothing is solid. Nothing is fixed’ (p. 44). Not
only are the borders of such an arena porous and malleable, but the
subject seeking it also remains, by necessity, fluidly nomadic, for ‘To
avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself I stay
on the run’ (p. 3). As with queer cosmopolitanism, to settle, it would
seem, means to own, with all its connotations of power, to settle down
and thus to cease fluid movement, and also includes settling for less
rather than seeking that which one desires, namely ‘the buried treasure’
(p. 63). Consequently, the quest ‘to discover things for myself’, where
the narrator’s wanderlust involves a semiotic wonderland, encourages
a drive for knowledge in which to wander or stray from the path (of
righteousness) is to reject the Word and rewrite the script.
Deploying the potentially liberating structure of postmodernism,
The Powerbook pushes the boundaries of traditional divides, opening
up its own metafictional interstices of hybridity and masquerade: in
weaving fairytales, legends, romance, amongst other stories, into an
imagined space, a world of queer hybridity opens up which cannot be
labelled, defined or controlled, offering a utopia where the lines of the
map can be redrawn: ‘In these wild places I become part of the map,
part of the story, adding my version to the versions there’ (Winterson
2001b, p. 54). The known map is shown to be the incarcerating chart
of heteronormativity under whose watchful radar the narrator must
duck in order to add her own version ‘of the story’ and disrupt the
grand narratives: ‘Break the narrative. Refuse all stories that have been
told so far [...] and try to tell the story differently – in a different style,
with different weights’ (p. 53). In The Powerbook, retelling the story is a
way to create an alternative space in the crevices of previous narratives
‘because a story is a tightrope between two worlds’ (p. 119). The act of
writing, then, involves raising questions about our own perceptions of
reality and fiction, and demonstrates the fluidity and porosity of their
boundaries: ‘trying to collide the real and the imaginary worlds, trying
to be sure which is which’ (p. 93) because ‘Nothing is solid. Nothing is
fixed’ (p. 44).
Ferns suggests that

perhaps the basic problem lies in the hybrid character of uto-

pian fiction. Whatever the psychological motivations involved, its
52 Queer Frontiers

aspirations are both political (to convince the reader of the desirabil-
ity of its particular social vision) and aesthetic (to do so in an artisti-
cally convincing manner). And in trying to do two things at once, it
often succeeds in doing neither. (Ferns 1999, p. 5)

Ferns’ discussion of utopian fiction as hybrid correlates to Winterson’s

hybridic text, but her work does not fail because of this. On the con-
trary, its very existence depends upon the tension created by both
facets, just as its hybrid characters and locations frequent the spaces
between borders. The text’s narrator mentions Capri, where part of the
love story is set, as a potential utopian ‘imaginary island’ (Winterson
2001b, p. 88) space and self-consciously acknowledges that its exist-
ence depends upon bridging such divides: ‘The island itself is a tension
between land and sea, height and depth [...] the secret of success has
been found in maintaining these tensions’ (p. 91). Like this descrip-
tion, the text is simultaneously solid and fluid: it inscribes images that
require the reader to broaden their limitations and perform new roles.
It is that tension between different ontological or cartographical modes
that provides Winterson with the mobility to resist territorial fixity,
echoing Braidotti’s concept of philosophical nomadism (1994) as a
geopolitical challenge to patriarchal hegemony. In Transpositions (2006)
Braidotti develops her nomadic philosophy to consider ‘The term
“transpositions”’ as ‘a double source of inspiration’ that ‘indicates an
intertextual, cross-boundary or transversal transfer’ by ‘playing [on] the
positivity of difference’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 5). Winterson’s text drama-
tizes a transpositional nomadism in its journeying between boundaries
of difference to synergize new possibilities.
One of the metaphorical spaces that Winterson deploys in the text is
that of cyberspace, which demonstrates the inability to locate gender in
the text for any sustained period: in cyberspace one is free to perform
one’s identity without the reductive value system of the patriarchal gaze.
In a sense, one is behind the looking-glass insofar as there is a monitor
that provides a gateway of windows to multiple virtual worlds and in
these spaces is the very potential ‘buried treasure’ that The Powerbook
is concerned with. Jodi O’Brien’s essay ‘Writing in the Body’ considers
subjectivity in cyberspace in a style that would not be out of place in
Winterson’s fictional work. O’Brien posits that:

I’m thinking about subject positions. My own. Wondering how you, the
reader, are conjuring me in your mind. How do you imagine me to be?
What characteristics concern you? Does it make a difference to you to
 Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods 53

know that as I write this I am wearing white cotton, button-fly briefs, a

white cotton undershirt (European cut), hemp sandals and a purple cot-
ton pullover dress? My straight brown hair is short by the standards of
some and way too long by others (including the queen who cuts it). I have
two pearl earrings in my left ear and a gold ring in my left nipple. I look
young for my age, some say. Others think me too precocious for someone
as young as I am. I’m not really tall or short. I have an athletic build. Do
you assume I’m white? Are you reminding yourself that ‘jodi’ spelled with
an ‘i’ must be a girl’s name? Does it matter? [...]
Online interactions provide an excellent site for observing the
dislocation of mind and body. In this interactional realm it is pos-
sible to observe how persons categorize self/other and structure
interaction in the absence of embodied characteristics. (O’Brien
1999, pp. 76, 78)

Both O’Brien and Winterson play with notions of imagined identi-

ties within the free-floating locative of cyberspace. Both also employ
a hybrid narrative that exists in the space between fiction and
criticism, navigating a new possibility in the wake of postmodern-
ist fragmentation. As Mark Currie observes in Postmodern Narrative
Theory, ‘the wall between academic literary studies and fiction has
been demolished from both sides, and [...] postmodern discourse has
been dancing for two decades on the new space between’ (Currie 1998,
p. 70). The Powerbook, then, is a fictional text that navigates towards
new frontiers in a bid to deconstruct restrictive borders and dismantle
the stable subject.
In order to create anew, however, Winterson acknowledges the neces-
sity of knowing the existing version or story. She writes in ‘A Work of
My Own’ that:

I have to respect my ancestors and not try to part company before

we know each other well. A writer uninterested in her lineage is a
writer who has no lineage [...] I cannot do new work without known
work [...] A writer’s style has in it many voices, many connections [...]
It is a perpetual dialogue, between the one who has written, the one
who is writing. (Winterson 1995, p. 191)

Likewise, for Currie, ‘the postmodern world is always a dialogue

between old and new processes of identification’ (Currie 1998, p. 106).
Unsurprisingly, then, The Powerbook is littered with intertextual allu-
sions: a list of ‘The great and ruinous lovers’ pays homage to ‘Romeo
54 Queer Frontiers

and Juliet’, ‘Cathy and Heathcliff’, ‘Vita and Violet’ and ‘Oscar and
Bosie’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 77) amongst others. The love story per-
meates this text, where ‘it seems that we cannot know enough about
this riddle of our lives [...] Nothing could be more familiar than love.
Nothing else eludes us so completely’ (p. 78). Out of the romance tale,
Winterson strives to add her own voice in retelling through a different
trajectory. It is a text preoccupied by spaces, the interstices that open up
between borders and thresholds, and the potential that might emerge
in such gaps. A dialogue between two lovers, one of whom is a writer
and a narrative voice in the text, inserts a level of metafictional aware-
ness. The discussion revolves around what book this lover is writing:
‘What is it about?’, to which the response is ‘Boundaries. Desire’. ‘What
are your other books about?’ ‘Boundaries. Desire’ (p. 35). The narrator
as surrogate author self-consciously alludes to what The Powerbook itself
is concerned with, in a move that mimics the interaction between
text and critic. In querying as well as queering desire, the text seeks
to transcend the known in its drive to unearth the hidden depths
of subjectivity.
A plethora of these ‘Boundaries’ occur in the text between self/other;
male/female; masculine/feminine; heterosexual/homosexual (specifi-
cally lesbian); inner/outer; reality/fiction; history/story; past/present;
meatspace/cyberspace; Earth/outerspace; twentieth/twenty-first cen-
tury. All of these seemingly fixed locatives in Western society are prone
to disruption and questioning by Winterson, and are replaced with
more fluid imagined identities in the utopian world of her fiction.
Of course, what is also strongly suggested is that so-called reality and
heteronormativity itself is imagined, as selfhood is continually at
the mercy of patriarchal discourses. As the surrogate author/narrator
informs us:

The more I write, the more I discover that the partition between real
and invented is as thin as a wall in a cheap hotel [...]
I talk to people whose identity I cannot prove. I disappear into a
web of co-ordinates that we say will change the world. What world?
Which world? (Winterson 2001b, pp. 93–4)

Reality, then, is something that is constructed through language, which,

in itself, is a notoriously unreliable coordinate that ensnares the subject
in its World Wide Web, which Winterson puns on above. The hotel is
significant because, like Ali Smith’s Hotel World, it serves as a transitional
space of travel, anonymity and time, where no one settles for long. The
 Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods 55

text is playfully subversive in its challenge to established meaning and

norms, arguing that ‘It used to be that the real and the invented were
parallel lines that never met. Then we discovered that space is curved,
and in curved space parallel lines always meet. The mind is a curved
space [...] Atom and dream’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 94). Like external
reality, the world of this novel is a spiralling anti-linear structure, which
does not move from A through to Z but weaves back and forth like a
maze. Responding to Woolf’s call for writers to move ‘beyond the for-
mal railway line of sentence’,2 in The Powerbook threads of story start,
stop, restart and alter in a bid to ‘Break the narrative. Refuse all stories
that have been told so far [...] and try to tell the story differently – in a
different style, with different weights’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 53). In this
book with chapters urging us to ‘QUIT’ and ‘RESTART’, the writing proc-
ess itself becomes an act played out on a portable powerbook, where
scenarios can rapidly undergo scene changes. The Apple Macintosh
Powerbook claims to be ‘Light enough to carry around all day’,3 and
Winterson’s deliberate association with the laptop rather than desktop
carries with it the dimensional freedom of mobility, with the additional
awareness that, in subverting established narrative traditions, she is
using an Apple to impart knowledge.
The Powerbook invokes a desire to ‘think outside the box’ because to
remain inside its walls is to suffer from a one-dimensional claustro-
phobic myopia in which alternatives, concerning for instance gender,
ethnicity and sexuality, are simply not voiced. We are told by the nar-
rator that:

In quantum reality there are millions of possible worlds, unactualised,

potential, perhaps bearing in on us, but only reachable by wormholes
we can never find. If we do find one, we don’t come back.
In those other worlds events may track our own, but the ending
will be different. Sometimes we need a different ending. I can’t take
my body through space and time, but I can send my mind, and use
the stories, written and unwritten, to tumble me out in a place not
yet existing – my future. (Winterson 2001b, p. 53)

Winterson is arguing here that the inhabitants of our world are suf-
fering from a particular blindness in firmly centring themselves in the
universe and basing what is purported to be natural upon theological
discourse, without ever contemplating our insignificance or distorted
fictional outlook. Hence Winterson’s desire to write ‘a different ending’.
Her novel’s title raises questions about narrative control, power and
56 Queer Frontiers

ideology – the very structures within which each individual subject’s

life is contained. Our apparent internal and external reality is only part
of the story and it is the spatial development of the unseen which The
Powerbook seeks: ‘The one life we think we know is only the window
that is open on the screen. The big window full of detail, where the
meaning is often lost among the facts. If we can close that window, on
purpose or by chance, what we find behind is another view’ (Winterson
2001b, p. 103).
‘In quantum reality’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 53) there exists a hypothesis
known as string theory. The universe both at macro and micro or quan-
tum level, according to string theory, consists of microscopic vibrating
loops or strings, like minuscule rubber bands. Any ordinary piece of
matter (such as an apple), when repeatedly magnified, reveals a com-
position of strings. This theory correlates to the elusive and somewhat
Holy Grail search by scientists to find a unified theory of the universe.
According to www.newscientist.com, ‘wormholes’ (Winterson 2001b,
p. 53) are tiny gateways to the rest of the universe, acting as short cuts
to the cosmos. Winterson is metaphorically interested in such spaces
as modes of travelling towards new realities and possibilities in a bid
to dismantle the frontiers of heteropatriarchy. Similarly, in Pullman’s
work of rebellion against Authority, The Amber Spyglass (2000), the
metaphoric use of infinite universes allows for an expansion in wisdom:
‘If [...] they were the multiple worlds predicted by quantum theory [...]
She was beginning to see how narrow her scientific horizons were’
(Pullman 2001 [2000], pp. 90–1). Both novels utilize extraterrestrial
leaps of intergalactic imagination in order to envisage the possibility
of a thoroughly interactive and harmonious future in the extra-textual
world. Winterson’s association with string theory, of course, also cor-
responds to Gut Symmetries (1997), or Grand Unified Theory (the idea
that there is a unified theory of the universe). On writing this earlier
work, she states that ‘It started out of curiosity about what was happen-
ing in science and a desire to fully understand it [...] I was busy reading
real science books and trying to come to terms with particle theory and
wave functions and warp space, black holes.’4 The connection, then, is
clear between this scientific theory of strings and Winterson’s textual
universe of spiralling thread-like narrative structure. Yet another bound-
ary is dissolved, namely of science and fiction, including embracing the
world of the internet in The Powerbook.
Interestingly, Winterson’s novels are themselves unified structur-
ally through looping narrative threads or strings, with even the
relationship between each text becoming intertwined. When asked in
 Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods 57

an interview by Peggy Reynolds ‘Why do you quote yourself in your

work?’, she responds:

Because all the books speak to each other. They are only separate
books because that’s how they had to be written. I see them really
as one long continuous piece of work. I’ve said that the seven books
make a cycle or a series, and I believe that they do, from Oranges to
The Power-Book. And they interact and themes do occur and return,
disappear, come back amplified, or modified, changed in some way,
because it’s been my journey, it’s the journey of my imagination,
it’s the journey of my soul in those books. So continually they must
address one another [...] that’s why I say it is a series, and that’s
also why I say it’s finished now with The Powerbook and there has
to be a new beginning. Whether or not I’ll go on quoting myself in
this new beginning, I don’t know. (Quoted in Reynolds and Noakes
2003, p. 25)

Winterson’s books, apparent from such claims, mirror the scientific

concept of a harmonious, vibrating, pulsating, rhythmic universe of
strings, each one umbilically tied to its predecessors. As a queer writer,
she is staking a claim for her own authority to create an elaborate sym-
phony, rather than being subjected to the grand narratives of a higher
Authority. Just as in Christian discourse, God created the universe in
seven days, it is worth noting that this particular textual world consists
of a series of seven books, beginning with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit’s
(1985) radical revisioning of biblical doctrine and culminating in The
Powerbook’s trip to other dimensions. Moreover, by perceiving this series
as one continuous work, the physical boundaries of traditional novels
are dissolved in favour of a feminine fluidity.
Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe: A Theory of Everything? posits that
string theory may well be a possible answer to the scientific search for
the key to the universe in finding a unified hypothesis. Intriguingly,
he says that Einstein’s ‘dream of a unified theory has become the Holy
Grail of modern physics’.5 This idea of a quest for absolute knowledge
as some kind of Holy Grail is strikingly similar to a trope that occurs
frequently in Winterson’s writing. In her first novel, Oranges, Jeanette’s
quest for perfect love is compared to the legend of Sir Percival. According
to Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, in the search for the Holy Grail, Sir
Percival was the only knight to have ever caught sight of it (Evans
1990, p. 840). As a symbol of human perfection, the Grail’s sighting by
Percival demonstrated that he was pure of heart. Similarly, Jeanette too
58 Queer Frontiers

has glanced and thirsted for such perfection: ‘I have an idea that one
day it might be possible, I thought it once had become possible, and
that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between
earth and sky’ (Winterson 2001a [1985], p. 165). It is the desire to find
that ‘balance between earth and sky’ that ties Winterson’s fictions meta-
phorically to the scientific pursuit of a unified theory of the universe, as
each of her literary worlds provides a wormhole to the next. Jeanette’s
association with Percival, of course, provides a subversive challenge to
the chivalric code of heteropatriarchal quest romance: whilst perceived
within the teachings of Christian doctrine as a perverse sinner indulg-
ing in the ‘Unnatural Passions’ (p. 83) of lesbianism, she is deliberately
cast in Oranges as being heroic and pure of heart.
The quest motif continues throughout The Powerbook, searching for
the pleasures of possibility that remain, as yet, undefined and uncharted
and with it is the thrill of the chase rather than any sense of closure,
which is the very thing that a postmodern text must resist. In an inter-
view Winterson asserts that ‘I don’t believe in happy endings. All of my
books end on an ambiguous note because nothing ever is that neatly
tied up, there is always another beginning, there is always the blank
page after the one that has writing on it. And that is the page I want to
leave to the reader.’6 As content mirrors structure, the narrator of The
Powerbook concedes that:

My search for you, your search for me, is a search after something
that cannot be found. Only the impossible is worth the effort. What
we seek is love itself, revealed now and again in human form [...] The
love we seek overrules human nature. It has a wildness in it and a
glory that we want more than life itself [...]
There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.
Merely human love does not satisfy us, though we settle for it. It is
an encampment on the edge of the wilderness [...]
Love is worth death. Love is worth life. My search for you, your
search for me, goes beyond life and death into one long call in the
wilderness. I do not know if what I hear is an answer or an echo.
Perhaps I will hear nothing. It doesn’t matter. The journey must be
made. (Winterson 2001b, pp. 78–9)

The narrator’s search mixes Arthurian and Christian myth here, as she
works on the level of romantic passion and the Passion of Christ (who,
notably, is a martyr and social outcast) – ‘There is no love that does not
pierce the hands and feet’ – with the inference that love involves the
 Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods 59

stigmata of suffering as well as ecstasy, and that search, by necessity,

will never cease but even transcends ‘death’ into yet another dimen-
sion. Intriguingly, Gregory Benford, writing in the scientific journal
Physical Review, further attests to the element of quest that applies to
quantum physics: ‘But whether or not we find a wormhole, it’s the
search that’s important.’7
Thus, the passionate ecstasy and suffering of Winterson’s narra-
tives also correspond to the structural format of the texts themselves,
such as her novel entitled The Passion. She concedes in ‘A Work of My
Own’ that:

The passion that I feel for language is not a passion I could feel
for anything or anyone else. When I say that my work comes first,
I mean that what that work embodies for me is an elusive chase after
perfection over ground increasingly bogged. I suppose it is a Holy
Grail and I know that I shall never find it but if I say that it is worth
chasing, even if it does not exist, then I hope you will understand
me. It may well be that nothing solid actually exists, but what might
exist is energy, is space. And I have not discovered a more energetic
space than art. (Winterson 1995, p. 168)

So, for Winterson, the form and the content of her work are one and
the same thing – each is a passionate pursuit after the elusive Holy
Grail of harmonious perfection in the universe; a perfection that
involves the dissolution of hierarchical binaries. Akin to the ambigu-
ous references to passion, one feels that this author must embrace
suffering for the martyrdom of her art and haunt the queer wild fron-
tier existing on the fringes of the symbolic order’s heteronormative
culture: ‘I suffer [...] I do not seek pain but there is pain. I do not seek
suffering but there is suffering [...] It is not easy, this love, but only
the impossible is worth the effort’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 188). It is the
artist’s lone cry in the wilderness, however, that has the energy to gen-
erate a political impetus against the mindsets of heteronormativity –
‘How else am I going to find the Promised Land, if not by way of the
lions?’ (p. 228).
However elusive that quest might be, The Powerbook ekes out a fic-
tional space in order to offer a mind-trip of ‘Freedom for a night [...]
the freedom to be somebody else’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 4), where one’s
desires can be explored beyond phallogocentric restraints. Donald E.
Hall ponders in Queer Theories that, ‘no one in the Renaissance could
have predicted cyber-sex; who knows what new technologies and social
60 Queer Frontiers

possibilities will arise? [...] one way to motivate ourselves to continue

working for change is to imagine an ideal moment or utopian state that
we hope to achieve [...] the “denaturalising” of identity allows for some
leverage in arguing for concrete socio-political changes’ (Hall 2003,
pp. 175–6). Winterson’s text envisages such a utopia where self and
other oscillate into an indistinguishable mass as fantasy attempts to
play in the unconscious ‘wilderness’ of Lacan’s unutterable dimension
of the ‘real’. To achieve this involves another border crossing between
day and night, waking and dreaming, visible and invisible, for ‘This
life, the one we know, stands in the sun. It is our daytime and the stars
and planets that surround it cannot be seen. The sense of our lives,
still our own, is clearer to us in the darkness of night or in our dreams’
(Winterson 2001b, p. 104).
To be able to see clearer ‘in the darkness of night’ involves looking
further than the naked eye to an inner dimension. Relevant to this is
a contemplation of the inner unseen body, ‘in these long lines of lap-
top DNA [...] we take your chromosomes, twenty-three pairs, and alter
your height, eyes, teeth, sex. This is an invented world’ (Winterson
2001b, p. 4). Once again Winterson’s text is travelling in the land of
hybridic culture with a view to disrupt the boundaries of inner/outer
and challenge the predominance of the external gaze. Similarly, Paul
Gilroy advocates in Between Camps (2000), published the same year
as The Powerbook, the need for a shift from the external locus of vis-
ible difference towards the common human denominator of internal
human organs and DNA structures. In such a state, differences of skin
colour, gender, sexuality and so on would be put into a perspective
that looked beyond these and found instead human similarities. This
would manifest, not a perpetration of self/other polarity, but a collapse
of these binaries towards a human mapping of integrated sameness, not
boundaries of difference.
The Powerbook asks us to evaluate the ideological weight of narrative:
‘It’s only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it – creation
story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and me’
(Winterson 2001b, p. 4). In doing so, its author demonstrates the oppres-
sive constraints held within discourse and the need to write against it,
for ‘Life was a journey I would have to make by myself’ (p. 156). Not
only is the quest physical and psychological, but it involves the need for
narrative intervention in order to avoid running the risk of having one’s
story told for them: ‘to make [it up] by myself’ because ‘The alphabet
of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell
it myself’ (p. 4). Ultimately, the text advocates a resistance to the Logos
 Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods 61

that is reflected in another of Winterson’s narrative threads, Oranges. In

this text, the narrator claims:

I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book
with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power.
Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The
words work. They do what they’re supposed to do; comfort and dis-
cipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries
in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not set into meaning. The
prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons. (Winterson
2001a, p. 156)

Notice here too that it is the ‘wilderness’ where the disembodied voice
is free to utter semiotic ‘sounds that do not set into meaning’ in a bid
to create that which is beyond the control of the ‘words’ of ‘the priest’
that serve to ‘comfort and discipline’. It may well be that ‘the prophet’
cries out but the ‘demons’ who torment are apparently ideology’s har-
bingers of Truth.
Similarly, the witch (often a subject of cultural oppression), Ruta
Skadi, in Pullman’s The Subtle Knife (1997) identifies the suppression of
free-thinking in society and the urgent requirement to resist: ‘to rebel
was right and just’ in order to contest ‘cruelties and horrors all com-
mitted in the name of the Authority, all designed to destroy the joys
and truthfulness of life’ (Pullman 1998b [1997], p. 283). For Winterson,
being the prophet involves a queer revisioning of historical ideologies
in order to forge multiple future paths of possibility: when the disturb-
ingly oppressive constraints of religious doctrine attempt to exorcize
Jeanette’s ‘demon’ in Oranges, she tells us that ‘I thought about William
Blake’ (Winterson 2001a, p. 106). Associating herself with the Devil’s
Party signals that Jeanette wishes to unfetter her creative intellect from
the stories enforced upon society and allow her individual imagination
to transcend their constraints. For Winterson, the act of writing as a
lesbian feminist triggers a dual outcast status from social norms:

The real problem, it seemed, was going against the teachings of

St Paul, and allowing women power in the church [...] She ended
by saying that having taken on a man’s world in other ways I had
flouted God’s law and tried to do it sexually [...] my success in the
pulpit being the reason for my downfall. The devil had attacked me
at my weakest point: my inability to realize the limitations of my sex.
(Winterson 2001a, pp. 131–2)
62 Queer Frontiers

Jeanette dares to query and rewrite her Father’s Word in Oranges, which
culminates in the utter dismantling of gender and sexuality as symbols
of difference in The Powerbook. The overwhelming necessity is to take
control of one’s own life, rather than numbly following a predestined
map: ‘I can change the story. I am the story’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 5).
In a world that seems to be ever polarized around questions of eth-
nicity and faith, it seems fitting that Winterson’s vision pivots around
a need for second sight in order to seek out new ways of being in a
text that offers a plethora of performative possibility for the narrative
subject to technologically travel towards a brave new world of millen-
nial terrain. Crossing the threshold between the twentieth and twenty-
first century – ‘Here I am, tightrope walking the twenty-first century’
(Winterson 2001b, p. 166) – Winterson acknowledges that ‘What I am
seeking to do in my work is to make a form that answers to twenty-
first century needs’ (Winterson 1995, p. 191). What is sought is fresh
hope, ‘The buried treasure is really there, but caulked and outlandish.
Hard to spot because unfamiliar, and few of us can see what has never
been named’ (Winterson 2001b, pp. 63–4). Through the metaphorical
implementation of spatial nomadism where ‘the territory is wilder’
(p. 54), the desire is to return with new possibilities to Western society,
for ‘What I carry back from those worlds to my world is another chance’
(p. 54). In the implementation of imaginative writing, which incorpo-
rates elements of fantasy, Winterson applies the metaphor of nomadic
travelling as a way to expand the territories of society’s consciousness,
thereby providing a highly politicized treatise rather than an escape
from reality.
Rosemary Jackson writes in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion that
‘fantasy characteristically attempts to compensate for a lack resulting
from cultural constraints: it is a literature of desire, which seeks that
which is experienced as absence and loss’ ( Jackson 1995 [1981], p. 3).
Thus, to return full circle to the question of lack or otherwise in this
queer text, it is evident that loss due to the subjective severance of
self and other resides in the frontiers of phallogocentric social terrain,
which Winterson’s writing attempts to transcend. However, insofar as
her novel is virtual to our reality, then those barriers remain, for ‘My
search for you, your search for me, is a search after something that can-
not be found. Only the impossible is worth the effort. What we seek
is love itself, revealed now and again in human form [...] The love we
seek overrules human nature’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 78). Nevertheless,
as we are also reminded, it is the unassuaged act of seeking out creative
new ways that is necessary, thus ‘The journey must be made’ (p. 79).
 Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods 63

In The Powerbook lack is part and parcel of the patriarchal mindset that
can be disassembled and filled in a feminine utopian space. By repeat-
ing that ‘I suffer [...] I do not seek pain but there is pain. I do not seek
suffering but there is suffering [...] It is not easy, this love, but only the
impossible is worth the effort’ (p. 188), there is the reminder that the
queer artist must redress the heteropatriarchal balance in order to set a
socio-political course towards global tolerance.
In The Stone Gods (2007) Winterson develops this theme of jour-
neying to other worlds in a nomadic relocation of humanity due to
climate change, for ‘We have limited natural resources at our disposal,
and a rising population that is by no means in agreement as to how
our world as a whole should share out these remaining resources’
(Winterson 2008 [2007], p. 5). A territorialist interviewer argues that
‘Conflict is likely. A new planet means that we can begin to redistrib-
ute ourselves’ (p. 5), echoing contemporary debates beyond the text
regarding global warming, population explosion and the ongoing sci-
entific search for an Earth-like planet in the so-called Goldilocks zone.
Journeying beyond traditional subjective hegemonies, Winterson
envisages a new species, ‘Robo sapiens’, a fusion of humans and robots
that resembles the fabricant Sonmi in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
(2004). While the anthropocentric ‘President of the Central Power’
(Winterson 2008, p. 5) mistakenly believes that ‘The great thing about
robots, even these Robo sapiens, is that nobody feels sorry for them.
They are only machines’ (p. 6), the heroine Billie Crusoe falls in love
with the female Robo sapien Spike: ‘She is the missing map. She is
the place that I am [...] She is the stranger that I am beginning to
love’ (p. 107). Rather than remaining within the fixed cartographies
of subjectivity, the cosmopolitically queer Billie Crusoe tells a differ-
ent story – ‘A traveller’s tale. I was the traveller’ (p. 110) – and charts
an alternative course that breaks the narrative of phallocratic norms.
Journeying beyond traditional constructions of subjectivity, Spike
allows Billie to recognize that ‘Gender is a human concept [...] and not
interesting’ (p. 76). When on board Captain Handsome’s pirate space-
ship journeying to Planet Blue, part of a book is read – ‘I was born in the
year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, tho’ not of that country …’
(p. 59), which an astute reader will immediately recognize as the open-
ing of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). In her queer revisioning,
Winterson’s Crusoe is not the traditional male white colonizer, but,
rather, a lesbian explorer of new possibilities, who has a relationship
with a Robo sapiens post-human. She rejects the phallocratic narrative
of territorial control and embraces a symbiotic co-existence with others
64 Queer Frontiers

that exceeds cartographies of difference, for ‘The universe has no sides,

no end, can’t be mapped’ (p. 57).
In her despair that patriarchy will impose its will-to-power matrix
upon another unsuspecting world, Billie empathizes with ‘Planet Blue’,
where humans are attempting to colonize, since ‘She needs us like a
bed needs bedbugs. “I’m sorry,” I say, to the planet’ (Winterson 2008,
pp. 26–7). Recognizing the devastation wreaked on Orbus (a futuristic
dystopian version of Earth) by human avarice, Billie fears for Planet
Blue’s wellbeing: ‘I wish she could sail through space [...] and find a
new orbit, empty of direction, where we cannot go, and where we will
never find her, and where the sea, clean as a beginning, will wash away
any trace of humankind’ (p. 27). Patriarchal anthropocentricism is
regarded as a parasitical blight, where ‘we [...] just fucked it [Orbus] to
death and kicked it when it wouldn’t get up’ (p. 8) for ‘The only waste
in the Cosmos comes from human beings’ (p. 37). Thus, Billie regards
the President’s outlook as symptomatic of a phallocentric dominance
based on the disregard for other feminized life within nature, while it
is such transpositional synergies between human and cyber technology,
according to Braidotti, that is generating the beyond-humanness of a
‘new pan-humanity’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 35). Billie and Spike’s relation-
ship is Winterson’s fictional response to scientific advancement and a
rethinking of what humanity entails within a wider global and univer-
sal existence, for ‘Robo sapiens are not us, but they may become a nearer
relative than the ape’ (Winterson 2008, p. 34). The boundary between
human and non-human dissolves in a transpositional zigzagging where
so-called natural humans are scientifically dependent upon extreme
cosmetic surgery achieved through genetic advancement, for ‘Every
human being in the Central Power has been enhanced, genetically
modified and DNA-screened. Some have been cloned. Most were born
outside the womb’ (p. 77). As such, ‘A human being now is not what
a human being was [...] So what is a human being?’ (p. 77), dissolving
the boundary of human/robotic and rendering both cyborgs. However,
patriarchy perpetuates itself since, in such a synthetic age, ‘The future of
women is uncertain. We don’t breed in the womb any more, and if we
aren’t wanted for sex …’ (p. 26) then they will be written out of humani-
ty’s future as well as being marginalized by its history. In this parody of
contemporary society’s obsession with celebrity, weight loss, consumer-
ism, cosmetic surgery and fear of aging, Billie informs us of ‘The DNA
Dynasty’, which ‘they called us, when the first generation of humans
had successful recoding. Age is information failure’ (p. 10). In this dys-
topian capitalist world, ‘Science can’t fix everything, though – women
 Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods 65

feel they have to look youthful, men less so’ (p. 11): patriarchal gender
dichotomies are still upheld in a mutated format, where women are
locked into a perfect youthful image of the masculine gaze. Billie has
‘an appointment today with a woman who wants to be genetically
reversed to twelve years old to stop her husband running after school-
girls’ (p. 14), as the infantalization of women reaches paedophilic pro-
portions. The woman has been ‘Fixed at twenty-four’, but ‘Now that
everyone is young and beautiful, a lot of men are chasing girls who are
just kids. They want something different when everything has become
the same’ (p. 21). Winterson is responding to contemporary society’s
obsession with ‘plastic surgery as a strategy towards self-perfection’,
a trend ‘which has been boosted in recent years by the rise of stars’
in a celebrity-driven culture (Walter 2010, p. 68). It has led to a surge
in television programmes that focus on cosmetic surgery and probe
ever further into the body, suggesting that, in our culture, ‘the scopic
drive is reaching a paroxysm’ (Braidotti 1994, p. 49). Although ‘These
programmes tend to use the language of choice and freedom’, clearly
‘The influence that this culture has on young women is such that even
teenagers now see plastic surgery as an answer to their anxieties about
their bodies’ (Walter 2010, p. 68). Shrouded in the ‘rhetoric of choice’,
this worrying trend demonstrates that ‘The power of this body project
is clearly tied to the sexualisation of women’ (p. 68), which ‘can lead to
the homologation of women into a masculine model’ (Braidotti 1994,
p. 54) of incarcerated perfection. While, on the one hand, ‘there is now
a genuine and understandable taboo around the idea of underage sexual
activity, there is paradoxically a real pressure on girls to measure up as
sexually attractive at a young age’ (Walter 2010, p. 68). It is that phal-
locratically inscribed model of sexualization that Winterson responds to
in her portrayal of Little Señorita, ‘a twelve-year-old pop star who has
Fixed herself rather than lose her fame’ (Winterson 2008, p. 19). In turn,
older women are threatened by such models of perfection and feel the
need to reverse the natural aging process, for ‘My husband is mad about
Little Señorita. I want to be her’ (p. 19).
In a scathing satirical jab at our world, Winterson uses the fictional
space of The Stone Gods to imagine the direction in which global capi-
talism might journey should it continue upon such a wasteful, narcis-
sistic yet, ultimately, suicidal path. Due to the rapid industrialization
of China, for instance, planetary destruction is accelerating: ‘We made
ourselves rich polluting the rest of the world, and now the rest of the
world is polluting us’ (Winterson 2008, p. 37). Rather than respond-
ing to this crisis in good time, humans continue to consume; while
66 Queer Frontiers

preoccupied by surface image and material accumulation, humanity’s

reliance upon technological advancements is, ironically, potentially
leading to an evolutionary regression. Billie ponders that ‘we are regress-
ing. Oh, yes, it’s true – we have no need for our brains so our brains
are shrinking. Not all brains, just most people’s brains – it’s an inevi-
table part of progress’ (p. 17). In this gadget-dependent world, many
humans have lost their intellectual capacity and drive for knowledge.
Billie’s love for writing materials, in a world where writing has become
defunct, marks her out as queer insofar as she is different from the
mainstream, not only in her sexual and emotional desires, but also
in her pursuit of wisdom. She notes that ‘Etymology was one of the
victims of State-approved mass illiteracy. Sorry, a move towards a more
integrated, user-friendly day-to-day information and communications
system. (Voice and pictures, yes; written words, no.)’ (p. 15). Again, this
offers a dystopian vision of our own increasing technological appetite
for visual stimulation, depending upon satnavs and GPS, for instance,
rather than relying upon our brain to read atlases and road maps. To
suit the ever-growing demands of global capitalism, our apparently
willing surrender of our cerebral evolution has led us into passive con-
sumerism. In the dilution of etymological communication, words are
reduced to single letters, such as ‘P is for Parking Meter’ (p. 12) and ‘R
is for Robot’ (p. 16), signalling a regressive return to child-like learning
cards where, for example ‘A is for Apple’. Society has been intellectually
infantilized, just as women have been sexually regressed to be ‘Fixed’
as little girls for their husbands’ satisfaction. Billie retaliates against
this brain-draining regime with ‘Fuck it fuck it fuck it. F is for Fuck it’
(p. 13). This responds to Winterson’s recurrent idea that one must avoid
settling into static hegemonic interpellative subject positions, such as
that discussed in The Powerbook where, instead, one must nomadically
mobilize a political resistance. In Winterson’s dystopia, ‘Meanwhile,
the Robo sapiens is evolving,’ since it is ‘The first artificial creature that
looks and acts human, and that can evolve like a human – within limits,
of course’ (p. 17). When Billie asks ‘Do we feel kinship with robots?’,
Spike’s response is that ‘In time you will, as the differences between
us decrease’ (p. 34). Though humans have set limits for Robo sapiens’
evolution, Spike informs Billie that ‘I am not a machine [...] We have
broken those limits’ (p. 35). In the arc of human regression and robot
evolution, as well as the genetic modification of humans, the self/other
difference is dissolving, even while the President’s anthropocentric arro-
gance blindly ignores it. Only the cosmopolitanly queer Billie is intel-
lectually capable of recognizing Spike’s humanity and connecting self
 Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods 67

and other through post-human love. A character briefly appears in the

text called Nomad, who is ‘frightened that the world is ending. I don’t
want to die’ (p. 43), yet when (s)he publicly announces this, is immedi-
ately silenced. As with Braidotti’s philosophical nomadism, Winterson’s
Nomad is selflessly speaking for others – ‘I represent all the people who
don’t know why we’re here’ (p. 43) – as a citizen of the world rather
than a territorialized consumer.
The deterritorializing nomadic echo of The Powerbook rings clear
throughout The Stone Gods, in its narratological reiteration that ‘Only
the impossible is worth the effort [...] I read it somewhere’ (Winterson
2008, p. 110) and ‘Nothing is solid [...] Nothing is fixed’ (p. 111)
because, again, ‘The buried treasure was really there’ (p. 89). The Stone
Gods advocates hope in face of adversity and, though the majority
may be blind to their own reality, Billie Crusoe is one of the few who
dares to challenge conventions and navigate her own path. While she
recognizes that ‘we have reached the end of everything’, she is also
prepared to act, for ‘we’re the human race, we have survived wars and
terrorism [...] we have made it back from the brink, not one but many
times. History is not a suicide note – it is a record of our survival’ (p. 47).
As a post-human citizen, Billie intends to avoid extinction, while her
struggle is charted and survives in the form of her narrative, which
resists dominant hegemonic accounts. CanCops, hybrid human/robot
law enforcers, are ‘cut to fit, machine-made, State-owned, low-main-
tenance, dream-free, inoculated against doubt. Life is so simple when
you’re just doing your job’ (p. 51), epitomizing the conformity of
the unquestioning society that Billie refuses to accept. For Billie, ‘the
system’ is the hegemonic matrix of state control, which is ‘repressive,
corrosive and anti-democratic’ (p. 54).
Navigating through the limitlessness of space towards a new unmapped
planet to escape the wreckage of Orbus, Billie Crusoe is a traveller like
her forefather’s ‘shipwreck story’ of Robinson Crusoe which ‘The men
like’ (Winterson 2008, p. 59). Billie rejects that traditional phallocratic
cartography of ‘A repeating world – same old story’ (p. 59) and seeks
to create a new version from the wreckage of previous literary and cul-
tural journeys. The initials of her name, BC, indicate that Winterson is
concerned in queering the patriarchal grand narrative measure Before
Christ and establishing an alternative Before Calendric order. The
‘Bible Compass’ (p. 8) is repeatedly mentioned, which refers to the way
Christians navigate their way through the moral teachings of the Bible.
Billie Crusoe (with the same initials) navigates her way through vari-
ous spatiotemporal pathways, teaching a different story to phallocratic
68 Queer Frontiers

grand narratives that offer a moral compass of queer cosmofeminism.

According to Captain Handsome, human evolutionary history is a trav-
elogue of intergalactic dimensions, for ‘The white planet was a world
like ours [...] We were still evolving out of the soup when the white
planet had six-lane highways and space missions’ (p. 67). However,
‘They couldn’t control their gases [...] the humans, or whatever they
were, massively miscalculated, and pumped so much CO2 into the air
that they caused irreversible warming. The rest is history’ (pp. 67–8).
That history is ‘Looking more and more like ours, don’t you think?’
because Handsome’s ‘theory is that life on Orbus began as escaping life
from the white planet – and the white planet began as escaping life
from ... who knows where?’ (p. 68). When the character Pink points
out that ‘Women are just planets that attract the wrong species’ (p. 69),
Winterson secures the link between human-accelerated climate change
at the hands of patriarchal global capitalism and the mistreatment
of women. Handsome’s patronizing response that ‘Women always
bring it back to the personal [...] It’s why you can’t be world leaders’ is
immediately challenged by Billie with, ‘And men never do [...] which
is why we end up with no world left to lead’ (p. 69). The Stone Gods
clearly responds to the global lack of female leaders in the extra-tex-
tual world, with a few exceptions, such as cosmopolitical Iceland with
the world’s first openly gay, let alone lesbian, Prime Minister, Jóhanna
Sigurðardóttir. For Billie, more female leadership and certainly queer
female leadership would rectify the global and universal imbalance:
she is the narrator in her own journey to new unmapped worlds, thus
challenging the cartographic phallocratic dominance of male colonial
narratives, like Robinson Crusoe.
As ever for Winterson, love is the human and political power of resist-
ance to hegemonic boundaries: Billie and Spike’s love is forged in the
limitlessness of space, a new type of queer union beyond anthropocen-
tric norms. Refuting the weight allotted to the body in established social
relations, Winterson’s use of a Robo sapiens allows for uncharted terri-
tory, where Spike’s body is ultimately deconstructed in order to preserve
her lifespan. Disassembling herself limb by limb ‘to conserve energy’
(Winterson 2008, p. 107), the Robo sapiens’ power supply is draining,
for ‘Spike is dying, lying in my arms, not speaking [...] Silently we agree
that I will detach her head from her torso [...] Her body is a piece of
armour she has taken off’ (p. 111). Liberated from the constraints of
the bodily frame’s hegemonic control, what remains is the crucial part,
one’s ‘consciousness’, for ‘Unfixing her has freed her’ (p. 111), allow-
ing these lovers to have a final meeting of minds before reaching the
 Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods 69

end of their love story. That story offers a new transpositional synergy
achieved through understanding and loving rather than fearing ‘the
stranger’ (p. 107) that shatters the illusions of heteronormative soci-
ety. In turn, this allows for new possibilities as unlimited as the space
through which Winterson’s characters are travelling: ‘I looked at Spike,
unknown, uncharted, different in every way to me, another life-form,
another planet, another chance’ (p. 90). The uncharted territory of new
love itself becomes akin to the uncharted and evolving Planet Blue and
both new discoveries exist in symbiotic harmony, for ‘Their intercon-
nection is a transposition, that is to say a creative leap that produces a
prolific in-between space’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 6). It is the energy available
in Billy and Spike’s transpositional relationship that allows for a new
creative potential. In a dialogue between Billy and Spike it is unclear
who speaks each line, with deliberate lack of names allowing for a blur-
ring and fusing of identity that echoes dialogue in The Powerbook. They
are discussing the human capacity for writing love poems and that,
despite their imminent extinction, new peoples will write more love
poetry in the future ‘because it will happen when someone finds that
the stretch of the body-beloved is the landmass of the world’ (Winterson
2008, p. 110), again echoing the idea in The Powerbook that love and the
beloved’s body is a utopian space of liberated deterritorialism. Quoting
John Donne, the dialogue continues, ‘“She is all States, all Princes I ...
Nothing else is”’ (p. 110), emphasizing the urgency of loving others in
cosmopolitical empathy.
In a resistance to patriarchal exploitation and rape of planetary
resources, Winterson’s text evolves towards creating a cosmofeminist
alternative: ‘A king had three planets [...] Planet White, Planet Red and
Planet Blue. He gave Planet White to his eldest son [...] then gave Planet
Red to his youngest son’ (Winterson 2008, p. 95). This story sees the
king pass on two of these planets to his sons who, in turn, consume
all of their resources in avaricious destruction. However, the narrative
alters path and is left open with the hope of an ecofeminist interven-
tion, for ‘The King then gave Planet Blue to his daughter [...] What hap-
pened next is another story’ (p. 95). Of course Earth is often referred to
as the Blue Planet, so Winterson is indicating that its entrenched patri-
archal rule may shift into an altogether more harmonious epoch, while
the colours of the Planets may also signify the flag colours of dominant
global powers like Britain and America.
Julie Ellam argues that Winterson’s motif of love throughout her
literary oeuvre is ultimately ‘conservative in the desire for love to be
transcendent’ (Ellam 2010, p. 9) and reinforces a hierarchical binary.
70 Queer Frontiers

Thus The Powerbook is derided since, while ‘It exhibits postmodern

influences in its form,’ nevertheless ‘because it does not deconstruct
love its adherence to binary thinking, which is intrinsic to Romanticism
and is elemental to the Enlightenment project, demonstrates an attach-
ment to the past that refuses to be severed’ (p. 196). In this reading,
Winterson’s depiction of love ‘reveals the influences of a collective
white, Western history and does so without any contemporary scepti-
cism’ (p. 194). While Winterson does indeed look back through a liter-
ary continuum, it is quite wrong to assume that she merely mimetically
imitates it. Rather, as we have seen in this chapter, her work comes at
the heteropatriarchal ‘Christian understanding of passion’, where ‘suf-
fering is somehow natural’ (p. 194), from a queer cosmopolitical angle.
Western authors are intertextualized because, by creating a postmodern
bricolage of narratives, Winterson reworks them into and frames them
within a queer text. Just as she manipulates and reappropriates biblical
discourse in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in order to position Jeanette
as an outcast who is socially crucified, so too does Winterson break the
narrative of fixed Truth by associating the Passion with the suffering of
queer love, as it is repeatedly stigmatized and rendered peripheral by
heteronormativity. It is the lone cry in the wilderness earlier mentioned
where the queer writer must suffer for the love of her art that does not
fit the fixed frame of hegemonic discourse but, instead, nomadically
pushes at its boundaries with fluid alternative narratives of desire.
Similarly, Ellam berates The Stone Gods as ecofeminist yet somehow
failing to confront patriarchy because ‘If love is made central, there
is the likely outcome that political concerns are either sidelined or
are made intentionally or unintentionally reactionary’ (Ellam 2010,
p. 224). This is a staggeringly phallogocentric approach to love as femi-
nized and, therefore, inferior to masculine power, and rather misses the
point that humanity should be striving for an aspirational alternative
to patriarchal capitalism’s thanatotic turn. Winterson is highly political
in her links between love and power in her texts, signalling the ways
in which the latter is always manipulated to work against women. To
recall the conversation between Captain Handsome and Billie, ‘Women
always bring it back to the personal [...] It’s why you can’t be world
leaders,’ to which Billie retaliates ‘And men never do [...] which is why
we end up with no world left to lead’ (Winterson 2008, p. 69). Love, for
Winterson, is a metaphorical exploration of cosmofeminist intervention
in hegemonic discourse that queers masculinist approaches to power
with a consideration of empathetic and ethical collective responsibil-
ity. Ironically, Ellam claims to argue from a poststructuralist position
 Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods 71

against Winterson’s essentializing love as a phallocratic narrative, while

failing to appreciate the cosmopolitical queering of grand narratives
and the nomadic resistance of fixed subjectivity. Further, the use of
Elaine Showalter’s dismissal of ‘how Winterson praises past descriptions
of love and how the intertextual referencing returns the reader continu-
ously to canonical works’ (Ellam 2010, p. 191) once more refuses to
recognize the feminist queering of such canonical works. By inserting
her own work into that tradition, Winterson is writing into literary and
cultural history the voices of those who had been otherwise written out
of history and thus silenced, particularly lesbians. For Winterson, the
queer cosmopolitan is equally valid to any heteronormative narrative
of love and her writing enters into the gaps and silences of that history,
presenting a free play of fluid alternatives that have the political ability
to break the narrative and rewrite the story from a different perspective.
Finally, Showalter’s feminist perspective is decidedly liberal humanist in
its assumption that female identity is somehow unproblematic and uni-
fied historically, when women’s identity has always been constructed
by patriarchal hegemony. Because of her interest with the lost mother
and her apparent preoccupation with ‘transcendental’ love, according
to Ellam, ‘Winterson is blinded to the practical effects of patriarchy’
(p. 224). This sounds uncannily similar to the likes of Showalter’s attack
on Virginia Woolf as transcendental and apolitical and smacks of the
same old story in a repeating world. Ellam derides Winterson for trying
to control language when it cannot be mastered, while simultaneously
suggesting that Western canonical narratives cannot be disrupted, as
though they are somehow set in ‘Stone’. At the same time Ellam fails to
recognize that Winterson is not wishing to ‘Fix’ discourse, but merely
to interrupt, intervene and alter its course.
The lines from Donne – ‘She is all States, all princes I, Nothing else is ...’
(Winterson 2008, p. 152) – are repeated in the third section ‘Post-3 War’,
a post-apocalyptic narrative of Earth after World War Three, where Billie
Crusoe reflects on her birth and severance from her biological mother
(again echoing Winterson’s own adoption). Nomadically wandering the
Earth searching for that reunion with her m(other), Billie equates her
journey through life with the search for a planetary signal: ‘She stood
like a lighthouse, like a pulsar, and I was a radio telescope that caught
the signal. There she is, a star the size of a city, pulsing through the
universe with burned-out energy. I know you’re there, I know where
you are, I can track you because we are the same stuff’ (p. 154). The
severed umbilical cord after spending 28 days with her mother has led
Billie on a quest for home and love, with the belonging that finding
72 Queer Frontiers

a ‘landing-place’ (pp. 175, 200, 217, 238, 241) brings. Just as with The
Powerbook the quest for the buried treasure is vital, so too in The Stone
Gods: ‘The buried treasure is really there, but it is buried’ (p. 147), so
‘You never stop looking. That’s what I found, though it took me years to
know that’s what I’ve been doing. The person whose body I was, whose
body was me, vanished after twenty-eight days. I live in the echo of
another life’ (p. 149). Just as Billie recognizes herself as a reverberating
imprint of her mother, so too is the universe regarded as ‘A repeating
world’ (p. 241), for ‘Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once
was’ (p. 246). Like the signal that is being picked up at Jodrell Bank in
the final section ‘Wreck City’, there is a pattern of repetition between
characters, time and space, creating transpositions that interconnect as
beginning, middle and end of the narrative and time overlap without
divisions: Billie Crusoe is the character who works with the Robo sapiens
Spike in the final two chapters – she is different to and the same as the
Billie Crusoe in the novel’s futuristic opening section ‘Planet Blue’. Each
character and setting is a spatiotemporal repetition and intergenera-
tional dialogic conversation, just as in her search for the lost m(other),
Billie realizes ‘I think all my life I’ve been calling you, across time.
Steadily sending the signal, sure that, one day, you will hear’ (p. 220).
In the quest for love and home, ‘perhaps I have to say that the landing-
place I am really looking for isn’t a place at all: it’s a person, it’s you. It’s
the one place they can’t build on, buy or bomb because it doesn’t exist
anywhere where they can find it’ (pp. 200–1). Beyond the territorialist
same old story of avarice, destruction and the pursuit of power, lies the
capacity of human love that transcends divisions, for ‘I wish there was a
landing-place that wasn’t always being torn up’ (p. 238). In ‘A quantum
universe’ which is ‘neither random nor determined’, but ‘A universe
of potentialities, waiting for an intervention to affect the outcome’,
Winterson wonders that, since ‘Love is an intervention’, then ‘Why do
we not choose it?’ (p. 244) rather than the repeated cycle of thanatic
territorialism and destruction. Amidst the never-ending devastation,
Billie despairs that the majority savour division and hatred over love
and healing: ‘my tears are for the planet because I love it and because
we’re killing it, and my tears are for these wars and all this loss’ (p. 239),
for ‘it’s hopeless, because we’re hopeless, the whole stupid fucking
human race’ (p. 238). Though humanity receives numerous warnings
from history, it remains blind to an inevitable outcome just as it refuses
to seek cosmopolitan empathy, and keeps repeating the same old story
like an intergalactic signal of ‘The same message, repeating [...] like an
echo’ that is ‘something very strange, very old, and at the same time
 Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods 73

in front of us’ (p. 222). Time-space is compressed to show that it is not

linear but spiralling, each period interweaving like a Möbius strip. As
she despairs, ‘These worlds need nothing from us, except that we leave
them alone – but we never do’ (p. 201).
The sense of the repetition of history and story is charted in The Stone
Gods structurally: Billie and Spike’s futuristic love affair occurs in the
first section ‘Planet Blue’, and Billie reads Captain James Cook’s journal
while she awaits death, for theirs ‘is one story. There will be another’
(Winterson 2008, p. 113). Notably, James Cook also shares the same
initials as Jesus Christ, again pointing to another queering of grand
phallocratic narratives. This leads into section two ‘Easter Island’, and
charts the resurrected hero Billy’s (notice the different spelling of the
name) story, a marooned crew member of Cook’s ship, who falls in
love with Spikker (obviously an earlier reincarnation of Spike), a man
of mixed Dutch and native islander heritage. This queer love blos-
soms among the ruins of a desolate island, whose resources have been
plundered by patriarchal greed, destroying trees to build stone gods of
worship, with no thought for the island’s fragile ecosystem or, in turn,
their own survival: ‘Why would a man destroy the very thing he most
needs?’ (p. 123). The echo of the characters’ names ensures that these
narratives link and intertwine in a transpositional intergenerational
dialogue, each warning the other about the lessons of their ancestral
age and each going against the grain of dominant myopic greed in
favour of love and understanding otherness. Like the devastation
wreaked on the futuristic Orbus that Billie witnesses and records, the
barrenness of Easter Island is told in this historical Billy’s story. In an
epiphanic moment, he narrates: ‘the world must have some covering
for its nakedness, and so the simplest things come to impart the greatest
significance – a piece of bread becomes a body, a sip of wine, my life’s
blood’ (p. 136). Such Eucharistic figuration infantilizes humanity and
perpetuates divisions between self and other, for ‘The island trees and
all of this good land were sacrificed to a meaning that has now become
meaningless. To build the Stone Gods, the island has been destroyed,
and now the Stone Gods are themselves destroyed’ (p. 136). Like the
advanced Orbus’ populace who worshipped and enslaved themselves
to ‘a corporate country’ (p. 71), where materialism became an empty
signifier of a depleted planet, Easter Island has been ravished to become
‘a wasteland’ (p. 137) of misplaced value. The death of Spikker results
in another rebirth of these characters, as symbols of hope within other-
wise suicidal histories that tell of ‘A repeating world – same old story’
(p. 59). Only those cosmopolitical characters collected in Winterson’s
74 Queer Frontiers

text manage to put a different emphasis on history, telling it from the

slant of those who try to make a difference for the better, those who
dare to love rather than exploit the other, and it is the narratives of
such characters repeating like a planetary signal that offer the chance
of a better tomorrow. She retrieves her written manuscript of The Stone
Gods that she left on a seat on the tube, going ‘round and round on
the Circle Line. A repeating world’ (p. 241). Billie as the queer naviga-
tional surrogate author had left it as ‘A message in a bottle. A signal’ to
urge its reader to actively intervene and alter the course of the planet’s
entropic trajectory and, as such, she ‘took the manuscript [...] dropped
the pages, picked them up again, shuffled as a pack of cards’ (p. 241).
In this moment of metafictional ontology, Winterson’s text collapses
the sequential formality of time: Billie’s manuscript has been travelling
cyclically until an intervention breaks the narrative and it develops in
an other direction: leaving it with Spike ‘for someone else to find’, Billie
says that ‘The pages are loose – it can be written again’ (p. 242). As with
life, ‘You never stop looking’ for different endings and, for Winterson,
it is always the love story that can prevail in the face of hopelessness for
‘Love is not easy to leave behind’ (p. 149).
The Powerbook and The Stone Gods adopt and query the chivalric quest
motif for the Holy Grail or buried treasure because ‘Some things are
worth looking for all your life’ (Winterson 2001b, p. 134) and the seer
may glimpse it best of all in darkness. In a rejection of rigid hegemonic
structures, Winterson’s cosmopolitan love mobilizes a queer resistance,
offering a reminder of ‘The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon
world’ (p. 40). As Audre Lorde fittingly says, ‘What you chart is already
where you’ve been. But where we are going, there is no chart yet’
(quoted in Friedman 1998, p. 3).
Part II
Cosmopolitan Cartographies
3
‘Fellow Humans’: Cosmopolitan
Citizens in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps
for Lost Lovers

In ‘Looking Back, Moving Forward: Notes on Vernacular Cosmo-

politanism’, Homi K. Bhabha’s recently added preface to The Location
of Culture, he observes that ‘In another’s country that is also your own,
your person divides, and in following the forked path you encoun-
ter yourself in a double movement [...] once as stranger, and then as
friend’ (Bhabha 2010 [1994], p. xxv). Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost
Lovers (2004) encapsulates precisely Bhabha’s notion of double-vision
or ‘movement’ of this cultural and cosmopolitical fusion. Now living in
North London, Aslam was born in 1966 in Pakistan but moved to the
north of England with his family when he was 14. Although born into
a Muslim family, Aslam describes himself as a ‘non-believer’.1 His family
relocated to Huddersfield because his communist father sought political
asylum from the regime that he was fleeing. In a discussion with Aslam,
Salil Tripathi writes that

Nadeem was the second of four children, and the responsibility of

bringing them up meant his father, who was a poet, could not pur-
sue his writing. He wrote his poetry under the name Wamaq Saleem.
‘There’s always a wound in my father that his real life did not hap-
pen. He wanted to be Wamaq Saleem.’ In all his novels, Aslam makes
room for a character, a great poet, called Wamaq Saleem. The Aslams
moved to Britain in 1980, as General Zia began his crackdown on
dissidents. ‘People like my father were saying – don’t support the
Mujahideen, but billions of dollars and weapons were given to them.
Those who opposed, like my uncle Mukhtar, were tortured,’ he adds.
(Tripathi 2008)

77
78 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

As such, the poet Saleem occurs in Maps for Lost Lovers. This novel took
Aslam over a decade to write, a vast timescale that accentuates its poeti-
cally epic content and sweeping painting-like feel of a panoramic canvas.
This is emphasized by intertextual references to other major literary works
like James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), offering a fusion or bricolage of different
art forms and cultures. Though set in England it is an orientalized, exotic
England, with references to ‘parakeets’, ‘mosques’, ‘incense’ and the rich
spicy cooking of Asian culture. As Bhabha notes, ‘the truest eye may now
belong to the migrant’s double vision’ (Bhabha 2010, p. 8).
Maps for Lost Lovers traces the routes/roots of racial tensions and
religious divisions in contemporary British society. Amidst its multiple
diversities and conflicts the common denominator of love appeals for
a universal empathy towards our ‘fellow humans’ (Aslam 2004, p. 369).
Love itself, however, serves as a metaphor upon which the acts of
humanity pivot, be they honourable or heinous, given its capacity for
union or division. At the interstices of the cultural divides in the text
lies the space in which individuals strive to make sense of their world
and their position within it. As a writer existing within yet simultane-
ously at the peripheries of British society, Aslam is critical of the hypoc-
risies carried out by blind faith, be it within Muslim, Christian or secular
cultures. The novel suggests that only the isolated artist, constantly at a
cultural crossroads, yet with the necessary distance to create a balanced
perspective, is able to transcend the trappings of cultural discourses.
British citizenship for the Asian characters portrayed is under continual
negotiation, as their identities are subject to cosmopolitical hybrid
states, which can only be mapped by the perpetual gains and losses of
love. Just as ‘G.W.F. Hegel employs the concept of love to summarize his
cosmic conception of a unified, all-encompassing worldview’ (Solomon
and Higgins 1991, p. 7), Aslam philosophically views love’s potential to
bridge the gulf between ‘fellow humans’. For Linnell Secomb,

Philosophy is not wisdom itself – for the attainment of wisdom, if it

were possible, would be the end of philosophy – but a fascination,
an infatuation, with thinking [...] It is not closure or completion but
unending intrigue. Love, too, is an incompletion [...] love is media-
tion not fulfilment. It is a movement between lack and comple-
tion, between Poverty and Plenty, between ignorance and wisdom,
between monstrosity and beauty. (Secomb 2007, p. 157)

Aslam too portrays the ‘incompletion’ of love, given its capacity

as a bridge rather than a final destination between individuals and
 Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers 79

communities, which can have the potential for healing or hatred.

Secomb importantly observes that ‘Philosophy as love, and love as
philosophy, are articulated through story [...] stories and literature, par-
ticipate in and share with love and philosophy the structure of media-
tion, deferral, unendingness and even of unworking’ (Secomb 2007,
pp. 157–8). Aslam’s depiction of love is similarly presented through
fiction, with its open-ended fluidity, suggesting an ongoing dialogue of
love and art rather than the prescribed fixity of closure.
Maps for Lost Lovers addresses other themes which include religious
dogma and political persecution, an intergenerational breakdown of
communication, the silencing, marginalizing and often physical mis-
treatment of women, and paedophilia within the confines of a mosque
(a particularly topical issue given the recent child-abuse crisis in the
Catholic Church that came to light in 2010). In a feminist statement
that urges global acknowledgement of human suffering based on gender
difference, Aslam argues,

How could you discriminate against 3 billion human beings sim-

ply because of their gender! If that makes me a feminist then I am.
The Sufi poets have always used women as the rebels within their
poetry – women strive and rebel and try to face opposition. Always,
always it was the vulnerability of women that was used to portray
the intolerance and oppression of the times. The women – more than
the men – attempted to remake the world, and failed. But in their
attempt they became part of the universal story of hope. (Quoted in
O’Connor 2005)

Aslam’s indignation here at gender inequality reverberates almost ver-

batim throughout Maps for Lost Lovers, with

the poet-saints of Islam expressing their loathing of power and

injustice always through female protagonists [...] always always it
was the vulnerability of women that was used by the poet-saints to
portray the intolerance and oppression of their times: in their verses
the women rebel and try bravely to face all opposition. They – more
than the men – attempt to make a new world. And, in every poem
and every story, they fail. But by striving they become part of the
universal story of human hope. (Aslam 2004, pp. 191–2)

Aslam’s solidarity with women as the oppressed in this novel simul-

taneously alludes to their self-policing when, succumbing to the will
80 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

of an extreme patriarchal order and its overpowering phantom con-

struction of the Angel in the House, they all too often become their
own worst enemies. For Aslam, empathy for the suffering of women
is in keeping with the cosmofeminist principles discussed in my
introductory chapter, where any cosmopolitical journey must resist
female subordination by decentring patriarchal hegemony. Refuting
her daughter’s despair ‘about the place of women in Pakistan’, Kaukab
resolutely proclaims that ‘There is nothing wrong with the status of
women in Pakistan’ (Aslam 2004, p. 323). Because of the cultural
inferiority of females, Shamas despairs that ‘The fertility clinics run
by Pakistani doctors’ offering to ‘tell you the sex of the foetus while you
wait’ is in fact a euphemism to convey ‘that if it’s female you may have
it aborted quickly’ (p. 88). Refusing a celebration of humanity through
cosmopolitan community, the society depicted by Aslam thrives
on self-policing, shame and division, as indicated in the encounter
between Charag and Suraya, for ‘The culture she shares with him is
based on segregation, and on the denial and contempt of the human
body’ (p. 133). Compliant to a culture that severs the natural instinct
of human contact and demonizes women, gay people and non-
believers, Kaukab is no longer sexually intimate with Shamas, ‘and
she remarked to herself that living in England was like living in one
big brothel’ (p. 347), while Chotta and Barra in response to their court
sentence ‘said England was a country of “prostitutes and homosexu-
als”’ (p. 348). In Pakistan ‘The people who learned of their crime pat-
ted their backs and said they had fulfilled their obligation’ and that
‘he who had committed the great dirty sin of sex outside marriage was
nothing less than evil’ (p. 348). Upon discovering a hidden love letter
from the Hindu boy placed in the shroud of his dead Muslim lover,
they are referred to as ‘“Minions of Satan! [...] Women and infidels:
minions of Satan both!”’ (pp. 193–4).
Maps for Lost Lovers encourages us to share its outrage at the mistreat-
ment of females within a system of patriarchy which claims to revere
them yet utterly brutalizes them when they dare to step out of line, or
are even suspected of doing so, for

A Pakistani man mounted the footpath and ran over his sister-in-
law – repeatedly, in broad daylight – because he suspected she was
cheating on his brother [...] This was here in England and, according
to the statistics, in one Pakistani province alone, a woman is mur-
dered every thirty-eight hours solely because her virtue is in doubt.
(Aslam 2004, p. 136)
 Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers 81

Maleeha Aslam regards patriarchal ‘Pakistani-Islam’ as ‘a force that

“legalizes” submission of women by granting divine legitimacy’ (quoted
in Anadolu-Okur 2009, p. 2) to their subjugation. Any traces of female
defiance are regarded as emasculatory insults to men, with women
reduced to possessions that are coerced and chastised as men deem fit,
since ‘According to the Home Office statistics 116 men were convicted
of murder last year as opposed to just 11 women. Women are usually
at the receiving end’ (Aslam 2004, p. 138). Though Shamas is reflect-
ing on the wider British society beyond his immediate community,
nevertheless Aslam is effectively drawing attention to the systematic
violence used against women, exploring heinous misogyny in the
name of religion. For instance, Shamas’ lover, Suraya, whose husband
divorced her in a fit of drunken petulance, uttering ‘the word talaaq
three times: I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee’ (p. 159), must
now remarry before she can marry her original husband ‘under Islamic
law’ (p. 150). Suraya has had to return to England to try to locate a
husband, while leaving her son behind in Pakistan, for ‘what had been
done could not be undone now. The husband – who was the only one
in a Muslim marriage with the right to divorce – had uttered the word
three times and according to Islam they were now divorced’, so even
though ‘There were no witnesses [...] they couldn’t ignore what had
happened: Allah had witnessed’ (p. 159). Through her focalization the
novel ponders that ‘Allah is not being equally compassionate towards the
poor woman who is having to go through another marriage through no fault
of her own’ (p. 150), and ‘It’s as though Allah forgot there were women in
the world when he made some of his laws, thinking only of men’ (p. 150).
In a moment of unguarded stream of consciousness Suraya’s dissent is
evident but immediately ‘she has banished these thoughts as all good
Muslims must’ (p. 150). Suraya had ‘been sent to a Pakistani village to
marry a man she had never met’, only to be ‘frightened by his rough
acts and demands when he got drunk, behaviour he had no knowledge
of when he sobered up’ (p. 157). The culture ‘shock she felt at the primi-
tive and coarse nature of village life’ is at odds with ‘her English life
still clinging to her’ (p. 157), leading her to be intimidated for speaking
out when

She discovered that a man [...] had been raping his niece for the past
few months and that the matter had come to light only now because
the fourteen-year-old girl had fallen pregnant. The entire family
accused the girl of having relations with someone and thereby bring-
ing dishonour on the bloodline. (Aslam 2004, p. 157)
82 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

Aslam depicts a closed world of Islamic culture in which women have

no voice or identity beyond the grasp of men and are systematically
silenced through fear of their heavenly Father’s retribution. While
recently teaching Aslam’s novel, Suraya’s husband’s divorce technique
was challenged by some of my Muslim students, who informed me that
there needed to be witnesses (though Aslam’s novel claims that Allah
is witness and, of course, it is a fictional representation), but Samia
Bano concurs with the novel’s representation of talaq. Bano writes that
‘Problems of power inequalities within the family are also evident in
the case of divorce. Under Islamic law, for example, a divorce can be
obtained in a number of different ways,’ including ‘through talaq (uni-
lateral repudiation by the husband)’ (Bano 2005, p. 169). According to
Radhika Coomaraswamy,

violence against women is closely linked to the regulation of sex-

uality. In many societies the ideal of masculinity is underpinned
by the notion of ‘honour’ – of an individual man, or a family or a
community – and is fundamentally connected to policing female
behaviour and sexuality. Honour is generally seen as residing in
the bodies of women. Frameworks of ‘honour’, and its corollary
‘shame’, operate to control, direct and regulate women’s sexuality
and freedom of movement by male members of the family. Women
who fall in love, engage in extramarital relationships, seek a divorce,
or choose their own husbands are seen to transgress the bounda-
ries of ‘appropriate’ (that is, socially sanctioned) sexual behaviour.
(Coomaraswamy 2005, p. xi)

Without doubt the most disturbing depiction of ‘honour’ in the text

involves that of ‘two clandestine lovers – a Hindu boy, and a Muslim
girl whose mother is convinced that she’s possessed by the djinn and
is asking for a holy man who’d perform an exorcism’ (Aslam 2004,
pp. 154–5). Shamas is revolted to learn of the abject violence meted out
against the Muslim girl who ‘has been beaten to death by the holy man’
who ‘reassured the family that if reasonable force was used the girl would
not be affected, only the djinn’. Thus ‘The girl was taken into the cellar
and the beatings lasted several days with the mother and father in the
room directly above reading the Koran out loud’ (p. 185). Denied human
dignity or respect, ‘She was not fed or given water for the duration and
wasn’t allowed to fall asleep even for five minutes, and when she soiled
herself she was taken upstairs to the bathroom by her mother to be
cleaned and brought back down for the beating to continue’ (pp. 185–6).
 Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers 83

Aslam cries out against an imprisoned dark world of phallocentric hor-

ror which reaches its crescendo in this portrayal of thwarted life and
potential at the brutal hands of patriarchal ignorance, for ‘the coroner
found the arms and legs broken by a cricket bat. The front of the chest
had caved in as though she had been jumped on repeatedly’ (p. 186).
In a mindless act of masculine aggression against the feminine, the text
depicts an ugly world of coercion against love and beauty, ideologically
legitimized by the madness of belief. Anathema to Shamas, for him
such a culture can only breed ignorance, violence, division and hate. In
contrast, he recollects ‘the story of Hiraman the rose-ringed parakeet’ who
advocates that ‘One mustn’t settle for the ordinary’ (p. 167). For Shamas
‘Hiraman the parakeet represents an artist, they who tell us what we
should aim for, they who reveal the ideal to us, telling us what’s truly
worth living for, and dying for, in life’ (p. 168). Shamas, as a portrait of
the frustrated artist, is utilized by Aslam to inform his reader that Maps
for Lost Lovers is a highly political work of art whose rhetoric is persuad-
ing us that the values of society are not based on love but power. Instead,
argues Aslam, it is the responsibility of the artist to teach us that there
needs to be cosmopolitical harmony and acceptance of human differ-
ence in order for the world to progress out of its Platonic dark cave and
transcend intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. One of his key mes-
sages is that this can only be achieved if women are recognized as equal
‘fellow humans’ (p. 369) rather than inferior objects of enslavement.
The novel insists that equality can be attained through a cosmopolitan
drive towards respecting humanity’s diverse entirety rather than the
isolationist measures of multiculturalism, where minority groups are left
alienated from mainstream British society. For Kwame Anthony Appiah,
‘multiculturalism’ is ‘another shape shifter, which so often designates
the disease it purports to cure’ (Appiah 2007, p. xi). Similarly, Bano
points out that the English legal system

was reluctant to intervene in cases of domestic violence, often leaving

women in dangerous situations, as the work of Southall Black Sisters
among Asian women has documented (1990). This illustrates how
policies of multiculturalism have meant that the ‘internal affairs’ of
the community are often left to be regulated by family/community
leaders. (Bano 2005, p. 164)

‘This has in many cases’, continues Bano, ‘led to disastrous conse-

quences for women and young girls of the community who choose not
to live according to cultural/religious traditional values and beliefs and
84 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

therefore become ostracised’ (Bano 2005, pp. 164–5). Similar attempts

to transcend cultural traditions are charted in Maps for Lost Lovers,
tracing the blowback that ensues for those daring to defy dominant
hegemony.
Thus, Shamas’ own brother Jugnu and lover Chanda have also met
their demise through such controlling mindsets of darkness who refuse
to give house room to any form of love that does not meet with its
stringent phallocratic insular laws and customs. ‘A lepidopterist by
profession, Jugnu’ (Aslam 2004, p. 17) symbolizes the desire for rational
enlightenment, professing that ‘I was born into a Muslim household, but
I object to the idea that that automatically makes me a Muslim’ (p. 38),
and emphasized by the name of his speedboat, ‘The Darwin’ (p. 28). His
elder brother Shamas echoes that humanist desire to move away from
the Althusserian religious ideological state apparatus of grand narrative
truth, arguing that ‘I am still inclined to believe the scientists, because,
unlike the prophets, they readily admit that they are working towards an
answer, they don’t have the final and absolute answer’ (p. 38). Refuting
the naivety of blind faith, he reasons that

I trust what science says about the universe because I can see the
result of scientific methods all around me. I cannot be expected to
believe what an illiterate merchant-turned-opportunistic-preacher –
for he was no systematic theologian – in seventh-century Arabian
desert had to say about the origin of life. (Aslam 2004, p. 38)

Of course Kaukab interprets this as a Western-inspired blasphemy

against the prophet Muhammad. Jugnu is very much a cosmopolitan
world citizen both in terms of his formal education and from the travel
that has broadened his horizons: ‘he arrived in Moscow to study at the
Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University. Learning Russian and
obtaining a bachelor’s degree would take him five years’ (Aslam 2004,
p. 26). Afterwards, he lived ‘in a damp cold house in England with
Shamas and Kaukab, and then he moved to the United States’ (pp. 26–7),
where ‘news of his mother’s death reached him in Boston where he was
working on a doctorate. The following year he flew to England’ (p. 27).
Attending a ‘People’s Friendship’ university, as a cosmopolitan citizen
Jugnu rejects masculinist territorialism and phallocentric dominance
of women, instead portraying a more androgynous character evident
even in adolescence: ‘the gentle nineteen-year-old boy their mother
always said was Allah’s way of compensating her for the daughter she
had always wished for’ (p. 26). By dismantling the rigid cartographies
 Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers 85

of gender dichotomies, Aslam offers a cosmopolitical fluidity that ech-

oes Winterson’s journey beyond gender in The Powerbook and The Stone
Gods. Rather than dominating women, it is clear that Jugnu empathizes
with them as his ‘fellow humans’ and brings love rather than power to
his relationships with them. He spreads that cosmopolitical vision to
Kaukab and Shamas’ children, telling Ujala various folktales from dif-
ferent countries involving butterflies and love, such as ‘an Irish law of
1680 which decreed that a white butterfly was not to be killed because
it was the soul of a child, and how in Romania adolescent girls made a
drink with the wings of butterflies to attract suitable partners’ (p. 71).
Jugnu’s lover Chanda with whom he has set up home because ‘We love
each other deeply and honestly’ (p. 62), has been unable to gain an
Islamic divorce from her errant husband, who had only wanted British
citizenship and then consequently fled. Chanda’s brothers regard this as
an insult to their fragile masculinity that must be avenged, particularly
in light of their own failings, claiming that ‘We are men but she reduced
us to eunuch bystanders by not paying attention to our wishes’ (p. 342).
We learn that ‘When both her marriages in Pakistan failed and she came
back to England, Chanda had been asked by her brothers and father to
consider wearing the all-enveloping burka’, imposing a punitive control
over her body to protect their masculinity since ‘The men said they felt
awkward and ashamed when they were with their friends on a street
corner and she went by’ (p. 342). Disempowered and silenced because
of gender inequality ‘Chanda wrote in her diary angrily’ that ‘I feel I am
being erased’ (p. 342). Undercutting with irony the Islamic claim that
‘Only the pious die on a Friday’ (p. 338), as Jugnu is told that the local
mosque’s cleric has collapsed, it is clear that the narrator regards the
murdered Jugnu and Chanda as pious when they are killed on that day
by those who mistakenly act out of honour. Immediately after Chanda’s
brother Chotta pistol whips Jugnu and leaves him to die he is informed
‘that cleric-ji had just died’ and ‘Only the very fortunate die on a Friday:
it’s not for the likes of us sinners’ (p. 352).
The theme of love is perhaps the most dominant, with its significance
as a key human condition that has the ability to transcend cultural bar-
riers and religious differences. Yet, often thwarted love leads to acts of
violent aggression in the novel, such as Shamas and Jugnu’s radicalized
elder brother: ‘heart-broken’, he started attending a reactionary mosque
where ‘he would meet the people who would eventually lead him
towards the austere and volatile form of the faith that was alien to his
parents and brothers’ (Aslam 2004, p. 83). Aslam says that ‘The book in
many ways is about the classic theme of Islamic literature: the quest for
86 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

the beloved. The book wouldn’t be what it is without 1001 Nights, the
Koran, Bihzad’ (quoted in O’Connor 2005). So, he writes that ‘a lover
looking for the beloved represents the human soul looking for salva-
tion’ (Aslam 2004, p. 188). Related to the theme of thwarted love that
runs through the novel, Aslam says

People ask me why are the younger generation of Muslims becom-

ing radicalized? Why are they more strictly attached to religion than
their parents were? It’s simple: we all know that to be an adult, to
exist within the world of grown-ups, is to encounter pain and disap-
pointment as well as joy and fulfilment. Every day friends fail us,
lovers abandon us, we don’t get the rewards we deserve, we make
decisions that are wrong and then we have to live with the conse-
quence of those mistakes. But turning to religion means we don’t
have to think anymore, we don’t have to make decisions anymore –
we are told what to think, what to eat, what to wear, who to meet,
who to talk to. Some people might say it’s serenity, but to me it’s
an escape! Yes the world is unjust, but we shouldn’t want to escape
from it [...] We must keep an eye on the mosques – if a youngster
is disillusioned he should not have the opportunity to fall into the
hands of the extremist mullah – let him channel his disappointment
and make great works of art. More libraries and art schools and film
institutes – less mosques. (Quoted in O’Connor 2005)

This is a post-9/11 novel that was written before and after that moment
in history, a bridge spanning across a cultural chasm, though mention
of extremism only exists on the fringes of the narrative, such as ‘the
young son’ of one of Shamas’ neighbours who ‘has walked out of uni-
versity where he was training to be a doctor and has taken up radical
Islam, grown a beard and proclaimed everything from democracy to
shaving cream unIslamic’ (Aslam 2004, p. 211). Refuting religious dis-
course, for Aslam art is a curative remedy against pain and division with
a capacity to harmonize individuals in much the same way as love can
function as a reconciliatory element of humanity. A character in a novel
that itself is like a work of visual art with its multiplicity of vivid descrip-
tions, Shamas ‘hadn’t known how to read Charag’s paintings’ but now
‘knows he is maturing as an artist, becoming aware of his responsibili-
ties as an artist’ (p. 19). As such, the text metafictionally ponders ‘Which
to hold dearer: my love for you, or the sorrows of others in the world? They say
the intoxication is greater when two kinds of wine are mixed’ because ‘Good
artists know that society is worth representing too’ (p. 319). Aslam
 Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers 87

acknowledges that ‘In a way, the book is about September 11 [...] I asked
myself whether in my personal life and as a writer I had been rigorous
enough to condemn the small scale September 11s that go on every
day [...] Jugnu and Chanda are the September 11 of this book’ (quoted
in Brace 2004). Literature, in his opinion, is a means of speaking out
against the injustices meted out in the name of grand narratives because
‘We moderate Muslims have to stand up’ (quoted in Brace 2004).
The novel is set in an unnamed town in England – we know that it
is not London because London is mentioned as the place that Shamas
and Kaukab’s children have escaped to by going to university and where
Mah-Jabin lives. Instead Aslam provides us with a name that has been
given to the town by its Asian immigrant population, namely Dasht-e-
Tanhaii, which translates as The Desert of Loneliness. He says ‘I don’t
give the location or name of the town because I wanted the reader to
be as confused about his surroundings as my characters – immigrants to
this alien place – were’ (quoted in O’Connor 2005). Rather than carto-
graphically territorializing the setting, Aslam offers instead an unfixed
imaginative space of uncharted territory, where the potential of cos-
mopolitan alternatives can be considered. While its setting places the
characters within an urban, postindustrial landscape of working-class
homes, with the mention of blue-collar jobs like factories, bus driv-
ers, shop work and so on, this is nevertheless a novel that very much
concerns itself with nature. For those who care to open their eyes and
see, it is a pastoral setting that is filled with insects (particularly moths
and butterflies), birds, a lake and seasonal changes. The structure of the
novel is divided into four sections, each charting a season in the British
climate: Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn.
Maps for Lost Lovers cyclically opens in winter with the first snowfall
and journeys through the seasons of one year, ending as it began, but
one year on, with Shamas and the snow. The pastoral scenes of nature
exist beneath the façade of the urban landscape just as, in Britain, the
Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi immigrants live almost invisibly,
underneath the dominant white populace. Instead, they build their
own communities, naming streets and towns after familiar figures and
places from back home, such as ‘Benazir Bhutto Road’ (Aslam 2004,
p. 96), never feeling integrated within the British way of life. Britain,
then, feels very much like the uncanny, the unfamiliar for many of
the characters; merely a backdrop against which they have to trace
out the canvas of their new lives. It is their home, but is not home
and, as such, a longing for that lack of belonging opens up. In exile
and caught between two worlds, they feel the pain of dislocation from
88 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

both cultures. Unable to articulate this cultural and linguistic displace-

ment, ‘this woman’s neighbour wonders why her children refer to
Bangladesh as “abroad” because Bangladesh isn’t abroad, England is
abroad; Bangladesh is home’ (p. 46). In an interview it is suggested that
‘There is no integration in the novel, England, as it were, is absent,’ to
which Aslam replies, ‘England is not absent from my novel – only the
WHITE England is absent’ (quoted in O’Connor 2005). Surely it is more
accurate to regard this as an absent presence, surrounding the wider if
not immediate community, and having varying levels of impact upon
different characters: for instance, Kaukab refuses to see white England,
though she is aware that its gravitational pull has systematically drawn
her children ever farther away from her traditional Muslim lifestyle,
while Jugnu, for example, is a fully fledged world citizen, tasting the
fruits of his intellectual and geographical journeys. He gave hope to his
nephews and niece who are experiencing racism, arriving with ‘his pass-
port swollen with the New England wildflowers he had picked’ (Aslam
2004, p. 11). ‘The journey Jugnu made’ (p. 27) broadened his horizons
geopolitically, equipping him with a cosmopolitan empathy that he
could bestow upon his younger relatives. For instance, for Ujala, ‘Jugnu
had been his companion since his earliest childhood,’ educating ‘him
about an Irish law of 1680 which decreed that a white butterfly was not
to be killed because it was the soul of a child, and how in Romania ado-
lescent girls made a drink with the wings of butterflies to attract suitable
partners’ (p. 71). Jugnu collects cultural knowledge and passes on stories
from a variety of global locations, particularly relating to moths, but-
terflies and love, opening up others to the diversity of humanity and
cosmopolitan understanding. According to Katherine Stanton,

Rather than world citizenship, cosmopolitanism now indicates a

multiplicity or diversity of belongings – some carefully cultivated,
others reluctantly assumed. Meant as an interpretive lens as well
as a descriptive term, ‘cosmopolitan fiction’ can help us glean new
insights into literary and cultural works, including contemporary
works in English [...] that thematize migration, exile, and the
diasporic condition. (Stanton 2006, p. 2)

Likewise, Aslam’s cosmopolitan text envisions the plight of the relo-

cated world citizen at different levels, ranging from those who attempt
to remain in multicultural pockets of isolation to those who steep them-
selves in each new cultural experience, offering ‘new insights’ of world
rather than national vision. Problematically, ‘multiculturalism remains
 Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers 89

trapped in the epistemology of the national outlook, with its either/or

categories and its susceptibility to essentialist definitions of identity’
which ‘lacks a sense of cosmopolitan realism’ (Beck 2007, p. 66). For
Berthold Schoene, ‘the first step might well be to imagine ourselves as
belonging to something far less securely defined and neatly limitable
than the nation, that is, to conceive of ourselves first and foremost as
members of humanity in all its vulnerable, precariously exposed plan-
etarity’ (Schoene 2009, p. 180). In Maps for Lost Lovers characters such
as Kaukab remain trapped within nationally deterministic identities,
while others like Jugnu attempt to adopt a cosmopolitan outlook look-
ing outwards at the potential of the world. For immigrants like Kaukab,
then, even their children have become uncanny to them:

‘There is nothing I loathe on this planet more than this country, but
I won’t go to live in Pakistan as long as my children are here. This
accursed land has taken my children away from me [...] Each time
they went out they returned with a new layer of stranger-ness on
them until finally I didn’t recognize them any more.’ (Aslam 2004,
p. 146)

Having remained displaced and alienated in a foreign land, Kaukab

fails to acknowledge that her culture is at odds with her children, given
their different upbringing and education. Recognizing the gulf between
them, her daughter Mah-Jabin realizes that ‘Trapped within the cage
of permitted thinking, this woman – her mother, is the most danger-
ous animal she’ll ever have to confront’ (Aslam 2004, pp. 110–11). The
epitome of submissiveness to Islamic grand narratives and constantly
chastising herself whenever contrary thoughts creep in, Kaukab repre-
sents the Angelic caged bird who would clip her daughter’s wings, while
Mah-Jabin realizes that only by flying the nest can she breathe fresh air.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty argues that ‘decolonization, anticapitalist
critique, and solidarity’ are vital since ‘an antiracist feminist framework,
anchored in decolonization and committed to an anticapitalist critique,
is necessary at this time’ (Mohanty 2004 [2003], p. 3) of globalization.
Mah-Jabin sees her female struggle within a wider transnational col-
lective, whereas Kaukab only thinks at a national level and refuses to
consider her plight within a cosmofeminist solidarity: instead she closes
her mind to women’s interconnected subjugation and submits to the
will of patriarchy. Far from denying otherness within feminism, how-
ever, Mohanty believes that ‘Diversity and difference are central values
here – to be acknowledged and respected, not erased in the building of
90 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

alliances,’ for only by accepting multiplicity can an ‘antiracist and inter-

nationalist feminism – without borders’ (p. 7) be realized. Mah-Jabin
deterritorializes her position as a Muslim woman within a wider terrain,
thus deconstructing the hegemonic borders imposed by patriarchy by
identifying with an altogether more borderless Woolfian notion of ‘the
whole world’ as one’s country. Living in London away from the fam-
ily home town, she is also planning to go to America having managed
to free herself from her abusive husband. Offended by her daughter’s
haircut, Kaukab confronts Mah-Jabin with ‘Is that how white girls are
wearing their hair these days?’ (Aslam 2004, p. 92), while her daugh-
ter resists the Islamic hegemony that pits women against each other,
despising the matchmaker, for she ‘can envisage the woman going
along the street, one of the many [...] involved in that organized crime
called arranged marriages’ (p. 106) and challenging the lack of female
solidarity from her mother: ‘Didn’t you once tell me that a woman’s life
is hard because you have to run the house during the day and listen to
your husband’s demands in bed at night? So why didn’t you make sure
I avoided such a life?’ (p. 113). This cosmopolitan sharing of cultures
coincides with Mohanty’s view that ‘feminist solidarity as defined here
constitutes the most principled way to cross borders – to decolonize
knowledge’ (Mohanty 2004, p. 7). Since ‘decolonization involves pro-
found transformations of self, community, and governance structures’,
for Mohanty ‘It can only be engaged through active withdrawal of
consent and resistance to structures of psychic and social domination’
(p. 7). In other words, Aslam’s depiction of Kaukab’s ideological fet-
ters must be superseded by her daughter’s cosmopolitical resistance in
order for there to be ‘not only the creation of new kinds of self-govern-
ance but also “the creation of new men” (and women)’ (p. 8). Though
preaching conservative beliefs, ‘Mah-Jabin remembers Kaukab telling
her she regretted not having been able to have had an education’
(Aslam 2004, p. 113), as the younger woman recognizes the urgency
of breaking that mould. In a statement that echoes Winterson’s desire
to break the narrative of destructive repetition in The Stone Gods, Mah-
Jabin’s incredulity asks ‘Why do you people keep doing the same things
over and over again expecting a different result?’ (p. 113). Realizing
one’s local predicament as part of a global hegemony is very much an
issue raised in Maps for Lost Lovers as the recovery of an errant humanity
offers a valuable weapon to resist the national and cultural constraints
of phallocratic grand narratives.
According to Freud, the uncanny or the unheimlich means unhomely.
For Nicholas Royle, ‘the uncanny is not simply an experience of
 Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers 91

strangeness or alienation. More specifically, it is a peculiar commingling

of the familiar and unfamiliar [...] It can consist in a sense of homeli-
ness uprooted, the revelation of something unhomely at the heart of
hearth and home’ (Royle 2003, p. 1). Britain may be home but Aslam’s
characters also experience the alienation of being ‘uprooted’ from their
original home and transplanted in unfamiliar soil. Equally, particularly
for the children of immigrants like Shamas, Pakistan is uncanny because
it is a home that they have never been to and not been born in yet it
haunts them. Aslam ‘captures something of the estranging sense of
the relocation of the home and the world – the unhomeliness – that is
the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations’ (Bhabha
2010, p. 13). The uncanny also involves feeling haunted, and this is a
theme that pervades the novel, from being haunted by the absent pres-
ence of home, to being haunted by lost lovers, to being haunted by the
dead lovers, Jugnu and Chanda, who have been the victims of a so-
called honour killing five months before the opening of the novel. Of
course, by using the seasonal cycle as its structure, Aslam is referring to
the cycle of life and death, with the opening season of Winter symbol-
izing the death of the lost lovers that haunts Shamas and the novel. On
the very first page mention is made of death as Shamas recalls ‘a dead
finch’ buried in the garden by ‘one of his children’ ‘many years ago’
(Aslam 2004, p. 3). Images of birds, either caged or free, run through
the book, symbolizing freedom, the imagination and the incarceration
of the individual, caged like a bird within social and religious ideolo-
gies. Always the novel is pointing towards the necessity of freedom from
grand narratives such as religion that impose upon and restrict the
individual’s potential. The epigraph to the novel sums up this journey
of seeking one’s own life beyond the restrictions of so-called truths:
‘A human being is never what he is but the self he seeks.’ To remain
mobile, journeying towards an ever fluid self, is to cultivate one’s poten-
tial for Aslam, while to remain static and unbending shows a perverse
waste of human existence. Though it is undoubtedly harrowing to be
displaced through postcolonial diaspora, nevertheless philosophical
nomadism seeks to relocate, decentre and reconnect home not as a
rigid territory but as a fluid mobility, while cosmopolitanism histori-
cally identifies with those marginalized and dispossessed, and urges a
planetary connectivity.
Themes of light and darkness dominate too, and darkness is the state
in which many of these characters reside, particularly Kaukab. Devoid
of formal education beyond the age of 11, she is exiled in England
without more than a rudimentary understanding of the language and is
92 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

almost completely isolated within her own immigrant neighbourhood.

When she chokes on a fish bone, we learn that

The trip to the hospital had taken more than an hour but it passed
blankly for her: there’s nothing for her out there in Dasht-e-Tanhaii,
to notice or be interested in. Everything is here in this house. Every
beloved absence is present here. An oasis – albeit a haunted one – in
the middle of the Desert of Loneliness. Out there was nothing but
humiliation. (Aslam 2004, p. 65)

The theme of haunting and ghosts returns again as Kaukab submerges

herself in past memories to avoid living life in the present. The house
that she retreats to is one that itself is alien to her, given its location in
England and the fact that her children have left her pretty much, due to
vast differences of opinion and beliefs. In that sense, choking on a fish
bone assumes several metaphorical levels: she is a fish out of water in the
sense that England is not her comfort zone, while the fish is the ancient
symbol for Christianity and Kaukab finds herself conflicting with another
culture that is largely secular, but with Christian foundations. Also, the
fish is apt given its associations with Darwinian human evolutionary
theory that is linked to Jugnu’s scientific outlook (his boat, the Darwin,
is closely aligned with fish as it travels on water). Anatomist Michael
Mosley notes, ‘It may seem strange that humans have evolved from fish,
but the evidence can be found not just in fossils but also within our own
bodies.’2 Meanwhile, in pagan tradition, fish symbolize feminine fertility
and creativity and power, associated with the ocean as feminine, and it is
significant that choking on a fish bone indicates Kaukab’s denial of her
own female voice or knowledge in her internalization of phallocratic dis-
course. Finally, the smell of fish is associated with female genitalia as she
refuses to have sexual intimacy with Shamas: associating intercourse with
sinful pleasure now that her procreative years have passed, she dismisses
it as a redundant perfunctory duty that can no longer be justified.
It is no accident that on Kaukab’s birthday Mah-Jabin sends her
‘Madonna lilies’ with ‘coffin-shaped buds’ (Aslam 2004, p. 69), symbol-
izing the themes of purity, incarceration and death that run through the
text. According to Bhabha, ‘The recesses of the domestic space become
sites for history’s most intricate invasions’ and, ‘In that displacement’,
experienced by migrants such as Kaukab, ‘the borders between home
and world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public
become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided
as it is disorienting’ (Bhabha 2010, p. 13). Kaukab is bewildered by the
 Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers 93

unhomeliness of a home whose permeable threshold has resisted her

attempts to keep England at bay just as her homeland of Pakistan’s
borders were breached by the forces of colonial history. Releasing their
grip on colonial India, Britain’s parliamentary Act of 1947 partitioned
India and Pakistan based on Hindu and Muslim allegiances, effectively
breaking up families as well as geopolitical regions, so that ‘The hostility
between the two neighbours makes it necessary for a letter to Pakistan
from India, or one to India from Pakistan, to be posted to a third coun-
try,’ while ‘Countless thousands of families wait for the news of their
loved ones from the other side of the border’ (Aslam 2004, p. 74). Again
it is the human cost of territorial cartography that is counted by Aslam,
since ‘what they feel is less important than nationalistic ideals’ (p. 74).
It is this unfeeling geopolitical manoeuvring that has affected Shamas’
family: his Hindu Indian father is separated from his sister as a child
during this time, and is brought up a Muslim in Pakistan. Such actions
have resulted in lost loves by imposed national borders, while families
still attempt to communicate their cosmopolitan love. Ultimately, too,
Aslam demonstrates the random illogicality of nationalist aggression or
religious fundamentalism, when humans are forever pawns in strategic
state games. Mention is also made of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, ‘pre-
sented to Queen Victoria by Lord Dalhousie in June 1850. This followed
the British annexation of the Punjab, India, after the British had defeated
the Sikhs. From that date the diamond became part of the British Crown
Jewels.’3 Tracing the complicity of Britain in India and Pakistan’s his-
torical and contemporary troubles, Aslam mentions the diamond while
intertextualizing Joyce’s Ulysses in the chapter ‘Leopold Bloom and the
Koh-i-Noor’. Jugnu recalls that, ‘in the brothel sequence [...] Bloom
wears the Koh-i-Noor diamond’ (Aslam 2004, p. 237), to which Shamas
responds, ‘I cannot think of anyone more appropriate than him to have
that jewel’ (p. 237). This scene attests to the colonial, sexual and class
consciousness of Aslam’s text in its empathy with Joyce’s Ireland and
the desire to liberate ‘fellow humans’ from hegemonic rule.
The neighbourhood that Kaukab hardly leaves and which her chil-
dren could not wait to fly away from is extremely insular, stifling and
claustrophobic and very much a desert of isolated loneliness that is con-
sumed with its own surveillance and repression: ‘it hoards its secrets,
unwilling to let on the pain in its breast. Shame, guilt, honour and fear
are like padlocks hanging from mouths. No one breathes. The place
is bumpy with buried secrets and problems swept under the carpets’
(Aslam 2004, p. 45). Observed and constantly trying to prevent their
lives being scrutinized – ‘Everyone was imprisoned in the cage of others’
94 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

thoughts’ (p. 117) – gossip is spread through the radio communication

of taxi drivers, which inadvertently leads to the murder of Chanda and
Jugnu. Like the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ that William Blake condemns,

in this neighbourhood, and in the way they had been brought up, the
things that were natural and instinctive to all humans were frowned
upon, the people making you feel that it was you who was the odd
one out. Everyone was imprisoned in the cage of others’ thoughts.
She and he were born here in England and had grown up witnessing
people taking pleasure in freedom, but that freedom although within
reach was of no use to them. (Aslam 2004, p. 117)

The girl who was murdered for loving a Hindu boy ‘was married off
against her will to a cousin brought over from Pakistan, but the couple
divorced because she remained distant from him’ (Aslam 2004, p. 87)
and is subsequently remarried to an older man who ‘has three other
wives’ (p. 88). Observing the collusion of many women with patriar-
chy, the narrator reports that ‘When her mother discovered that she
had refused to consummate the marriage with her cousin [...] she took
the bridegroom aside and told him in a whisper, “Rape her tonight”’
(p. 88). A victim of its own suppression as well as poverty, ‘this rundown
neighbourhood’ is dysfunctional with ‘one suicide attempt a year, 29
people registered insane, and so many break-ins a month’, while ‘more
and more of the burglaries are being done by the sons of the immi-
grants themselves, almost all of whom are unemployed’ (p. 46). Shamas
‘seemed to shock himself by the desperation of most people’s lives here,
family life frequently reduced to nothing more than legalized brutality.
He counted nineteen mentally ill people in his own street’ (p. 210).
Like Louis Althusser’s ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, individuals in
Aslam’s novel are denied their humanity by the repression of tradi-
tion, poverty, religion, family and neighbours, all of which kept them
‘trapped helplessly in similar webs of their own’ (Aslam 2004, p. 118).
Even Shamas, though an atheist communist former poet, feels ‘fettered
by his conscience – that self-arresting chain’ (p. 155). He notes that
‘Most people live in the past because it’s easy to remember than to
think. Most of us don’t know how to think – we’ve been taught what to
think instead’ (p. 282). Incarcerated by their own mindsets of internal-
ized social discourses, many of the individuals in this novel are afraid
to imagine, to push their lives forward, to take risks and instead remain
trapped in the boundaries that limit and define them: ‘Human beings
and chains, it is the oldest acquaintanceship in the world’ (p. 176).
 Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers 95

Interpellated into their allocated hegemonic power structures, many of

Aslam’s characters subject themselves to a state of false consciousness,
religion functioning as their condoning opiate of cooperation rather
than questioning that reality. Similar ideas of being intellectually incar-
cerated inform much of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, urging its
reader to resist the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ of social hegemony ‘on this
imperfect and shackled planet’ (Aslam 2004, p. 138). Just as Pullman
challenges religious indoctrination and portrays his heroine Lyra as the
second Eve, so too does Aslam portray the pursuit of wisdom and love
as vital components of human development. An association is made
between Jugnu and Chanda’s love and paradise, since ‘A few of the
birds now entered Jugnu’s back garden for safety amid branches of the
apple trees’ (p. 334). Fleeing peacocks take refuge in the lovers’ garden,
yet ‘Their presence in the neighbourhood was disturbing to some. The
faithful have always been ambivalent towards peacocks because it was
this kind-hearted creature that had inadvertently let Satan into the
garden of Eden’ (p. 334). Beside ‘Jugnu’s body [...] lay the bright corpse
of the peacock’ (p. 358). An ambivalence is attached to the Edenic
connotations, since Jugnu and Chanda’s love is regarded as sinful by
‘the faithful’ yet endorsed by the narrator as a vital human connec-
tion. Those who would consider themselves ‘faithful’, however, are
condemned in the text for their inflexible laws of obedience, as well as
the hypocrisy of some. The lovers’ Eden, then, is invaded by ‘Satan’ in
the form of ‘the faithful’ who obey rather than ‘condemn the idiocies
of Islam’ (p. 302) by carrying out an honour killing against Jugnu and
Chanda. Though ‘Some people in the Muslim community were aware of
the clandestine love-affair’ between Chanda’s brother Chotta and Kiran,
‘They – and Chotta himself – saw nothing in common between his
secret nights with a woman he was not married to and Chanda setting
up home with Jugnu’ (p. 344). Spouting self-loathing and hypocrisy
regarding his relationship, Chotta argues ‘I am a sinner [...] but I am not
an apostate. I know I am sinning. That’s the difference’ (p. 344). Finding
Kiran in bed with the man she loved years ago but was prevented from
marrying, Chotta avenges his damaged masculine pride by murder-
ing Jugnu and Chanda. His accomplice is his brother: ‘Barra who was
returning from a visit to his wife at the abortion clinic’ as ‘The couple
already had five daughters’ (p. 349). Like Chotta, Barra seeks vengeance
to compensate for his damaged masculinity since ‘I am ruined. The doc-
tors now say they made a mistake: it was a boy she was carrying, not a
girl’ (p. 349). Victims themselves of the insanities of religious grand nar-
ratives, both brothers in turn seek to empower themselves by punishing
96 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

the feminized other. Signifying the rebirth and mating associated with
spring, the lovers first meet in ‘March’ when

The apples had not yet put out their shell-white flowers. The blossom
would be out in May – when she would move in with Jugnu – and
both Chanda and Jugnu would be dead by the time those very flow-
ers became fruit in the autumn, the apples that would lie in a circle of
bright red dots under each tree until the snows of this year’s January.
(Aslam 2004, p. 55)

Expelled from Eden by the ‘faithful’, the lovers’ union has had no chance
to flourish as religion has interfered with nature. Jugnu, ‘the man with
the luminous hands’ (Aslam 2004, p. 55) and Chanda, ‘the girl whose
eyes changed with the seasons’ (p. 54) are themselves depicted as pagan
nature semi-deities who are destroyed by Islamic man-made laws. Both
married in their hearts by love but not by their religions’ dictates, when
Chanda first enters Jugnu’s garden ‘Her veil caught on a branch (as
though she were being clairvoyantly prevented by the tree from advanc-
ing any further [...] but she freed herself and moved towards the door’
(p. 359), symbolizing the wedding veil she will never wear as his bride
and the death shroud that awaits.
Kaukab certainly remains imprisoned in the snares of ideology and is
afraid to have an independent thought in her head, lest it be heard and
condemned by her heavenly maker. Women are particularly depicted
as victims in such an extremely patriarchal society, and the system
of education that keeps them ignorant and compliant is explored by
Aslam. Girls are described as having an inferior education to boys
and are expected to constantly submit to the will of their husband, as
the depiction of their earthly lord and master. Shamas’ lover Suraya
remembers that ‘One day when she was a little girl, she had gone home
from the mosque in tears, having just learned that the Prophet, peace
be upon him, had said there would be more women in Hell than men’
(Aslam 2004, p. 199). Falling in love with a Sikh man in her youth, ‘her
disgusted mother had taken her out of school and enrolled her into a
girls-only Muslim school, the segregated school where daughters could
be taught traditional values like modesty and submission’ (pp. 202–3).
What is important to realize, though, is that this gender divide is more
acutely drawn for those from poor backgrounds. Aslam writes,

The headmistress – and founder – of the Muslim school lived in

the outlying suburbs and drove to the poor neighbourhood every
 Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers 97

morning, having dropped off her own daughter at a private co-

education school; the Muslim school wouldn’t do for her girls but
was good enough for ‘these’ people. (Aslam 2004, pp. 202–3)

Double standards operate between rich and poor, keeping the poor (par-
ticularly women) in a perpetual state of darkness and ignorance, limited
in their knowledge to rote-learning of the Koran and domestic duties
to satisfy their husbands. In turn, the relative disempowerment of the
impoverished Muslim men is relieved by their ultimate power over the
females that they rule. Anwar Hekmat argues that the intellectual and
physical constraint of women coincided with a ‘shift from polytheism
to monotheism’ which erased pre-Islamic goddesses, since ‘By eliminat-
ing the female deities from Arabia, Muhammad not only perpetuated
and universalized his own tribal god, Allah, but at the same time he
downgraded the status of women in society’ (Hekmat 1997, p. 253). ‘It
is not surprising’, continues Hekmat, ‘that all the supposedly revealed
laws of the Koran favour men’ (p. 253). Echoing Aslam’s sentiments,
Hekmat expounds that ‘The dominance of one sex over the other is
inhuman and therefore intolerable’ and, resultantly, ‘No society can be
viable in which the superiority of one sex is recognized and advocated
by law’ (p. 253). For Ruth Lister, this involves a renegotiation of citi-
zenship since, ‘Within nation-states, the exclusion of women has been
pivotal to the historical theoretical and political construction of citizen-
ship’ and, as such, ‘The appropriation of citizenship’ has a ‘potential
value to feminism’ (Lister 2003 [1997], p. 196). She asserts that

a feminist reconstruction of citizenship has to be internationalist and

multi-layered in its thinking [...] It is only through such a perspective
that we can address the limitations of citizenship which are thrown
into relief in the face of growing numbers of migrants and asylum
seekers and of a nation-state under pressure from within and with-
out. (Lister 2003, p. 196)

For Lister and Aslam national-bound thinking maintains the subju-

gation of women, while an increasingly globalized world demands
the commonality of ‘cosmofeminist’ recognition (Pollock et al. 2002,
pp. 8–9). Caught between Islamic traditionalists and Western secular-
ism, women in Aslam’s novel are excluded from the rhetoric of a patri-
archal religion and often struggling to find a voice in another language,
echoing the democratic shortfalls of ancient Athens’ rhetorical training
since ‘citizenship was not extended to women, foreigners or slaves’
98 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

(Richards 2008, p. 158). James A. Herrick argues that ‘The exclusion

of women from the rhetorical mainstream has resulted in the loss of
women’s meanings, and thus, it is argued, in the loss of women them-
selves as members of the social world’ (Herrick 2001 [1997], pp. 261–2).
According to Dale Spender,

The group which has the power to ordain the structure of language,
thought and reality has the potential to create a world in which they
are the central figures, while those who are not of their group are
peripheral and therefore may be exploited. In the patriarchal order
this potential has been realized. (Spender 1994 [1980], p. 143)

In the appropriation of discourse, Islamic masculinity has confined

women to a mythopoeic wilderness in Maps for Lost Lovers, devoid of the
tools to chart a route through patriarchal society. But Aslam also offers
cosmopolitical hope for such adrift world citizens to connect outwith
the available charts and inscribe their own new citizenship through the
language of love.
Ultimately, then, incarceration can only be avoided by daring to cross
cultural thresholds and experience the uncanny sensations of other
human cultures. In the interstices of culture, advocates Bhabha, it is
imperative that one builds ‘a bridge’ (Bhabha 2010, p. 13) in order to
move ‘beyond’ (p. 13) the limitations of the familiar and experience
cosmopolitan diversity. Quoting Heidegger, Bhabha offers the bridge
as a metaphorical fusion of difference in order to create hybrid new
citizens from Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ (p. 7), since
‘the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro,
so that they may get to other banks’ (p. 7). While Bhabha’s comments
are helpful and he does discuss feminism, there is nevertheless a ten-
dency to privilege the ‘ways of men’ in some cosmopolitan theorizing:
in its focus upon the subjugation of women, Aslam’s novel reminds us
that cosmopolitanism must be for all of the world’s citizens, not just a
celebration of male bonding. Likewise, Schoene’s (2009) discussion of
cosmopolitanism offers little consideration of the role of feminism in
achieving planetary equality and devotes significantly more chapters
to discussing male authors as though they are somehow more capable
of world envisioning than their female counterparts. Clearly there
is a danger that the plight of women is being globally silenced in a
misguided association between cosmopolitanism and phallocratic nar-
ratives. In that sense, Aslam’s epigraph from Octavio Paz asserting that
‘A human being is never what he is but the self he seeks’ is precisely
 Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers 99

responding to the postmodern desire for a creative imagining of alterna-

tive possibilities to hegemonic dominance that open up the boundaries
between the hitherto closed bodies of self and other in order to find a
space ‘beyond’ fixed national, gendered and sexual identities, where the
self is continually in progress rather than already complete. Crucially,
Shamas embodies the concept of the bridge: he is ‘The director of the
Community Relations Council’ (Aslam 2004, p. 15) and, as such, he ‘is
the person the neighbourhood turns to when unable to negotiate the
white world on its own’ (p. 15). Liaising between different cultures,
Shamas allows the journey ‘to other banks’ to succeed and eases the
transition process of moving ‘beyond’ one’s familiarity, enlightening
those in need of guidance. He himself exists at the interstices of multi-
ple boundaries and has shifted beyond them: a non-believing Muslim
living in an increasingly secular England of Christian tradition, his
father was a Hindu by birth but, uncannily, was raised to be a Muslim
due to the personal domestic sphere being unsettled by the historical
conditions of the public sphere. So too is love an open-ended bridge,
and it is no accident that Shamas first encounters his beloved Suraya
on a bridge, who remembers ‘that man on the bridge’ (p. 25). For Susan
Stanford Friedman, ‘Bridges signify the possibility of passing over. They
also mark the fact of separation and the distance that has to be crossed’
(Friedman 1998, p. 3). Aslam too is aware of this gulf that needs to be
surmounted, just as Shamas acknowledges the dangerous fragility of
his developing relationship with Suraya, for ‘there hasn’t been even
an instant’s physical contact, because between them lies a glass bridge’
(Aslam 2004, p. 183). By applying the bridge metaphor, Aslam is similar
in his cosmopolitical outlook to Zoe Strachan’s Negative Space which
also utilizes the idea of crossing bridges in order to journey away from
stifling social norms.
The theme of light is most strongly associated with the moth and
butterfly symbolism of the text. Moths, of course, tend to die when
they get too close to a light and burn themselves. Several of the key
characters in the text have names that are associated with light or the
heat given out by light: Shamas means sun, Jugnu means fire or firefly,
Chanda means fierce, hot or passionate, Kaukab and Suraya both mean
star, Deepak means little lamp, Ujala means bright, Charag means lamp,
Mah-Jabin means moon, Mahtaab means moon, Stella means star (nota-
bly, Strachan’s main character in Negative Space is also called Stella),
Kiran means ray of light, and Aarti is a Hindu ritual involving the offer-
ing of lamps. The light that pervades the novel constantly reminds us
of the dead lovers, Jugnu and Chanda, since for Chanda’s mother, their
100 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

murder has signified that ‘The light of the world has gone out’ (Aslam
2004, p. 275). Fireflies are even mentioned, so offering a ghostly echo
of Jugnu’s absent presence in the text, and his hands are described as
‘luminous’ because of a chemical spillage from factory work, so making
him attract moths just as Chanda’s attraction to him spells her doom.
The surname of Shamas’ family is Aks, which means reflection. Chakor
means bird, which relates to the theme of caged or wild birds, the sym-
bol for the constrained or liberated individuals. Bird motifs also relate
to the imagination, creativity or intellect, key skills for Aslam as a writer
and something that is highly valued in the text. As with Pullman’s His
Dark Materials, seeing the light is not finding religion in this text, which
is, on the contrary, associated with remaining in the dark and unenlight-
ened. To seek the light is to extend beyond one’s familiar boundaries and
explore alternative selves and realities, in order to challenge the restric-
tions imposed upon one. Finding this out is to discover the only signifi-
cant truth in life, and it is regarded as the role of the writer, musician or
artist to indicate this road to enlightenment to the individual. We are
told that ‘Shamas and the other migrant workers’ (p. 13) are introduced
to jazz music by Kiran and her father. Aslam writes that

the listeners would be engrossed by those musicians who seemed to

know how to blend together all that life contains, the real truth, the
undeniable last word, the innermost core of all that is unbearably
painful within a heart and all that is joyful, the unimaginable depths
of the soul [...] so engrossed would the listeners become that, by the
end of the piece, the space between them would have contracted.
(Aslam 2004, p. 13)

Historically, jazz is associated with migrant suffering in the shape of

African American slaves who combined their musical roots with a
European fusion to create hybridity, while Ted Gioia argues that jazz
is ‘a synergistic process’, involving ‘a blending together of cultural ele-
ments that previously existed separately’ (Gioia 1998 [1997], p. 5). The
role of art, like jazz and literature, is to offer people space in which to
think for themselves which, in turn, creates communities of shared
understanding rather than division and hostile separation. According
to Aslam, ‘All great artists know that part of their task is to light up
the distance between two human beings’ (Aslam 2004, p. 13). This is a
self-conscious or metafictional comment where the text recognizes its
own responsibility to enlighten the reader and create harmony rather
than discord through the music of life’s love and pain, the conditions
 Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers 101

familiar to humanity that transcend the trappings of social, religious

and ethnic divisions. Again, this alludes to the theme of light in the
novel, and art, not religion, is regarded as a source of truth, understand-
ing and peace because ‘those musicians’ knew ‘how to blend together
all that life contains, the real truth [...] and all that is worthy of love’
(p. 13). Only through such intellectual and aesthetic transcendence
can the individual and collective consciousness journey beyond the
shackles of darkness and allow a blending together rather than division.
Charag regards his art as ‘a metaphor’ (p. 321) to challenge his childhood
circumcision because ‘What I am trying to say is that it was the first act
of violence done to me in the name of a religious or social system. And
I wonder if anyone has the right to do it. We should all question such
acts’ (p. 320). Part of that questioning involves learning to interpret
grand narratives rather than simply obey them; Ujala criticizes Kaukab’s
ignorance, arguing that ‘I’ve read the Koran, in English, unlike you who
just chant it in Arabic without knowing what the words mean, hour
after hour, day in day out, like chewing gum for the brain’ (p. 322).
As the young artist, Charag explains to his mother that ‘I am sorry if
you are offended but I can’t paint with handcuffs on’ (p. 321), echoing
Aslam’s message about the social responsibility of art.
Similarly, Marshall Walker argues that ‘It is the artist, as much as the
ecologist and always more than the politician, who urges us to love the
world well enough to find ways of saving it from consumerism’s pollu-
tions, bigotry, the vitiating politics of power’ (Walker 1996, p. 347). He
continues, ‘It is from the artist’s “great love” of earth, humanity, mind
and language that we may acquire a sensibility militarized against our
propensities to self-destruction’ (p. 347). That search for empathy and
love between humans that Aslam calls for in his novel is integral to the
philosophy of cosmopolitanism. At the very end of the novel the illegal
immigrant boy who failed to carry out his role as the fake Jugnu to help
Chanda’s family, is focused upon. Having experienced the death of his
own brother when the tower block he was staying in was demolished,
the boy decides it is time that he came out of hiding ‘to go out into the
world again. If a calamity is coming then where else would he rather
be than with his fellow humans? What else is there but them?’ (Aslam
2004, p. 367). Individuals have been elevated from separatist labels to
a cosmopolitan recognition of their common humanity, as a sense of
solidarity and hope lingers despite the harshness of the world. To com-
municate with others and love our ‘fellow humans’ is regarded as the
only way of ‘lessening the amount of pain in this Dasht-e-Tanhaii called
the planet Earth’ (p. 367).
102 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

According to Kwame Anthony Appiah, cosmopolitan communica-

tion is a necessary response to an ever-shrinking world which ‘is get-
ting more crowded’ (Appiah 2007, p. xix). As the world becomes ever
smaller through globalization, and people become more mobile and
transnational, seeking work or political asylum or refuge from the effects
of climate change, then, according to cosmopolitan theorists, it is ever
more vital that people recognize their common humanity while celebrat-
ing their diversity as the only way to prevent division, extremism and
darkness. All of these are themes that are addressed either directly or
indirectly in Maps for Lost Lovers. Schoene considers literature as a means
to challenge a totalitarian world state of divisive and alienating globali-
zation through cosmopolitan vision, seeing ‘The greatest cosmopolitical
challenge’ being ‘to inspire a global politics that circumvents the pitfalls
of both totalisation and atomisation by radically recasting the relation-
ship between self and other’ (Schoene 2009, p. 181). Cosmopolitan
fiction, then, has the capacity to chart a geopolitical route through the
interstices of an ever-compacting worldview, given ‘the forward-look-
ing and future-oriented impulses of these works’ (Stanton 2006, p. 81).
With fiction’s talent for responding to the geocultural Zeitgeist, Katherine
Stanton’s Cosmopolitan Fictions concludes that ‘While they do not imag-
ine final victory, these cosmopolitan fictions envision doing justice as a
struggle that must be engaged’ (p. 81). This is Aslam’s hope in the novel
as the only way to contest the current impasse of multiculturalism which
ultimately leaves people isolated and limited within the field of vision
allowed by their immediate community. Thresholds of understanding
between communities is lacking with characters such as Kaukab as repre-
sentative of first-generation, particularly female, immigrants, who exist
metaphorically behind a veil of separatism from the wider society in
which they live, and subject to the restrictions of their culture and educa-
tion. Her children, however, are born in Britain and are far more mobile
in the existence between their family ties and the home in which their
parents have relocated themselves to, with Charag having a mixed-race
child and then divorced from his white British wife. But racial politics
in Britain is one of the dominant themes of the text and it is Shamas
and Kaukab’s children as British Asians who try to navigate the territory
between the trappings of their culture and religion, and the ideological
mindsets of those trapped within a white-only mentality. Ujala confronts
Kaukab, saying, ‘Mother, are you aware that Muslim women cannot
marry a non-Muslim? Their testimony in a court of law is worth half
that of a man,’ while ‘Non-Muslims living in Muslim countries have
inferior status under Islamic law: they may not testify against a Muslim,’
 Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers 103

and ‘Non-believers are to be killed’ for ‘In Saudi Arabia [...] non-Muslims
are forbidden to practise their religion, build churches, possess Bibles’
(Aslam 2004, p. 321). He challenges Kaukab’s view, questioning ‘A reli-
gion that has given dignity to millions around the world? Amputations,
stoning to death, flogging – not barbaric?’ (p. 322). Condemning his
mother, arguing, ‘If I changed my religion in a country like Pakistan what
would happen to me, Mother?’, he continues ‘I might want to change it
because Islam further deranges an ignorant and uneducated woman so
that she feeds poison to her sons’ (p. 323), referring to the potion given
to Kaukab by a cleric to put in his food and render her son obedient as
an adolescent, which lowered his libido. Global poverty is regarded as a
vital ingredient in human oppression because,

For millions of people, religion was often another torture in addi-

tion to the fact that their lives were not what they should be. Their
world is pitiless from womb to tomb, everything in it out of their
control [...] This world gives them terrible wounds and then the holy
men and women make them put those wounds into bags of salt.
(Aslam 2004, p. 302)

Controlled by a lack of financial freedom, humanity has a self-destruc-

tive tendency to ensnare itself in ideological fetters that serve as an
opiate to thought. A ‘wealthy looking well-dressed woman’ visiting
England from Pakistan exclaims that ‘People like that are ruining the
name of Pakistan abroad’ (Aslam 2004, p. 312). Having experienced
racial and sexist abuse by a white man, she is indignant – ‘I who speak
better English than him, educated as I was at Cambridge’ (p. 312) – and
protests that ‘it’s all the fault of you lot, you sister-murdering, nose-
blowing, mosque-going, cousin-marrying, veil-wearing inbred imbe-
ciles’ (p. 312). Kaukab, however, demonstrates a moment of political
consciousness, arguing that ‘We are driven out of our countries because
of people like her, the rich and the powerful. We leave because we
never have any food or dignity because of their selfish behaviour. And
now they resent our being here too. Where are we supposed to go?’
(p. 312). Echoing the despair of displaced transnationals, Aslam draws
attention to global capitalism’s culpability in generating an ever-wid-
ening poverty gap where its victims are further impoverished by the
constraints of religious discourse. Such displacement is further linked
to the subcontinent’s colonial history: ‘Kiran was a girl of thirteen
back in the 1950s when Shamas had arrived from Pakistan. Her father
had lost all other members of his family during the massacres that
104 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

accompanied the partition of India in 1947, and so he had brought

her with him when he migrated to England from India’ (pp. 10–11).
Though, ‘It was a time in England when the white attitude’ appeared
to be slowly thawing, by the 1970s ‘there were calls for a ban on immi-
gration and the repatriation of the immigrants who were already here.
There were violent physical attacks’ (p. 11). Though former subjects of
Britain’s empire who undergo partition overseen by Lord Mountbatten,
these postcolonials are abused and receive a hostile reception. It is not
only those of the postcolonial diaspora who feel displaced, for even
back ‘home’ political tensions between India and Pakistan ensure that
familial love is compromised and must be navigated around territo-
rialized cartographies, forced to scale ‘a wall that also effectively cuts
the whole of Asia in half’ (p. 74). Time and again in the novel, Aslam
draws attention to the human capacity for love in the face of cultural
divisions, offering cosmopolitical hope against a hegemonic tide. Back
in ‘November 1971’, West Pakistani troops ‘had been in East Pakistan
since March, spreading death and destruction’, since ‘soldiers had been
told that the East Pakistanis were an inferior race – short, dark, weak,
and still infected with Hinduism’ and to ‘improve the genes of the East
Pakistanis: women and girls were raped in their hundreds of thousands’
(p. 82). Again Aslam points out the horrific mistreatment of women
at the hands of patriarchal masculinity while interweaving historical
events into the immediate lives of his characters, for

On the day in December that Chakor vomited dark-brown half-

digested blood [...] so that now his body was consuming itself – the
Indian army moved into East Pakistan, and Pakistan surrendered [...]
East Pakistan was now Bangladesh – India had not only defeated
Pakistan, it had helped cut it in two. (Aslam 2004, p. 82)

In the madness of thanatic-driven civil war, neighbours have wreaked

havoc, just as Chakor’s body has embarked on its own self-destruction.
Aslam is also intent on making interconnections between the women’s
plight in the novel and a geopolitical awareness of Pakistan, since

The last two decades for Pakistani women have been of particu-
lar significance. In 1975, the state was encouraging women into
the mainstream and many women were taking advantage of these
spaces. Soon after, however, with the Islamisation/militarisation proc-
ess resulting from the military take-over in 1977, the state actively
tried to push women into the chadder and chardevari (seclusion) and
 Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers 105

promulgated several ordinances and directives that made women

more vulnerable than they had been earlier. (Khan 2000, p. 5)

Sylvia Walby concurs that ‘since 1979’ there has occurred ‘the loss of
civil and political rights to women alone, with the rise of Islamic funda-
mentalism where the Islamic priesthood has taken power; for example
in Iran’ (Walby 1996, p. 247). As such, Kaukab’s internalization of mas-
culinist discourses, exclaiming that ‘There is nothing wrong with the
status of women in Pakistan’ (Aslam 2004, p. 323), is challenged in Maps
for Lost Lovers as hegemonic submission to phallocratic fundamental-
ism, part of ‘the patriarchy inherent in all religions’ (Khan 2000, p. 6).
Friedman alludes to a necessary glocalized response in order to become
conscious of women’s subjugation and to forge community resistance,
since ‘Locational feminism requires a geopolitical literacy that acknowl-
edges the interlocking dimension of global cultures, the way in which
the local is always informed by the global and the global by the local’
(Friedman 1998, p. 5). Ultimately, she continues, ‘feminism needs to be
understood in a global context, both historicized and geopoliticized to
take into account its different formations and their interrelationships
everywhere’ (p. 5). The victimization of Aslam’s women requires a uni-
fication not only of glocalized women but also of men, such as Shamas
and his sons Charag and Ujala, who can invoke cosmopolitical empathy
for the suffering of their ‘fellow humans’. There can only be cosmopoli-
tan equality if men learn to transcend the discourses of masculinity that
pervade their lives: a mother’s threat to her little girl in a shop is that
‘If you don’t behave, I’ll not only give you away to the whites, I’ll give
them your brother too,’ which is regarded as more of a threat, given the
importance of maintaining patriarchal masculinity in what is regarded
as an effeminate country, for ‘They’d make sure he doesn’t learn to drive
when he grows up and has to sit in the passenger seat while you drive.
Do you want a eunuch like that for a brother?’ (Aslam 2004, p. 221).
Her hegemonic tirade culminates with ‘Househusbands, if you please!
The mind boggles at the craziness of this race’ (p. 221). Terrorizing her
daughter with xenophobic sexism has achieved the desired result, for
the child is ‘Visibly disturbed’ into compliance (p. 221), filling the next
generation’s minds with ideological constraints.
A recurring motif in the novel that also crosses across cultures is the
moth and butterfly references:

The idea of a butterfly or moth as the soul is a remarkable exam-

ple of the universality of animal symbolism, since it is found in
106 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

traditional cultures of every continent. The custom of scattering

flowers at funerals is very ancient, and the flowers attract butter-
flies, which appear to have emerged from a corpse. A butterfly or
moth will hover for a time in one place or fly in a fleeting, hesitant
manner, suggesting a soul that is reluctant to move on to the next
world. The transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly seems
to provide the ultimate model for our ideas of death, burial, and
resurrection.4

In the novel we learn that ‘Muslims do burn lamps on graves and the
moths they attract are said by some to be angels, the spirits of the
departed by others, or lovers in disguise come to say prayers for their
beloveds’ souls’ (Aslam 2004, p. 196). This is referring to the murdered
Muslim girl who was beaten to death by a holy man to exorcize the
djinns (demonic spirits) that allegedly caused her to fall in love with
a Hindu boy. The idea of the soul and moths keeps recurring through-
out, with the mother of Jugnu and Chanda’s murderers wanting ‘to
go into their souls with a lighted lamp to look for the truth’ (p. 175),
or later acknowledging that her daughter’s ‘soul will never forgive us’
(p. 182) for concocting an alibi for her sons. The notion of haunting,
the soul and metamorphosis is further enforced by numerous men-
tions of moths alongside death, such as ‘a dead moth’ (p. 96), ‘This
year’s butterflies would soon begin to emerge’ (p. 134), ‘his skull full
of moths [...] Ghost Moth’ (pp. 6–7). The moth’s almost automatic yet
lethal draw to the flame serves as a trope for the heart’s desire for the
beloved in circumstances that carry mortal risks. For Aslam, the light
of love will always be worth crossing the cultural bridge to pursue
despite the dangers, until our common humanity is recognized above
differences. Until that time, love itself is feminized and brutalized in
the same way that women are oppressed, and it is the role of literature
to give voice to that longing for connectivity amongst our ‘fellow
humans’. The pursuit of love is a truth worth defending against false
ideologies and, in Aslam’s view, it is the role of the artist to convey the
urgent gravity of this message. Comparable to the short life cycle of the
butterfly or moth who is ‘born to die’ and so must seek a mate ‘with
passionate impatience’ (p. 21), humans are regarded as existing only
for a moment in the grand scheme of things and should live life to the
full rather than enslaving themselves to a false doctrine of hegemonic
control, and love is integral to our existence since ‘They say that the
heart is the first organ to form and the last to die’ (p. 204). It is no acci-
dent that Aslam mentions the heart here given the pervading theme
 Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers 107

of love, signalling that though hegemonic divisiveness may continue

to attempt to crush affairs of the heart, love will endure until death.
Notably, as an anatomical organ, the heart has four chambers which
correspond to the structure of the novel’s division into four sections
and four seasons. Importantly, the Muslim girl who is crucified for lov-
ing a Hindu boy has her chest caved in by the holy man, furthering
the association between love and violence. He literally stamps on the
so-called feminine concept of love which threatens to emasculate men
and patriarchal authority. Aslam emphasizes the contrast yet fusion
between both, since ‘A human being’s heart is about the size of that
human being’s fist.’5
In Aslam’s mind, only connectedness with our ‘fellow humans’ can
make bearable ‘this Dasht-e-Tanhaii called the planet Earth’ (Aslam
2004, p. 367). In a destructive Thanatos-driven world, this text reveres
Eros as a curative cosmopolitan hope, for Shamas and Kiran consider
that ‘it’s their curiosity about ways of living that led to Chanda and
Jugnu’s death [...] They did not have a death wish. They had a life wish’
(pp. 280–1) because ‘In this life we are duty bound to dig up a little
happiness’ (p. 281). Questioning ‘Why weren’t they careful? Even ani-
mals know to retreat from obvious danger. For all his love of the natu-
ral world, Jugnu should have remembered that all animals retreat from
fire,’ the response is ‘All, except moths’ (p. 281). It is precisely that
love of nature that has led to his union with Chanda, as love becomes
the inextinguishable flame that ideology constantly tries to snuff out.
Despite global hostilities – ‘The feuds of the world. The feuds of the
world’ (p. 19) – love serves as an emblem of cosmopolitan hope, just
as ‘the many hearts carved on the poles of the xylophone jetty enclose
initials in Urdu and Hindi and Bengali as well as English’ (p. 17). The
common denominator among different cultures is the universality of
love and allure of the heart, symbolized by Jugnu’s moths who ‘were
unable to resist the pull of his raised hand and more and more would
arrive out of the black air to spin around it like planets bound to a
sun through gravity’ (p. 17). Grieving for the lost lovers, Jugnu and
Chanda, Shamas ‘is not a believer, so he knows that the universe is
without saviours: the surface of the earth is a great shroud whose dead
will not be resurrected’ (p. 20) – reinforcing the urgency of living true
to oneself and sharing a cosmopolitan empathy with others because
an individual’s existence is a brief moment. According to Berthold
Schoene, cosmopolitan fiction is identifiable insofar as ‘it is possible
to detect a world-creative consciousness beginning to stir within the
imaginative realm of the contemporary British novel’ (Schoene 2009,
108 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

p. 186). In its cosmopolitical outlook, Maps for Lost Lovers synergizes

local and global concerns that appeal for unification rather than divi-
sion amongst otherwise haunted citizens by ‘lessening the amount of
pain in this Dasht-e-Tanhaii the planet Earth’ (Aslam 2004, p. 367).
Aslam’s message of empathy rests on the insignificance of our differ-
ences because ‘From this existence of two moments, we have to steal
a life’ (p. 279).
4
‘The Bridge to the Stars’: Travelling
Home in Philip Pullman’s His Dark
Materials

the Authority, whom I think of as not the creator, but as simply the
first conscious being [...] told them that he was the first one, that he
had created them [...] they had to worship him [...] [O]ne of them
was wiser than him, which the early church and, indeed, the writer
of the Old Testament book of Proverbs, knows as wisdom, Sophia.
And she said to the being [...] ‘Look, it would be better if you told
the truth [...] Let’s have a bit of democracy round here’ [...] [T]here
was a rebellion and she was thrown out [...] [T]he rebel angels at the
prompting of the Sophia decided to set about secretly advising these
creatures how to gain the knowledge of themselves [...] [T]he Satan
story of the Garden of Eden was that happening.1

Philip Pullman demarcates here the parameters of the vision existing

within His Dark Materials: a fin-de-siècle anticipation that the world will
move out of infantilized darkness and embrace a mature millennial
enlightenment. Staking a claim in their own lives will empower indi-
viduals to regain the paradise of a true tangible home hitherto denied
them by the dispossessing false promise of a kingdom of heaven. In
imagining this vast multiverse within the rubric of children’s literature,
Pullman has been both celebrated and demonized for challenging grand
narratives. Instead, he offers an alternative story encouraging child
readers onto a path, not already narrowly defined, but rather of interac-
tive progress, mirroring that of Bildungsroman fiction. He contends that
the Body Politic has peddled stories in the name of a usurping Father
to legitimize the systematic incarceration of humanity from its material
bodily pleasures, while stripping individual intellectual advancement.
Pullman’s work is concerned with deconstructing, demystifying and
renegotiating the hierarchies of not only Western but global grand

109
110 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

narratives, creating imaginative spatial opportunities which accom-

modate alternative realities. Fundamentally, it is a Neoplatonic call for
those enslaved in the darkness of the cave to emerge fully enlightened
by ousting a tyrannical Kingdom and building a Republic. However,
unlike Plato, who privileged the soul’s divinity over debased bodily
matter (Colebrook 2004, p. 20), according to Pullman, the material
body (envied and desired by corrupt deities like Metatron) is the crux of
humanity’s potential, revered for its very paradisiacal earthiness.
Pullman explains, ‘The Gnostic worldview is Platonic in that it rejects
the physical created universe and expresses a longing for an unknow-
able God who is far off. My myth is almost the reverse. It takes this
physical universe as our true home. We must welcome and love and live
our lives in this world to the full’ (quoted in Lenz 2005, p. 11). In The
Amber Spyglass (2000) Lyra frees the ghosts of the underworld by allow-
ing them to reunite with their planetary home, saying

‘When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will
loosen and float apart, just like your dæmons did [...] they’re part of
everything. All the atoms that were them, they’ve gone into the air
and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things [...]
that’s exactly what’ll happen to you [...] you’ll be out in the open,
part of everything alive again.’ (Pullman 2001, p. 335)

Pullman is drawing on contemporary scientific thinking to offer an

alternative creation story to biblical authority for, according to Brian
Cox, ‘every atom in your body was once part of something else’ because
‘everything in the Universe is composed of the same basic ingredients’
(Cox and Cohen 2011, p. 92). By studying the cosmos it has been con-
firmed that it is composed of the same ‘ninety-four naturally occurring
elements that we have collected and identified here on Earth’ and, as
such, ‘it is clear that we are connected in a very real sense to the whole
of the Universe [...] because we are all intrinsically made of the same
stuff’ (p. 101). This ‘teaches us that the path to enlightenment is not in
understanding our own lives and deaths, but in understanding the lives
and deaths of the stars’ (p. 81) because the carbon produced at the end of
a star’s life cycle is responsible for rebirth in the creation of new stars as
well as humanity since ‘every carbon atom in every living thing on the
planet was produced in the heart of a dying star’ (p. 123). In recognizing
that ‘it is in the deaths of old stars that new stars are born’, it is clear that
we are witnessing ‘the Earthly cycle of death and rebirth played out on a
cosmic scale’ (p. 133) because ‘It is from such a cycle that we emerged’,
 Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials 111

for ‘within a nebula [...] our sun was formed. Around that star a network
of planets condensed from the ashes, and amongst them was Earth’
(p. 133). Given that Pullman is drawing on scientific discoveries, it is
crucial to recognize the deliberate association made between his heroine
Lyra and the stars. In the final chapter of Northern Lights (1995), ‘The
Bridge to the Stars’, Lyra embarks upon a new journey, treading the peril-
ous path of a little girl lost to a little girl found, by leaving the security of
her familiar world to discover the alien: ‘So Lyra and her dæmon turned
away from the world they were born in, and looked towards the sun,
and walked into the sky’ (Pullman 1998a [1995], p. 399). Her movement
from lost to found is significant, since ‘The intertextual link between
Lyra’s name and that of Blake’s Lyca in Songs of Innocence and Experience
also provides a hint to the knowing reader that Lyra’s journey from
innocence to experience is going to be successfully accomplished’ (Walsh
2003, p. 246). Lyra’s relationship with stellar phenomena is cemented by
sharing her name with a constellation, and ensuring that her journey to
an unfamiliar world is equally a return home in astronomical terms as
well, in terms of the scientific links that Cox points out within the cos-
mos regarding Earth being born from the stars. Pullman’s choice of chap-
ter heading, then, firmly creates a bridge between Lyra as a representative
of humanity and the stars as our other creation story. Thus, ‘When we
look out into space we are looking at our place of birth. We truly are chil-
dren of the stars, and written into every atom and molecule of our bodies
is the history of the Universe’ (Cox and Cohen 2011, p. 135). Rejecting
the phallocratic grand narrative of our existence, Pullman’s alternative
vision signals that ‘Our story is the story of the Universe,’ where ‘Every
piece of every one and every thing [...] was assembled in the first few
minutes of the life of the Universe, and transformed in the hearts of stars
or created in their fiery deaths’ (p. 136). Far from despairing at this rejec-
tion of biblical narrative, ‘When you die those pieces will be returned to
the Universe in the endless cycle of death and rebirth. What a wonderful
thing to be a part of that universe [...] What a majestic story!’ (p. 136).
Such thinking could almost be taken directly from the pages of His Dark
Materials in its insistence that enlightenment depends upon humanities’
willingness to see its own origins as a shared planetary story. As well as
responding to current scientific discoveries, Pullman’s endeavour to cre-
ate an intertextually and cosmopolitically layered multiverse draws on a
plethora of cultural myths:

the group of stars commonly referred to as the constellation Lyra has

taken on a myriad of different meanings, and has been subject to
112 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

just as many varying interpretations across cultural boundaries [...]

The star is also commonly associated with a harp, or known as ‘the
harp star’ [...] the constellation’s prominent alpha star Vega proves
its historical significance as a central element in mythological sto-
ries of Asian origin. The tale identifies vega as a ‘weaving girl’, in
courtship with a neighbouring ‘herd boy’, represented by Altair
of the constellation Aquila. The two neglected their duties in the
heavens, and were eternally divided by the Celestial River, the Milky
Way Galaxy.2

In a trilogy that strives to break down boundaries to free mental capac-

ity, this constellation inspires multiple stories spanning ‘across cultural
boundaries’ – Pullman’s Lyra and Will echo the star-crossed lovers who
defy heavenly ‘duties’, with Lyra ‘weaving’ her own lyrical story, just as
the constellation Lyra takes its name from the ancient stringed instru-
ment, the lyre. Both children also must return to their respective uni-
verse and lead separate lives, only able to evoke memories of the other.
Finally, the constellation is considered small in stature but very signifi-
cant, just as Lyra is a little girl of paramount importance. Interestingly,
the intellectual conscious Dust or ‘sraf came from the stars’ (Pullman
2001, p. 289), thus linking Lyra’s quest for wisdom directly with the
dark material of creativity itself, whilst the martyr in the underworld
pleads, ‘So I urge you: come with the child out to the sky!’ (p. 336). In
her journey to the stars, Lyra seeks to bridge an understanding between
here and there, between self and other, by crossing boundaries of famili-
arity in the recognition of cosmopolitan empathy, in a similar vein to
my discussion of Nadeem Aslam’s use of the bridge metaphor in Maps
for Lost Lovers or Zoe Strachan in Negative Space.
Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is a work of polemical dissent
that seeks to fully engage with socio-political debates pertinent to
contemporary culture and offer an alternative cosmopolitan vision of
connectedness and empathy. Imagining a world with no religion is a
particular political drive in these texts, inviting us to wonder if we can.
If we cannot, the message is chillingly clear: the death-dealing binary
logic of nation states will continually privilege one set of valued Truths
over an Other. Crucial to the end result is the power of ‘story’ insofar
as its ideological discourses have perpetuated a division of ‘them’ and
‘us’ that, in the current climate of a world increasingly polarized around
questions of ethnicity and faith, is all too glaringly relevant. It is not just
religious discourse that His Dark Materials asks us to challenge, though it
is perceived as the hegemonic keystone upon which patriarchal ideology
 Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials 113

prohibitively pivots, for it ‘can’t allow any other interpretation than the
authorized one’ (Pullman 1998a, p. 275). Ultimately, this grand nar-
rative is scrutinized in an imaginative world that addresses how such
androcentric stories suppress feminine factors including the environ-
ment, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Louis Althusser posits a similar
position regarding the hegemonic function of social institutions by
considering various Ideological State Apparatuses:

the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the

Courts, the Prisons [...] constitute what I shall in future call
the Repressive State Apparatus [...] I shall call Ideological State
Apparatuses [ISAs] a certain number of realities which present
themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and
specialized institutions [...]: the religious ISA (the system of the
different Churches), the educational ISA, the family ISA, the legal
ISA, the political ISA [...] the Repressive State Apparatus functions
‘by violence’, whereas the Ideological State Apparatuses function ‘by
ideology’. (Althusser 1992 [1970], pp. 50–1)

Pullman’s view of social institutions, then, aligns with Althusser’s

concept of ISAs, insofar as the discourses of such entities control
the subject’s sense of reality, which the rebels of wisdom strive to
deconstruct. His Dark Materials envisages a transference from aggres-
sive phallocratic Authority to a balanced cosmopolitan Democracy/
Republic, stemming from the wiser female angel, Sophia, who reminds
society that ‘it would be better if you told the truth’3 rather than
hiding behind an illusive veil. Contravening the established biblical
ISA account, Pullman records the revolt of the angels as a favourable
advancement in the move out of the cave towards enlightenment.
Siding with Blake’s ‘Devil’s Party’, Pullman revises the account of
humanity’s fall told in Genesis, while developing Milton’s rewrite in
Paradise Lost, focusing upon a contemporary politics befitting of mil-
lennial society. Thus,

while Pullman, Blake, and Milton all interpret the biblical themes
and narratives in the context of contemporary thought and church
doctrine, Blake also interprets Milton’s interpretation, and Pullman
reflects and re-creates them all. In this way, Pullman’s trilogy
becomes a triumph of intertextuality, with text quoting text and
image quoting image in a metaphorical reflective hall of mirrors.
(Scott 2005, p. 96)
114 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

Pullman creates a multi-layered dialogical response to biblical grand

narrative and its literary interpreters and, by doing so, offers a
contemporary cosmopolitical polemic. His ‘Disobedience, then, recog-
nizes that different stories might need to be told, that the official story
is not sufficient’ (Wood 2001, p. 255).
In this fictional deconstruction of the Kingdom of Heaven, the free
world’s as well as any other’s lack of democracy is exposed, insisting that
the potential for global understanding and harmony can only flourish
in a cosmopolitan Republic. The polemical aim is to lead readers from
darkness to enlightenment through a philosophical awareness of the
journey from prelapsarian myopia to postlapsarian vision. Mirroring
the depositioned Authority, hermeneutically, this intertextually over-
determined text redistributes authorial control, democratically offering
an interactive epistemology of childhood subjectivity that figuratively
represents a brave new millennial world. Achieving this necessary matu-
rity allows a renegotiation of childhood with Eden, as dispossessed refu-
gees regain paradise by discarding the shackles of Western storytelling.
Ironically, Pullman’s socio-political call for mental expansion coincides
with reactionary fundamentalist backlashes against creative expression,
in a way that witnesses a blurring between the inner textual narrative
and outer narratives of our reality. Thus, Peter Hitchens writes in the
Mail on Sunday that Pullman is ‘the most dangerous author in Britain’,
whilst Claudia Fitzherberts warns, ‘Christian parents beware: his books
can damage your child’s faith,’ Michael Dirda’s assessment of The Amber
Spyglass is that ‘In another time, this is a book that would have made
the Index [the Catholic list of prohibited texts], and in still another era
gotten its author condemned to the stake as a heretic’ (quoted in Squires
2003, pp. 72–3).
As is widely critically acknowledged, His Dark Materials retreads
the Blakean path of innocence to experience, but it also quests
between this Romantic concept and Neoplatonic/Aristotelian wisdom,
gained through experience, to invoke a new generation of children’s
literature:

Traditionally, children are seen as beautiful, innocent beings, then

comes adulthood and they become corrupt. That’s the C.S. Lewis
view. My view is that the coming of experience and sexuality and
self-consciousness is a thing to be welcomed, because it’s the begin-
ning of true understanding, of wisdom. My books tell children that
you’re going to grow up and it’s going to be painful but it’s going to
be good too. (Pullman quoted in Walsh 2003, p. 247)
 Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials 115

Childhood itself, then, becomes a metaphor for society’s necessary

evolutionary progress from ignorance to intellect, evoking Aristotle’s
belief that ‘Human life was defined by its end of “living well.” And liv-
ing well was defined as exercising one’s highest capacity – wisdom – in
order to form one’s life into a stable and coherent whole’ (Colebrook
2004, p. 22). Thus, Lyra and Will’s heroic journey to the underworld in
The Amber Spyglass to free those incarcerated by a tyrannically deceptive
puppet-master Father, strongly resonates with Plato’s notion of the cave
in The Republic and Aristotle’s drive towards wisdom in Ethics. ‘Plato pic-
tures human life as a pilgrimage from appearance to reality’ (Murdoch
1978, p. 2), and it is this apocalyptic urgency to penetrate beyond the
illusion to a core truth that is the central aim of liberating stifled souls
from the cavernous underworld, allowing them to breathe freely. Plato’s
metaphor of the cave envisages chained prisoners, their backs to a fire,
who only see shadows cast by puppets on a wall, which they mistakenly
perceive as reality. Julia Annas writes of their blissful ignorance, where
only a brave few escape

out of the cave to the real world [...] The Cave is, then, not just the
degraded state of a bad society. It is the human condition. Even in
the ideally just society, we all start in the Cave. We don’t all end
there, though; at least in the ideally just society some, who are the
Guardians, journey upwards to achieve knowledge and wisdom.
(Annas 1982, pp. 252–3)

Whilst a useful summation, Annas’ reference to ‘the human condi-

tion’ is vague – it is more accurate that humanity is caught within
the policed borders of its own particular social ideologies, which the
intellectual ‘Guardians’ who ‘journey upwards’ strive to dismantle.
Otherwise, we exist in Platonic darkness or Marx’s illusory state of false
consciousness, never comprehending our subjection to the grand narra-
tives of our existence. Lord Asriel confirms the link between childhood
and the urgency to dispel adult ignorance, arguing that ‘We’ve gone
beyond being allowed, as if we were children’ (Pullman 1998a, p. 394).
Likewise, Anne-Marie Bird notes that ‘the Church does not want peo-
ple to grow up, but to keep them in an infantile ignorance’ (Bird 2005,
p. 193), while Naomi Wood agrees that ‘the Church’s mission [is] to
infantilize its believers by maintaining their innocence at all costs’
(Wood 2005, p. 18).
The journey is a vital motif in transcending the depths of the dark-
ened cave in order to forge a path of enlightenment where societies can
116 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

unshackle themselves from their ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ (Blake 1994,

p. 83). In children’s literature, according to Peter Hunt,

The relationship of child to adult is a theme that also recurs in terms

of the child’s literal place in the world: very many books originate in
a sense of place. This, combined with the frequent journey motif [...]
has led to a singular use of landscape [...] As the readers grow, so
the journeys become longer [...] the text becomes a Bildungsroman,
accounts of rites of passage are metaphorized as quests. (Hunt 1994,
p. 179)

His Dark Materials clearly repeats this trope in order to chart the
childhood journey as one that necessitates society’s evolution from
ignorance to the pursuit of knowledge, which is linked with Cox’s
comment that our path to enlightenment lies in understanding our
connection to the stars. Lyra and Will undertake such a quest from
the insular familiarity of their respective Oxfords, towards a broaden-
ing horizon of wisdom that culminates in opening a gateway from the
underworld cave to the open air of humanity’s true ‘homeland’, as the
displaced ‘refugees’ cyclically return to their rightful resting ground.
The land inhabited by the mulefa functions as an accommodating
paradise where the meek shall inherit the earth, described as ‘a wide
quiet prairie [...] like his own homeland’ (Pullman 2001, p. 439) where,
understandably, ‘It was desperately hard for Lyra and Will to leave that
sweet world where they had slept’ (p. 403). Ultimately, the intercon-
nectedness of conscious matter and habitation is recorded scientifically
by the female scientist:

Mary had never seen such joy [...] as if they were embracing the
whole universe [...] becoming part of the earth and the dew and the
night breeze [...] more of these ghosts were coming, thousands upon
thousands, like refugees returning to their homeland. (Pullman 2001,
pp. 455–6)

The Diaspora of the dead to the discarded regions of a subterranean

wasteland is reversed, allowing a return home to reclaim the rightful
Paradise denied them by Authorial narratives. Mary’s observation here
charts the displacement and dispossession faced by all, regardless of
creed, religious belief, gender, sexuality or ethnicity. The Charon-like
ferryman warns, ‘they knew what the truth was in the end: the only
position they were in was in my boat going to the land of the dead,
 Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials 117

and as for those kings and popes, they’d be in here too, in their turn’
(Pullman 2001, p. 302). Lyra and Will’s nomadic journey witnesses
the result of squandering one’s life believing fantastic stories about an
afterlife, rather than pleasurably living in the pursuit of wisdom and
cosmopolitan peace: ‘this is a terrible place, Lyra, it’s hopeless, there’s
no change when you’re dead’ (p. 323); ‘This is a wasteland’ (p. 332).
Attesting to this quintessence of futility is ‘a young woman [... who] had
died as a martyr centuries before’ (p. 335):

‘When we were alive, they told us that when we died we’d go to

heaven [...] a place of joy and glory [...] a state of bliss [...] that’s what
led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary
prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us, and we
never knew.
‘Because the land of the dead isn’t a place of reward or a place of
punishment. It’s a place of nothing. The good come here as well as
the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom for ever, with no
hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep or rest or peace [...] now this child
has come offering us a way out.’ (Pullman 2001, pp. 335–6)

Such disillusionment warning against living as an automaton hoping

for an abundant death echoes T.S. Eliot’s biblical reference in ‘The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come
back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’ (Eliot 1986 [1940], p. 13) (notably,
the sign outside Mary’s office door reads ‘R.I.P. Another hand had added
in pencil “Director: Lazarus”’ [Pullman 1998b, p. 87]). A nihilistic desti-
nation awaits those who refuse to challenge and rewrite the authorita-
tive phallocratic script controlling their lives.
The martyr succeeds in revising the official morality tale by impart-
ing her own version of that truth. Throughout Pullman’s trilogy the
onus is strongly upon individuals discovering truths for themselves
and perpetuating this in a Foucauldian counter-discourse of ‘true
stories’: ‘if people live their whole lives and they’ve got nothing to
tell about it when they’ve finished, then they’ll never leave the world
of the dead’ (Pullman 2001, p. 521). Metaphorically, the latter type
of people are already dead in their cave of ignorance, vainly hoping
that the hereafter will make worthwhile the here and now. As Marx
advocates, ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the senti-
ment of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is
the opium of the people’ (quoted in Haralambos with Heald 1980,
p. 460). That numbing opiate is nowhere more clearly envisaged than
118 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

at Bolvangar: we learn of the nurse that ‘with a brisk, blank, sensible

air; she would be able to stitch a wound or change a bandage, but never
to tell a story’, having undergone the ‘intercision’ process of the guil-
lotine: ‘Suddenly she understood their strange blank incuriosity, the
way their little trotting dæmons seemed to be sleepwalking’ (Pullman
1998a, pp. 240, 284). Likewise Marisa Coulter’s soldiers have ‘under-
gone intercision. They have no dæmons, so they have no fear and no
imagination and no free will, and they’ll fight till they’re torn apart’
(Pullman 1998b, p. 209), much like soldiers in our world. Mrs Coulter’s
(her surname refers to the cutting blade used to separate children and
dæmons) involvement with the Bolvangar guillotine involves severing
children from their inevitable adulthood, inducing a state of perpetual
infantile ignorance. Millicent Lenz argues that the procedure between
child and dæmon conveys ‘shades of the Mengelian horrors of the Nazi
era’, whilst also conjuring images of ‘genital mutilation [...] in some
contemporary cultures’ (Hunt and Lenz 2001, p. 127). Many at the
Experimental Station are street children like Tony Makarios, rounded
up and disposed of at Bolvangar in a process of ethnic cleansing: ‘they
do it with the help of the landloper police and the clergy. Every power
on land is helping ’em’ (Pullman 1998a, p. 116). Unlike the masses, Lyra
as a Neoplatonic Guardian of enlightenment is spared this numbing
opiate, suggesting not only a desire to maintain childhood innocence
but, crucially, lower-class ignorance, prompting her to ask Marisa: ‘if it
was so good, why’d you stop them doing it to me? If it was good you
should’ve let them do it. You should have been glad’ (p. 284). Through
fantasy, Pullman is drawing on the stark reality of recent child disposals
in Brazil and Colombia: in 1997 BBC News reported that ‘In the 1980s
the world was shocked to learn of the murder of street children in Rio
de Janeiro, often by policemen determined to wipe out what they saw
as a social nuisance. These killings still go on and Friday’s report names
both Rio and Sao Paulo as the home of some of the country’s death
squads.’4 Further, ‘In Bogota, the capital of Colombia, the street chil-
dren are referred to as “throwaway children” [...] Local businesses hired
“death squads” to clean up the streets, and during the 1990s thousands
of street children were just murdered.’5
In Pullman’s account, not only do individuals suffer at the hands of
untruths, but cosmological balance is impeded. Dust, the metaphor in
the texts for consciousness and creative intellect, ‘was flowing more
quickly [...] a great inexorable flood pouring out of the world, out of all
the worlds, into some ultimate emptiness’ (Pullman 2001, p. 475). The
Dust is flowing, aptly, to the abyss in the land of the dead, which not
 Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials 119

only incarcerates humanity, but also every creative intention or possi-

bility. Unless a reverse tide is found, the apocalyptic result is that

Thought, imagination, feeling, would all wither and blow away, leav-
ing nothing but a brutish automatism; and that brief period when
life was conscious of itself would flicker out like a candle in every
one of the billions of worlds where it had burned brightly. (Pullman
2001, p. 476)

This despair resonates with Lewis Carroll’s Alice books where the
dream-child’s subjectivity is continually scrutinized, coming dangerously
close to annihilation in a fictional fragility where ‘it might end [...] in my
going out altogether, like a candle’ (Carroll 1970 [1960], p. 32). This inter-
textual allusion is further traceable in Northern Lights: when Lyra wanders
as a little girl lost in the menacing ‘dark maze’ (Pullman 1998a, p. 99) of
‘murky London’ (p. 100), she masquerades as ‘Alice’ (p. 101).
Ecocritically, Pullman traces the drainage of Dust and the loss of
humanity’s connection with its rightful dwelling place, Gaia, to a simul-
taneous decline in the balance of nature’s resources. Upon entering the
mulefa’s troubled paradise, Mary learns in her serpent role, that

There had once been a time when the seed-pods were plentiful, and
when the world was rich and full of life, and the mulefa lived with
their trees in perpetual joy. But something bad had happened many
years ago; some virtue had gone out of the world [...] the wheel-pod
trees were dying. (Pullman 2001, p. 139)

Unsurprisingly, it is in this threatened ecological utopia where the former

nun (who subversively shares the name of the Virgin Mother) – isolated
from a sense of connectedness and meaning since being disillusioned
with her Father – discovers that paradise can only be regained in the
recognition of an interdependent ecosystem. Mary’s pivotal epiphany
in the text is the realization that an aggressively masculine scientific
progression, driven by the survival-of-the-fittest demands of global
capitalism, is hurtling the Earth headlong into an environmental void:

Three hundred years [...] the trees had been failing [...] the same
thing was happening in her universe too, and in every other one.
Three hundred years ago, the Royal Society was set up: the first true
scientific society in her world. Newton was making his discoveries
about optics and gravitation.
120 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

Three hundred years ago in Lyra’s world, someone invented the

alethiometer.
At the same time in that strange world [...] the subtle knife was
invented. (Pullman 2001, p. 384)

James Lovelock points out that

We are in our present mess through our intelligence and inventive-

ness [...] the species equivalent of that schizoid pair, Mr Hyde and
Dr Jekyll [...] Hyde led us to use technology badly; we misused energy
and overpopulated the Earth, but we will not sustain civilization by
abandoning technology. We have instead to use it wisely, as Dr Jekyll
would do, with the health of the Earth, not the health of people, in
mind. (Lovelock 2006, pp. 6–7)

Whilst Lovelock’s reading misses the point that it is Jekyll’s misused

knowledge that unleashes Hyde in the first place, the ecological senti-
ment is, nevertheless, similar to Pullman’s.
The ‘subtle knife’ is a powerful political symbol in His Dark Materials
of power’s ambiguity: the armoured bear, Iorek Byrnison, warns Will
that ‘I don’t like that knife [...] Your intentions may be good. The
knife has intentions too’ (Pullman 2001, p. 190). The wise witch,
Serafina Pekkala, echoes this sentiment in her incantation to heal Will’s
wounds:

‘Little knife! They tore your iron

out of mother earth’s entrails
[...]
what have you done?
Unlocked blood-gates, left them wide!
Little knife, your mother calls you,
from the entrails of the earth,
from her deepest mines and caverns,
from her secret iron womb.’ (Pullman 1998b, pp. 266–7)

This accords with Book II of Paradise Lost (Northern Lights’ epi-

graph), where ‘The womb of nature and perhaps her grave’ depends
upon the use made of her ‘pregnant causes’ (Milton 1992, p. 398).
Scientific discoveries, then, are frequently double-edged: whilst laud-
able in themselves, they are often harnessed for misdirected ideological
 Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials 121

purposes. When Lyra consults her alethiometer, this ecopolitical mes-

sage resounds:

‘It said about balance first. It said the knife could be harmful or it
could do good, but it was so slight, such a delicate kind of a balance,
that the faintest thought or wish could tip it one way or the other.’
(Pullman 2001, p. 192)

Will’s intention regarding the use of the knife becomes paramount,

learning the consequences of one’s actions: ‘Every time we open a
window with the knife, it makes a Spectre. It’s like a little bit of the
abyss that floats out and enters the world’ (Pullman 2001, p. 515).
Environmental cost reverberates in the message learned by Ged in
Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1968):

you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until
you know what good and evil will follow on the act. The world is
in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and of
Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that
power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need.
To light a candle is to cast a shadow. (Le Guin 1991 [1968], p. 56)

Discussing the subtle knife in an interview, Pullman says ‘the cost is

that you have to use it responsibly, and the temptation is always to use
it irresponsibly [...] which is what led to all the trouble they had in the
city of Cittagazze [...] And it’s a metaphor [...] for every technological
advance we’ve ever made.’6
As a tool wielded by patriarchal authority, the phallic knife has
penetrated ‘mother earth’s entrails’, unbalancing femininity’s natural
rhythm: ‘Dust had been leaking out of the wounds the subtle knife
had made in nature [...] and the universe was suffering because of it’
(Pullman 2001, p. 475), bleeding stigmata-like for the wages of profit:
‘they used it to steal candy’ (Pullman 1998b, p. 334) in ‘this corrupt
and careless world’ (p. 196) of Cittàgazze, when its use ought to be as
the ‘god-destroyer’ (p. 286). Deliberately, Pullman casts a female scientist
who has learned to respect, rather than dominate, her environmental
home. Mary’s ecofeminist epiphany is fundamental in the textual drive
to acquire wisdom and self-knowledge:

[The particles] were conscious! [...] she was now suffused with a
deep slow ecstasy at being one with her body and the earth and
122 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

everything that was matter [...] that slow sky-wide drift had become
a flood [...]
The Shadow-particles knew what was happening, and were
sorrowful.
And she herself was partly Shadow-matter. Part of her was subject
to this tide that was moving through the cosmos. And so were the
mulefa, and so were human beings in every world, and every kind of
conscious creature, wherever they were.
And unless she found out what was happening, they might all
find themselves drifting away to oblivion, every one. (Pullman 2001,
pp. 386–7)

Mary’s awakening recognizes, not her superiority to nature but, rather,

her integral interdependence upon it for her survival as a species: ceas-
ing to robotically follow her Father’s indoctrinating script, she listens
to the semiotic rhythm of her Mother’s pulsating ‘womb’. Pullman
demonstrates the necessity for mutual dependence between species,
showing that there must be integrative harmony within, rather than
control of, nature. Notice, too, that the mulefa are an androgynous bal-
ance of masculinity and femininity insofar as they nurture and respect
their surroundings and its creatures, unlike in Western representations
of masculine colonial expansion such as R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral
Island (1857) or William Golding’s later revision in Lord of the Flies
(1954). Thus, nature was portrayed in boys’ adventure stories as a femi-
nine entity to be dominated by patriarchal masculinity. The association
between destructive abuse of the environment in boys’ adventure sto-
ries is considered in Margery Hourihan’s Deconstructing the Hero (1997),
in which she advocates the necessity to create alternative narratives,
where heroines must be more actively portrayed rather than confined
within traditional domesticity, and cast in roles that respect nature.
Pullman’s creation of Lyra is undoubtedly a shift towards representing
humanity in a non-anthropocentric relationship that decentralizes their
dominance and indicates a planetary empathy.
Ecofeminist Val Plumwood writes, in Feminism and the Mastery of
Nature (1993),

racism, colonialism and sexism have drawn their conceptual strength

from casting sexual, racial and ethnic differences as closer to the ani-
mal and the body construed as a sphere of inferiority, as a lesser form
of humanity lacking the full measure of rationality or culture [...] To
be defined as ‘nature’ in this context is to be defined as passive, as
 Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials 123

non-agent and non-subject, as the ‘environment’ or invisible back-

ground conditions against which the ‘foreground’ achievements of
reason or culture (provided by the white, western, male expert or
entrepreneur) take place. (Plumwood 1993, p. 4)

Pullman’s new vision in children’s literature, however, teaches the

laws of respect and interdependence required in contemporary culture.
Victorian discourses of childhood perpetuated a mythological return
to Eden through the child, whilst adult culture freely participated in
anthropocentric mastery of its terrain, but contemporary children’s lit-
erature is attempting to rebalance the ecosphere in the representation of
childhood as a cultural fragile space that requires sustenance to develop
its full potential. Kamala Platt identifies a move beyond blatant Western
imperial domination of the environment at the behest of childhood
innocence: ‘Environmental justice literature for children is not bound
by region or language’ (Platt 2004, p. 186). Besides blurring cultural
divides, Pullman’s contemporary children’s literature also erodes the
child/adult dichotomy, its textual message appealing to an adult read-
ership too – The Amber Spyglass is the first children’s book to win the
hitherto adult category of the Whitbread Prize (Walsh 2003, p. 233).
Thus, complicit in Mary’s awakening is the call for a socio-political
shift beyond the text’s parameters: rejecting the lies of grand narratives
authorized by patriarchy’s will to power, liberated thinking encouraging
cosmopolitical cultural and ecological harmony is given space to develop.
Only then can individuals achieve their potential, rewriting existing
scripts and creating new stories that defy traditional Authority. Likewise,
in recognizing cosmological interconnectedness, Mary finds the satisfac-
tory meaning she has sought since rejecting the biblical version:

And then she saw what they were doing, at last: she saw what that
great urgent purpose was.
They were trying to hold back the Dust-flood [...] wind, moon,
clouds, leaves, grass, all those lovely things were crying out and hurl-
ing themselves into the struggle to keep the Shadow-particles in this
universe, which they so enriched.
Matter loved Dust. It didn’t want to see it go. That was the meaning
of this night, and it was Mary’s meaning too.
Had she thought there was no meaning in life, no purpose, when
God had gone? Yes, she had thought that.
‘Well, there is now,’ she said aloud, and again, louder: ‘There is
now!’ (Pullman 2001, p. 476)
124 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

Recognizing the significance of here and ‘now’ rather than hereafter, the
scales have fallen from her eyes to reveal the collaborative symphony
of the universe and her own part within it: she has attained a level of
higher consciousness by allowing her mind to transcend the dimen-
sions of her previous knowledge: ‘She was beginning to see how narrow
her scientific horizons were. No botany, no geology, no biology of any
sort – she was as ignorant as a baby’ (Pullman 2001, p. 91). Crucially,
she learns this ecological lesson from interacting with an other species,
the mulefa, who offer an alternative insight beyond the constricted
boundaries of Mary’s initial reality: ‘In the next few days she learned so
much that she felt like a child again, bewildered by school’ (p. 129).
Instead of trying to dominate their landscape in a masculine grip,
the mulefa’s (notice this is almost an anagram of female) feminine
nurturing has enabled an ideal synchronization. Thus, ‘The road was
more like a watercourse than a highway [...] It was quite unlike the
brutal rational way roads in Will’s world sliced through hillsides [...]
This was part of the landscape, not an imposition on it’ (Pullman
2001, pp. 447–8). Unsurprisingly, this utopia, unlike ‘Will’s world’
(a representation of our world), becomes the site in the text where the
human spirit rejoins the ecospace: ‘The first ghost [...] found himself
turning into the night, the starlight, the air’ (p. 382). Acknowledging
this return home, where

we’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million

leaves, we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh
breeze, we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon
out there in the physical world which is our true home and always
was. (Pullman 2001, p. 336)

signals a defiance against the Father’s remote mystery in favour of

reconnecting with the rhythm of nature: ‘The mulefa were planting a
grove [...] because it was a holy place [...] a source of joy’ (Pullman 2001,
p. 531).
A path of wisdom that ousts the law of the Father assumes a further
dimension of femininity in the figure of the rebellious angel – not a
male Satan, but a female Sophia – noted in Pullman’s opening remarks.
It is also worth recognizing that biblical authority is contravened as
Lyra, the next Eve, comes before Will as Adam because he does not
feature until The Subtle Knife. According to Pat Pinsent ‘many of the
challenges that Pullman poses to established religion have already, quite
independently, been set by feminist theologians’ (Pinsent 2005, p. 199).
 Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials 125

In The Amber Spyglass this ancient female rebel angel is called Xaphania.
Serafina Pekkala, another wise woman, informs Mary that

I met an angel: a female angel [...] Xaphania [...] She said that all
the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and
stupidity. She and the rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have
always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have
always tried to keep them closed. (Pullman 2001, p. 506)

Consequently, ‘for most of that time, wisdom has had to work in

secret [...] while the courts and palaces are occupied by her enemies’
(Pullman 2001, p. 506). Religion alone does not maintain its oppressive
grip on society; further state institutions collaborate in an effort to keep
its subjects in the dark. Lovelock, like Pullman, demands a feminine
(re)union with our earthly home to overturn heteropatriarchy’s divide-
and-rule regime,

ask[ing] that we put our fears and our obsession with personal and
tribal rights aside, and be brave enough to see that the real threat
comes from the harm we do to the living Earth, of which we are a
part and which is indeed our home. (Lovelock 2006, p. 14)

The witch, Ruta Skadi, says that these ‘fears’ are moulded by the
Authority, whereas Asriel

‘showed me that to rebel was right and just [...] And I thought of
the Bolvangar children, and the other terrible mutilations I have
seen in our own south-lands; and he told me of many more hideous
cruelties dealt out in the Authority’s name – of how they capture
witches, in some worlds, and burn them alive, sisters, yes, witches
like ourselves ...
‘He opened my eyes. He showed me things I never had seen,
cruelties and horrors all committed in the name of the Authority,
all designed to destroy the joys and truthfulness of life.’ (Pullman
1998b, p. 283)

Truth involves speaking out against atrocities of cultural supremacy

against an other, favouring recognition of our common humanity,
as characters share stories which bear witness to the enslaving fal-
sity of master narratives. Pullman’s insistence on life’s truthfulness,
while apparently contravening philosophical nomadism’s disruption
126 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

of fixed certainties, nevertheless effectively calls into question the

verisimilitude of cultural hegemony. By doing so, his work effectively
disrupts the power of phallocratic authority and replaces it with a
multiplicity of subjective truths and, as such, it corresponds to nomad-
ism’s non-unitary deferral of absolutes. Furthermore, a moving display
of love between the homosexual angels, Baruch and Balthamos, is
witnessed:

the two angels were embracing, and Will [...] saw their mutual affec-
tion. More than affection: they loved each other with a passion [...]
Will found himself intrigued and moved by their love for each
other. (Pullman 2001, pp. 27–8)

Marginalized as an aberration in grand narratives, Pullman instead

portrays a loving relationship in order to demonstrate homosexuality’s
equal value to any heterosexual union, whilst also melding ethereal
and matter in a fusion of heavenly bodies. Consensual love inspires a
transcendence from destructive binary egotism to harmonious univer-
sal empathy: ‘truly I died when you did, Baruch my beloved’ (Pullman
2001, p. 496). John Parry informs his son, Will, that

‘Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom

and decency [...] Every little increase in human freedom has been
fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more
and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be
humble and submit.’ (Pullman 1998b, p. 335)

Apparently, ruling ideologies function like Orwellian Thought Police

keeping subjects divisively in the dark about the truth that is out
there.
To stem the flow of Dust towards nothingness, individuals must
ascend from their metaphorical cave by rejecting dominant discourses
and fuelling creative potential. Xaphania imparts to Lyra and Will the
urgency of ‘gaining wisdom and passing it on’, continuing,

‘And if you help everyone else in your worlds to do that, by helping

them to learn and understand about themselves and each other and
the way everything works, and by showing them how to be kind
instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead
of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and
curious.’ (Pullman 2001, p. 520)
 Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials 127

Instead of demonizing sectors of society, it is imperative to learn appre-

ciation of difference to dismantle hierarchical binaries. Retaining an
open mind is the key to globalized tolerance, achieved through Keats’
Negative Capability, where one is ‘capable of being in uncertainties,
mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’
(Pullman 1998b, p. 92). Lyra’s loss of ability in reading the alethiometer,
she learns, will only return through ‘a lifetime of thought and effort,
because it will come from conscious understanding. Grace attained like
that is deeper and fuller than grace that comes freely, and furthermore,
once you’ve gained it, it will never leave you’ (Pullman 2001, p. 520).
Xaphania alludes to Romanticism’s belief in higher consciousness, when
the veil of the visible world’s limitations is rent asunder. Lifting the veil
of cave-like seeming aligns itself with Pullman’s metaphorical use of the
aurora borealis, itself described as containing a thinner epicentre, allow-
ing visibility beyond the dimensions of the world of Northern Lights to
glimpse an altogether different universe, ‘Because the charged particles
in the Aurora have the property of making the matter of this world thin,
so that we can see through it for a brief time’ (Pullman 1998a, p. 187).
Notably, the witches (marginalized and demonized in Western
cultural history) fluidly straddle the threshold of these two worlds,
gaining an acute intellectual insight: ‘Because they live so close to the
place where the veil between the worlds is thin, they hear immortal
whispers [...] Without this child, we shall all die’ (Pullman 1998a,
pp. 175–6). Crucially, Lyra’s observation of this celestial phenomenon
clarifies her own journey towards perception:

As if from Heaven itself, great curtains of delicate light hung and trem-
bled [...] and at the bottom edge a profound and fiery crimson like the
fires of Hell [...] she felt something as profound [...] She was moved by
it: it was so beautiful it was almost holy; she felt tears prick her eyes,
and the tears splintered the light even further into prismatic rainbows
[...] And as she gazed, the image of a city seemed to form itself behind
the veils and streams of translucent colour. (Pullman 1998a, p. 183)

Like Mary, Lyra’s awakening allows her to see beyond the veiled myopic
gaze of polarized society and to move bravely towards a prismatic new
world spectrum, uniting ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’. Like most astronomical
entities, the Northern Lights have been the subject of folklore:

Some cultures [...] have regarded the sighting of the aurora as a sign
of royal birth; to others it suggests ghosts of the dead or the precursor
128 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

for war [...] Up until the Enlightenment of the 18th century, the
northern lights were viewed with fear or reverence and were related
to contemporary concepts of heaven and hell.7

Clearly, Pullman is drawing on several of these mythological tales as

palimpsests informing his version, for a saviour is cited, a war occurs, as
Lord Asriel ‘was said to be involved in high politics, in secret explora-
tion, in distant warfare’ (Pullman 1998a, p. 6), whilst images of heaven
and hell pervade His Dark Materials.
Challenging the reality of mapped borders is fundamental to the
North Pole setting of Svalbard in the final section of Northern Lights,
where the vastness of the multiple world theory opens up. Crucially,
the North Pole is a fluid space without boundaries: ‘The magnetic
poles are not fixed but follow circular paths with diameters of about
100 miles (160 km). Studies of paleomagnetism also indicate that
the earth’s magnetic field has reversed its polarity many times in the
geologic past.’8 Pullman uses this as a metaphorical space to demon-
strate the artificiality of cultural boundaries, much like the finale of
A Wizard of Earthsea when Ged meets his Shadow after journeying to
‘Lastland’, where ‘East and south of it the charts are empty’ (Le Guin
1991, p. 189). The empty wasteland where Ged confronts his alter
ego, Shadow Ged, is poignantly located beyond charted territory –
Le Guin, like Pullman, utilizes a fictional space to create the potential
for new identities of equilibrium existing beyond those firmly con-
structed through binary logic. Both texts provide a spatial desolation
of landscape and mindscape and it is at this boundary between the
recognizable and the unknown that self and other become one and
the same. This wilderness of uncharted landscape renders fixed phal-
logocentric meaning impotent. Le Guin writes, ‘Only in silence the
word’ (p. 199), whilst Pullman argues that ‘we need [...] silence’,9 both
envisaging fantasy literature as a spatial dimension where new crea-
tivity can flourish. For example, Will’s observation that, ‘In my world
demon means ... It means devil, something evil’ (Pullman 1998b,
p. 22), is challenged through his new knowledge of Lyra and Pan,
who equally learn that there are cultures without visible dæmons.
Maude Hines notes that ‘By seeing familiar ideologies naturalized
through different apparatuses, readers can see the constructed nature
of our own ideologies’ (Hines 2005, p. 45). Northern landscapes are
often used in fiction to depict spatial alternatives from the fixed
cartographies of territorial borders, as is also evident in Zoe Strachan’s
Negative Space.
 Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials 129

Will’s father underlines the significance of gaining knowledge beyond

one’s familiar surroundings, including the need for male subjectivity to
reject a restrictively polarized masculinity in favour of recognizing one’s
equally valuable femininity:

‘But there were other doorways into other worlds [...]

‘So here I came. And I discovered a marvel [...] worlds differ greatly,
and in this world I saw my dæmon for the first time [...] People here
cannot conceive of worlds where dæmons are a silent voice in the
mind and no more. Can you imagine my astonishment, in turn, at
learning that part of my own nature was female [...]
‘I learned a good deal [...] What they told me of this world filled
some gaps in the knowledge I’d acquired in mine, and I began to see
the answer to many mysteries.’ (Pullman 1998b, p. 223)

Like John Parry, Mary’s wisdom is accentuated, transcending her previous

boundaries to acquire an all-encompassing intellect, whilst ‘the wheeled
people seemed to be just as wonderstruck by her’ (Pullman 2001, pp. 129–
30). Apparently, travel really does broaden the mind: in applying a meta-
phorical intergalactic exchange of ideas, these texts chart the necessary
journey of society, dramatized through the use of childhood development,
from innocent naivety to the wisdom of a mature millennial outlook: ‘So
that evening the people of three worlds sat down together and shared
bread and meat and fruit and wine’ (p. 531). As such, each cultural norm
is permeated in a quest to create new meanings from stories existing in
these inter or in-between spaces, echoing Homi K. Bhabha’s belief in The
Location of Culture (1994), that new selves can emerge through negotiating
the interstices of cultural diversity’s hybridic states.
Reality, then, is fluid, rather than a concrete fixture: Lyra also disrupts
boundaries as an unconventional heroine who transgresses traditions.
Although of noble birth, she is simultaneously illegitimate; she strad-
dles class barriers, inhabiting the privileged world of Jordan College, yet
befriending the kitchen boy, Roger; she circumvents gender roles in her
masculine pursuits of roof climbing, gang battles, smoking, drinking,
befriending street children, preferring boys rather than girl friends, and
actively setting off on a traditional heroic quest to rescue her abducted
male friend, Roger, and her imprisoned father (Walsh 2003, p. 241).
Thus the demarcations of male/female, affluent/poor and adult/child are
continually disrupted. Notably, she invades the academic male space,
oppressive with its air of patriarchal tradition: ‘Portraits of former Masters
hung high up in the gloom along the walls’ (Pullman 1998a, p. 3). From
130 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

the outset, a pervading static immobility is overturned through the con-

tinual movement of this younger generation, echoing Virginia Woolf’s
satirical attack on the absurdity of male academic authority in A Room of
One’s Own (1929). Ultimately, His Dark Materials pursues spatial possibili-
ties in the intergalactic hunt for a home of one’s own – Lyra has been told
lies about her parental origins, only learning her true identity by jour-
neying away from home. Meanwhile, Will challenges cultural discourses:
rather than blindly following an inherited masculinity, he embarks upon
a Woolfian route of androgynous feminine balance: ‘You said I was a
warrior. You told me that was my nature, and I shouldn’t argue with
it. Father, you were wrong. I fought because I had to. I can’t choose my
nature, but I can choose what I do. And I will choose, because now I’m
free’ (Pullman 2001, p. 440). Symbolizing the emergence of the younger
generation’s free will to transcend the symbolic law of the Father and cast
off its mantle, Will is congratulated for his maturity: ‘Well done, my boy’
(p. 440). It is also worth considering that Lyra’s semi-orphan unconven-
tional upbringing at Jordan College aligns with Plato’s thinking, where

the existence of reason in all souls meant that women could be

capable of the higher activities of theory and contemplation, but
this would require detachment from the domestic duties of mere
life [...] the realisation of women’s potential for reason would require
radical political reform. In The Republic Plato suggested that only
collective child rearing, where no child was tied to any particular set
of parents, would allow for all human beings to realise their proper
form – the exercise of reason [...] such reform would not just be liber-
ating for women, but would create a more rational world in general.
(Colebrook 2004, pp. 18–21)

Pullman’s Republic strives to achieve a Neoplatonic ideal, with Lyra

returning to Oxford to hone her academic wisdom after freeing her
‘will’. As such, Lyra and Will’s copulation represents the mingling of
feminine matter and masculine reason as an absolute necessity which,
in turn, moves beyond Plato and adheres more to Blake’s marriage of
contraries or Woolf’s view of androgynous creativity.
The scientific theory that there is more to reality than merely what
can be seen is a significant trope in Pullman’s drive to expand intel-
lectual horizons:

the Holy Church teaches that there are two worlds: the world of
everything we can see and hear and touch, and another world, the
 Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials 131

spiritual world of heaven and hell. Barnard and Stokes [...] postulated
the existence of numerous other worlds like this one, neither heaven
nor hell [...] Barnard and Stokes were silenced. (Pullman 1998a,
pp. 31–2)

Such heresy is gagged as the Authority seeks to control society’s

thinking about the world and maintain a binary logic of punish-
ment and paradise. Similarly, Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook
attempts to transcend the restrictions of hegemonic discourses and
urges a reconstitution of identity. Rather than accepting preconceived
scripts, as I argue on p. 55, she metaphorically invites us to discover
‘other worlds’ where ‘the ending will be different’ insofar as it resists
heteronormative fixity and envisages a hitherto unmapped ‘future’
(Winterson 2001, p. 53).
As Farder Coram informs Lyra, ‘I have just brushed ten million other
worlds [...] we are as close as a heartbeat, but we can never touch or
see or hear these other worlds except in the Northern Lights’ (Pullman
1998a, p. 187). On one level, the aurora borealis serves here as a way to
project one’s mind into other expansions and possibilities in which the
norms and traditions of our own society are questioned. On the other
hand, it is a metafictional comment urging the reader to open their
minds beyond binaries and consider alternative perspectives by look-
ing through the imaginative lens of Northern Lights. As Serafina Pekkala
acknowledges, it is necessary to ‘go to far places and see strange things
and bring back knowledge’ (Pullman 2001, p. 500). Complicit in this
is Lyra’s association with the Aurora – like ‘the dawn-goddess’ (Evans
1990, p. 61) of ancient mythology, Lyra’s mission as the second Eve is
to herald in a new dawn of awakened intellectual creativity.
Evidently, Pullman considers his creative message to be a modern key
unlocking the veiled mysteries of cultural conditioning:

There are many reasons why I write. I write for money and because
I would go mad if I didn’t. And because I have the not-dishonourable
ambition to be famous. And I don’t mean famous in the sense of
slightly celebrated now, but I mean known in two to three hundred
years’ time. If you’re doing something really well, you should want
the results to last that long. (Quoted in Carter 1999, p. 185)

The self-importance of Pullman’s epic vision is clear in his referral to His

Dark Materials, not as a trilogy of three separate books but, rather, as one
book written in three volumes (Carter 1999, p. 192). This writer believes
132 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

in the power of stories to illuminate the dark recesses of the individual’s

position within their social reality:

All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They
teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach
it more effectively than moral precepts and instructions [...] We don’t
need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do’s and don’ts: we need
books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once
upon a time lasts forever.10

This is precisely the lesson Lyra must learn as she progresses through
these texts, developing from a childish ‘liar’ of fictional tales to a mature
teller of true stories: ‘You have to promise to believe me [...] I haven’t
always told the truth [...] but my true story’s too important for me to tell
if you’re only going to believe half of it. So I promise to tell the truth,
if you promise to believe it’ (Pullman 2001, p. 542). In the first novel,
the narrator reveals that Lyra ‘wasn’t imaginative [...] Being a practised
liar doesn’t mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars
have no imagination at all; it’s that which gives their lies such wide-
eyed conviction’ (Pullman 1998a, p. 249). However, her experiences,
including storytelling in the land of the dead, enhance her imaginative
skills and wisdom.
The creative process enables her and Will to connect across the divide
of their worlds: Xaphania tells them of the ability to travel through
the use of ‘what you call imagination. But that does not mean making
things up. It is a form of seeing [...] nothing like pretend. Pretending is
easy. This way is hard, but much truer’ (Pullman 2001, p. 523). So, Lyra
authorizes her own script rather than accept a prescribed role, honing
her imagination as a tool to transcend physical thresholds and create
new perspectives. That is precisely why, although His Dark Materials
is a work of fantasy, its author refers to it as ‘stark realism’ (quoted in
Moruzi 2005, p. 56), dissolving the traditional division between two
opposing genres. In this sense, fantasy is an ideal cosmopolitical space
where a writer can challenge patriarchal society from a particular angle,
whilst fully interacting with reality. David Gooderham argues that
‘Fantasy is a metaphorical mode [...] seen to describe not so much a col-
lection of marvels which divert readers from ordinary human concerns,
but a distinctive and fruitful way of speaking about just these concerns’
(Gooderham 1995, p. 173). Similarly, Rosemary Jackson contends that
‘Fantasy re-combines and inverts the real, but it does not escape it: it
exists on a parasitical or symbiotic relation to the real. The fantastic
 Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials 133

cannot exist independently of that “real” world which it seems to find

so frustratingly finite’ (Jackson 1995, p. 20). Le Guin’s essay, ‘Why Are
Americans Afraid of Dragons?’ (1974), closely supports Pullman’s view
of fantasy as social polemic:

Fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children

know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of
them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even
threatens, all that is false, all that is phoney, unnecessary, and trivial
in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are
afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom. (Le Guin 1992
[1979], p. 37)

Pullman’s use of fantasy’s imaginative space produces a challenge to

‘all that is false’, showing that desire is not sinful, but a natural gift to
be celebrated. Mary describes her sexual awakening to Lyra and Will
as being akin to the epiphenomenal mental expansion gained from
discovering other worlds, for it was ‘like a quantum leap [...] it was
paradise’ (Pullman 2001, p. 468). Significantly, after emerging from
the underworld of the dead, both Lyra and Will undergo a baptismal
immersion, readying them to receive Mary’s words of wisdom: ‘she
took off her shoes and waded into it [...] She bent down to dip her face
under the water, and wet her hair thoroughly’ (p. 443), and ‘he took
the rucksack down to the stream, where he drank deep and washed off
most of the dirt’ (p. 445). Having lost their innocence, both are reborn
to a mature higher state of consciousness, for ‘Lyra knew exactly what
she meant [...] inside her, that rich house with all its doors open and all
its rooms lit stood waiting, quiet, expectant’ (p. 468), now that she is
‘brim-full of new knowledge’ (p. 471). Meanwhile, ‘Will was lying on his
back, eyes open to the stars’ (p. 471), maintaining the link between the
constellations, Dust, Lyra and Will: all necessarily fused in a manoeuvre
to stem ecological and human catastrophe, symbolizing the textual
hope that there will be a global expansion from ignorance to enlighten-
ment. For Will, Lyra is indeed a heavenly body – Pullman portrays their
copulation as a union of mind/body, disputing Plato’s belief that mat-
ter was inferior, whilst appropriating ancient philosophy (where ‘Male
and female principles were used to explain the ultimate forces of the
cosmos, with the very generation of the universe often being explained
as a result of the encounter between masculine and feminine forces’
[Colebrook 2004, p. 2]) to indicate the epic importance of this moment
for global rebirth. Notably, the epigraph in The Amber Spyglass from
134 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Third Duino Elegy reads: ‘O stars, / isn’t it from
you that the lover’s desire for the face of his beloved arises? Doesn’t his
secret insight into her pure features come from the pure constellations?’
Aligning Lyra and Will with cosmological forces, Pullman utilizes their
metaphorical potential in creating an epic vision.
Their union occurs in an Edenic space within the mulefan paradise
chosen for the homecoming of the dead:

Will and Lyra followed the stream into the wood [...] until they were
in the very centre.
There was a little clearing in the middle of the grove, which was
floored with soft grass [...] The branches laced across overhead,
almost shutting out the sky and letting through little moving span-
gles and sequins of sunlight, so that everything was dappled with
gold and silver [...]
There was no sign of the dæmon-shadows anywhere. They were
completely alone [...]
Then Lyra took one of those little red fruits [...] she lifted the fruit
gently to his mouth [...]
The word love set his nerves ablaze [...] her sweet moist mouth that
tasted of the little red fruit [...] there was nothing but silence, as if all
the world were holding its breath. (Pullman 2001, pp. 491–2)

This sexual awakening situates the new Eve and her lover in a pasto-
ral idyll, where ‘They might have been the only people in the world’
(Pullman 2001, p. 483). Enacting Mary’s ‘quantum leap’ causes human
potential to be realized as the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ are cast off in a
reclamation of belonging:

Mary turned [...] to see Will and Lyra returning [...] they would
seem to be made of living gold. They would seem the true image of
what human beings always could be, once they had come into their
inheritance.
The Dust pouring down from the stars had found a living home
again, and these children-no-longer-children, saturated with love,
were the cause of it all. (Pullman 2001, p. 497)

Their achieved maturity is a metaphorical hope that the world outwith

the text will itself grow up into its inclusive ‘true image’, rejecting ide-
ology’s divisive differences.
 Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials 135

By focusing upon individual morality and intellectual creativity super-

seding cultural indoctrination, the ancient Authority’s death is deemed
insignificant: ‘Demented and powerless, the aged being could only
weep and mumble in fear and pain and misery [...] Then he was gone: a
mystery dissolving in mystery’ (Pullman 2001, pp. 431–2). It would be
a mistake to read this as a weak anticlimax, when that is precisely the
purpose – to diffuse the over-inflated ego of religious zealotry. The scene
is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s claim that ‘God is dead’ insofar as his exist-
ence is only a projection whose purpose is to assuage human need but,
ultimately, only ever dupes us. Echoing Pullman’s epic prophecy,

Nietzsche [...] uses the language of religion in an attempt to under-

mine religion [...] and how humanity can strive to be greater and
realize its potential [...] Nietzsche does not believe in Christianity
as revealed truth: he sees Christianity as one of many instances
in history of humans creating values. But, in Nietzsche’s opinion,
Christianity has expended its last benefits and no longer carries
humanity to the heights it once did; instead, all that remains of
Christianity are chains that weigh us down. This is one of the sub-
texts behind his pronouncement that ‘God is dead’. For humanity to
flourish, it must cast off those values that no longer carry it forward
and replace them with new ones that do. (Baggini and Stangroom
2004, pp. 170–1)

Pullman’s vision shifts beyond Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity, as

His Dark Materials deconstructs global grand narratives, though simi-
larly Lyra realizes that ‘the kingdom was over, the kingdom of heaven,
it was all finished. We shouldn’t live as if it mattered more than this life
in this world, because where we are is always the most important place’
(Pullman 2001, p. 548), and Mary concedes that ‘The Christian religion
is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all’ (p. 464). Such
illumination ignites the necessary spark of knowledge, for ‘we’ve got to
study and think, and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds,
and then we’ll build [...] The republic of heaven’ (p. 548). Part of that
acquired wisdom, as Mary acknowledges, is to replace reductive labels
with a common humanity of mature understanding that collectively
acts to resolve social problems:

‘I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil

that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are
names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is
136 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that’s an evil

one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have sim-
ple labels.’ (Pullman 2001, pp. 470–1)

Pullman insists:

one of the most deadly and oppressive consequences of the death of

God is this sense of meaninglessness or alienation that so many of us
have felt in the past century or so [...] [W]hat I’m looking for is a way
of thinking of heaven that restores these senses of rightness and good-
ness and connectedness and meaning and gives us a place in it [...]
[T]hat has got to exist in the only place we know about for sure which
is this earth, and we’ve got to make our world as good as we possibly
can for one another and for our descendants. That’s what I mean by a
republic of heaven. And we won’t ever finally get there [...] [b]ecause
of entropy. There’s always a struggle against that [...]
The very tendency of matter to form molecules [...] is a struggle
against entropy in a way. But we can have a lot of fun in a way before
we all finally peter out in the cold and the dark [...]
[W]e’re making a better crack now in the liberal democracies of
the West [...] in terms of medical science and advances in caring
for people who are sick [...] [M]ost of the liberal democracies of the
West have done away with capital punishment. By and large we
now understand, for example, that it’s better to have a free press and
freedom of speech than not. These are all moral advances. In parts of
the world, of course, they haven’t reached it yet and they are fight-
ing a great struggle against the forces of obscurantism in the form of
fundamentalist Islam. So the odds against it are formidable, but we’re
not powerless.11

Attaining the Neoplatonic republic is very much an imaginative and

intellectual drive, which may ultimately falter in the ‘entropy’ of brain-
washed prejudices of self and other. Notably, entropy is a term often
used bleakly in cosmological theories, but also derives from the Greek,
meaning looking inward, as Pullman again interweaves scientific and
cultural meaning.12 In this scenario, His Dark Materials is a sophisti-
cated yet false vision (Sophistry), only achieved in a work of imagina-
tive fiction. However, Pullman ironically underestimates the power of
story as an inspirational tool helping to disillusion those subjected to
discourses forged by ISAs, thereby politicizing readers into questioning
their reality.
 Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials 137

Through the vehicle of children’s literature, Pullman uses childhood

innocence as a trope to dramatize a lack of knowledge at the heart of
society and its need to participate in a learning process that compre-
hends the power of stories. His use of this as a metaphorical mode is
abundantly clear, asserting that ‘Children’s books still deal with the
huge themes which have always been part of literature – love, loyalty,
the place of religion and science in life, what it really means to be
human. Contemporary adult fiction is too small and sterile for what I’m
trying to do’ (quoted in Tucker 2003, p. 184), and ‘Children’s books, for
various reasons, at this time in our literary history, open out on a wide-
ness and amplitude – a moral and mental spaciousness – that adult liter-
ary fiction seems to have turned its back on’ (quoted in Hunt and Lenz
2001, p. 138). Ultimately, his imperative is the urgency of telling the
story: ‘There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction;
they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book [...] in adult
literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to
be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness’ (quoted in
Squires 2003, p. 21). While the imperative of storytelling is undeniable,
Pullman’s aversion to ‘literary knowingness’ is contested by the trilogy’s
vast intertextual depth: for instance, Lord Asriel is closely aligned with
Ariel, a rebel angel in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Like the cosmological jour-
neys undertaken within His Dark Materials, imperatively the reader can
journey through the pages, but must ultimately return to their own real-
ity: ‘We can travel, if there are openings into other worlds, but we can
only live in our own [...] we have to build the republic of heaven where
we are, because for us there is no elsewhere’ (Pullman 2001, p. 382).
Pullman appropriates the imaginative space of fantasy to encourage
us to envisage other possibilities than our recognizable norms, just as
Xaphania explains to Will and Lyra the capacity of the unleashed imagi-
nation in permitting a metaphysical transcendence. What remains
is the potential to challenge and alter that reality through creativity,
recognizing one’s shared humanity in a celebration of cultural diversity
awakening from the many incarceration motifs provided in the texts,
such as the Experimental Station at Bolvanger, the underworld of dead
and the cave in which Lyra is kept in a stuporous sleep. Returning to
Pullman’s opening remarks regarding the Sophia, the female wisdom
reminds us in the book of Proverbs in the Bible: ‘For wisdom is bet-
ter than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not to be
compared to it [...] Forsake the foolish, and live; and go in the way of
understanding’ (Proverbs 8:11 and 9:6). Even biblically, then, wisdom
is the vital felix culpa, spurring us to ‘live’ fully. Indeed, ‘Not until the
138 Cosmopolitan Cartographies

fourth century C.E. did Eve’s quest for knowledge begin to be viewed as
(like Pandora’s curiosity) the source of humanity’s woes’ (Smith 2005,
p. 159). According to Mary Harris Russell,

Pullman fits comfortably into the position of a Gnostic outsider,

interrogating authority [...] Anyone’s Eve, of course, is an interpre-
tive event, since Genesis 1:3 is a text so filled with contradictions
[...] Especially in the early decades of Christianity, at a period of
time when neither the Hebrew nor the Christian canons were fixed,
there was considerable literary activity, in authoring and preserving
a variety of texts about the events of the Creation and Fall [...] ‘The
situation of early Christianity was simply much more fluid – indeed,
confused – than has been acknowledged’ [...] the dissident writers
we now characterize as Gnostic [...] can frequently be seen seek-
ing a different explanation for the events in Eden. (Russell 2005,
pp. 212–14)

In his cosmopolitan vision, Pullman dialogically intervenes in religious

grand narratives and offers an alternative creation story that connects
our planet to the wider cosmos.
Though Lyra and Will return to their respective Oxfords, they can
unite in a higher consciousness of imaginative projection in the tropi-
cal landscape of ‘the Botanic Garden’ (Pullman 2001, pp. 536, 545), a
colourful oasis of spatial possibility in an otherwise grey British climate,
where self and other mingle in a cosmopolitical meeting of minds. Until
they reunite in a return home to regain the paradise of mother earth’s
womb, the exotic haven of Oxford’s Botanic Garden serves as their own
particular Eden.
Part III
Time-Travellers
5
‘Around We Go’: Transpositional
Life Cycles in David Mitchell’s
Cloud Atlas

The term ‘transpositions’ has a double source of inspira-

tion: from music and from genetics. It indicates an inter-
textual, cross-boundary or transversal transfer, in the
sense of a leap from one code, field or axis into another,
not merely in the quantitative mode of plural multipli-
cations, but rather in the qualitative sense of complex
multiplicities. It is not just a matter of weaving together
different strands, variations on a theme (textual or
musical), but rather of playing the positivity of differ-
ence as a specific theme of its own. As a term in music,
transposition indicates variations and shifts of scale in a
discontinuous but harmonious pattern. It is thus created
as an in-between space of zigzagging and of crossing:
non-linear, but not chaotic; nomadic, yet accountable
and committed [...] it is coherent without falling into
instrumental rationality. (Braidotti 2008, p. 5)

In her discussion of philosophical nomadism as a cosmopolitical chal-

lenge to the uniform commodification of globalized capitalism, Braidotti
identifies transpositions as synergized interstices that accentuate ‘the posi-
tivity of difference’. Rather than traditional notions of unified identities,
transpositional philosophical nomadism offers resistant subjectivities that
are multiple, mutable and decentred, yet simultaneously coherently pat-
terned. Transpositions, then, offer ‘a paradigmatic model’ where the self/
other binaries of Western philosophical thought fuse into a resistant self
and other ‘in-between space’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 6) of nomadic ‘mobility’
(p. 7) that recognizes ‘a fundamental and necessary unity between subject
and object’ (p. 6). Strikingly similar to Braidotti’s thesis, David Mitchell’s
141
142 Time-Travellers

Cloud Atlas (2004) utilizes a transpositional model in its critique of global

capitalism’s destructive will to power. Like Braidotti, Mitchell draws on the
term’s musical and genetic inheritance to envisage alternatives to a world
that spins repeatedly closer to entropic consumption, pondering ‘Is this
the entropy written within our nature?’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 528).
Structurally, Cloud Atlas contains multi-layered transpositions of char-
acter imbrications and spatiotemporal journeys that zigzag and cross
each other’s tracks, like those identified by Braidotti. By transposition-
ing each section that spans from the 1850s to a post-apocalyptic future,
Mitchell resists the territorial fixity of Western hegemony and presents a
philosophically nomadic text of border crossings. As though anticipating
Braidotti’s argument, Mitchell writes: ‘You would think a place the size
of England could easily hold all the happenings in one humble lifetime
without much overlap [...] but no, we cross, criss-cross and recross our
old tracks like figure skaters’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 165). Even within an indi-
vidual’s timespan, Mitchell identifies the transpositional multiplicity that
creates a seemingly chaotic but nevertheless ordered psychogeographical
cartography of selves. Thus, in Zachry’s post-apocalyptic narrative, ‘Old
Georgie’s path an’ mine crossed more times’n I’m comfy mem’ryin’’
(p. 249), referring to close encounters with one’s mortality through a
personified Death. Directly associating transpositions with its musical
terminology, one section features Robert Frobisher, a musician who is
‘reworking my year’s fragments into a “sextet for overlapping soloists”’
(p. 463). Metafictionally, Frobisher’s composition alludes to Mitchell’s
novel in which it exists: six seemingly separate protagonists in a series of
novellas that form an intricately entwined ensemble. Just as Frobisher’s
sextet is arranged ‘each in its own language of key, scale and colour’
(p. 463), so does Mitchell’s work use different linguistic styles to map the
sociohistorical inflections and geopolitical climate of its spatiotemporal
journey. Frobisher notes that ‘In the 1st set, each solo is interrupted by its
successor: in the 2nd each interruption is recontinued, in order’ (p. 463),
which is reverberated in the novel’s structure of six interrupted narratives
that are resumed in the second half of the text. In Mitchell’s literary craft
he wondered ‘What would it actually look like if a mirror were placed at
the end of the book, and you continued into a second half that took you
back to the beginning?’1 Cloud Atlas’ complex overture of overlapping
narratives philosophically ponders the hegemonic will to power repeti-
tively perpetuated by humanity which echoes ‘Deleuze’s statement that
teaching philosophy is like composing a musical score [...] Difficult texts
get illuminated over time, with the build-up of experience’ (Braidotti 2008,
p. 20). By refuting conventional characterization, Mitchell’s post-human
 David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 143

narrative spans across multiple characters, genders, sexualities and geospa-

tialities. Similarly, Braidotti rejects a singular identity imposed by ‘social
conventions’, and suggests instead that

Transposing the subject out of identity politics into a non-unitary

or nomadic vision of selves as interrelational forces is a more useful
approach. Consciousness is redefined accordingly not as the core of
the humanistic subject, but at best as a way of synchronizing the
multiple differences within everyone, which constitute the ethical
core of nomadic subjects. (Braidotti 2008, p. 266)

The inner sections of Cloud Atlas are framed by ‘The Pacific Journal of
Adam Ewing’, which charts the route of the Prophetess, an aptly entitled
vessel whose crew are avariciously ‘California Bound’ (Mitchell 2004,
p. 23) in their desire to benefit from the Gold Rush. His journal is then
read in the following section ‘Letters from Zedelghem’ by Frobisher, who
notes that ‘it’s the edited journal of a voyage from Sydney to California
by a notary of San Francisco named Adam Ewing. Mention is made of the
gold rush, so I suppose we are in 1849 or 1850’ (p. 64). Frobisher, himself
no stranger to a parasitic lifestyle, interprets that Ewing is ‘blind to all
conspirators’ insofar as ‘he hasn’t spotted his trusty Doctor Henry Goose
is a vampire, fuelling his hypochondria in order to poison him, slowly,
for his money’ (p. 64). Ewing’s journal contains a narrative outlining the
enslavement of the Moriori by the Maori, as Mitchell immediately sets
up a paradigm of a consumptive ‘will to power, the backbone of human
nature’ (p. 462) that runs throughout each section. While ‘War was an
alien concept to the Moriori’, who understood ‘Peace’ ‘not [as] a hiatus
betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace’ (p. 12), nevertheless
‘The Maori colonise the Moriori’s land and people, even after helping and
nursing them to health’ (p. 14). Mitchell implicates the British Empire
in this genocide since ‘The first blow to the Moriori was the Union Jack’
(p. 12), while ‘takahi, a Maori ritual translated as “Walking the Land to
Possess the Land”’ signalled that ‘The Maori proved themselves apt pupils
of the English in “the dark arts of colonization”’ (p. 14). Western mascu-
linist territorialism and its will to power has exported a binary logic of
self/other that overturns generations of Moriori existing symbiotically
within the rhythm of nature. Symbolic of the avaricious appetite of
Empire, ‘fifty Moriori were beheaded, filleted, wrapped in flax-leaves, then
baked in a giant earth oven with yams & sweet-potatoes’ (p. 15). Such
cannibalistic preying on fellow humans, in turn, is reflected in Henry
Goose’s attempted murder of Ewing aboard the Prophetess, prey to ‘Goose’s
144 Time-Travellers

Two Laws of Survival’, his philosophy of civilization where ‘The Weak are
Meat the Strong do Eat’ (p. 508) and ‘Eat or be eaten’ (p. 509). Ironically,
the native Autua, whom Ewing – fuelled by Christian discourses – initially
associates with cannibalism, is his rescuer against Goose. The latter feeds
on others’ weakness, believing that ‘people are joints of meat [...] ready for
the skewer & the spit [...] I need money [...] so I have killed you for it [...]
Adam, the world is wicked’ (p. 523). Symbolizing the fall into knowledge
of Christianity’s first man, Adam learns from Goose that civilization is a
food chain, where ‘Maoris prey on Moriori, Whites prey on darker-hued
cousins, fleas prey on mice, cats prey on rats, Christians on infidels, first
mates on cabin-boys, Death on the Living’ (pp. 523–4). Goose reduces life
to a thanatic struggle, where ‘people aren’t sacred beings crafted in the
Almighty’s image’ (p. 523): instead this grand narrative of an Almighty
perpetuates a hierarchy of winners and losers based on eugenical myths
that simultaneously claim to ‘save’ humanity. Goose’s name reflects his
avaricious attitude to the consumption of meat, with the added inference
that ‘a foolish or ignorant person is called a goose because of the alleged
stupidity of this bird’ (Evans 1990, p. 489).
Capitalist society is repeatedly portrayed in Cloud Atlas as a parasitic
opportunist whose cannibalistic desire for profit and power ultimately
leads to its own demise. In conversation with Monty Dhondt, Frobisher
learns that ‘Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that
elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man, are the same facul-
ties that’ll snuff out Homo sapiens before this century is out [...] What a
symphonic crescendo that’ll be’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 462). Reflecting upon
his brother’s demise at the Front in World War One, Frobisher concurs,
‘European music is passionately savage, broken by long silences’ (p. 460).
For Braidotti, ‘This inherently self-destructive system feeds on and thus
destroys the very conditions of its survival. Capitalism is omnivorous.
It is an unsustainable system, whose way of existing becomes the main
cause of its self-destruction’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 275). As Mitchell observes,
‘One of my serial-repeating themes is predacity – and cannibalism is an
ancient and primal manifestation of predacity.’2 Similarly, in his carto-
graphical discussion of superviolence and globalization, Arjun Appadurai
argues that ‘predatory identities’ are those ‘whose social construction and
mobilization require the extinction of other, proximate social categories,
defined as threats to the very existence of some group, defined as we’
(Appadurai 2006, p. 51). In establishing this rapacious binary,

Predatory identities emerge in the tension between majority identities

and national identities. Identities may be described as ‘majoritarian’
 David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 145

not simply when they are invoked by objectively larger groups in

a national polity but when they strive to close the gap between
the majority and the purity of the national whole. (Appadurai
2006, p. 52)

Capitalism’s predatory impetus is acutely portrayed in Luisa Rey’s escape

from the corporate thugs that she is investigating: her journey through
labyrinthine streets leads through ‘An underworld sweatshop’ where
‘Limp Donald Ducks and crucified Scooby-Doos have their innards
stitched’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 443). Mitchell alludes to beloved children’s
television characters who belong respectively to Disney and Warner
Bros: they paradoxically manufacture a saccharine childhood innocence
while the production of their manufactured goods relies on exploiting
cheap, and often very young, labour. In Rethinking Disney, it is argued
that ‘mainstream press missed or trivialized one of the most important
parts of the story – sweatshops’ (Budd 2005, p. 4), ensuring that image
becomes reality while the unsavoury truth is suppressed. As with ‘other
global corporations, Disney licenses its merchandise manufacturing to
those who search the world for the lowest possible production costs,
leading the “race to the bottom” in wages and working conditions’
(p. 4). As well as widening the gap between rich and poor, this also
expands the distance between ‘the company’s squeaky-clean [childhood
friendly] image’ (p. 3) and a sinister exploitative underworld. Thus,

While these corporations draw first-world consumers more tightly

within the world of commodity fetishism and wasteful consump-
tion, their licenses force former peasants and rural dwellers into the
maw of globalized capitalist production. Hence the pitiful wages and
sweatshop working conditions of the mostly young women in Haiti,
Vietnam, China, Macau, Honduras, Bangladesh, and many other
developing countries as well as the United States. (Budd 2005, p. 4)

Such exploitation is felt most acutely by women at the bottom of the

economic ladder, while the comparatively affluent developed world
consumes an ever-expanding diet of commodification. Meanwhile,
Warner Bros is one of several American companies who have relied
on Burmese sweatshops for their economic expansion (Hellmer 2005,
p. 37). Not surprisingly, ‘It’s 1875 down here, thinks Luisa, not 1975’,
demonstrating that capitalism repeats its exploitation of the most vul-
nerable groups in any epoch, while just ‘thirty seconds on the factory
floor has affected her hearing’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 443).
146 Time-Travellers

Through the lens of six mini-narratives, Mitchell’s text repeatedly

shows the destructive impact of capitalism’s divide-and-rule enterprise
on our planet in a mapping of space and time that compresses into a
variety of notes playing the same tune with transpositional overlaps
of familiarity. Likewise, Braidotti posits that ‘The spectral economy of
capital desynchronizes time [...] nothing more than this all-consuming
entropic energy, capitalism lacks the ability to create anything new’
(Braidotti 2008, p. 276). Capitalism, then, is a ‘spectral’ haunting that
uncannily perpetuates itself time and again until, ultimately, it runs
out of time and fuel in its avid waste of energy. Logging its destructive
impact upon individuals, communities and nature from the Victorian
era to a post-apocalyptic future, Mitchell entwines each character to
their historical predecessor and future generation through the motif
of rebirth. In his 1930s letters to his homosexual lover Rufus Sixsmith,
Frobisher refers to ‘that birthmark in the hollow of my shoulder, the one
you said resembles a comet’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 85), which investigative
journalist Luisa Rey reads in her 1970s narrative, for ‘Robert Frobisher
mentions a comet-shaped birthmark’ (p. 122). Clearly Frobisher’s rein-
carnation, Rey examines ‘a birthmark between her shoulder-blade
and collar-bone [...] undeniably shaped like a comet’ (p. 124), while
she recurrently experiences flashbacks that only Frobisher could have
known of, ‘Images so vivid she can only call them memories’ (p. 121).
While investigating corporate corruption in an attempt to locate Rufus
Sixsmith’s document hidden on his boat that would prove her exposé,
Rey’s ‘birthmark throbs’ as she goes ‘past the Prophetess’ (p. 448), the
ship that transported Ewing, now a restored heritage site. In turn,
Timothy Cavendish, who reads Hilary V. Hush’s manuscript of ‘The First
Luisa Rey Mystery’, admits in an aside that ‘(I, too, have a birthmark,
below my left armpit, but no lover compared it to a comet. Georgette
nicknamed it Timbo’s Turd)’ (p. 373). Rejecting ‘the insinuation that
Luisa Rey is this Robert Frobisher chap reincarnated’ as ‘Far too hippie-
druggy-new age’ (p. 373), Cavendish is nevertheless linked spatiotem-
porally to the other protagonists. When Luisa Rey’s ‘birthmark throbs’
it is fitting that ‘She grasps for the ends of this elastic moment, but
they disappear into the past and the future’ (p. 448). Mitchell is also
blurring and questioning the divisions between literary and historical
narratives, given the fictional facets of the characters: for instance, Rey
is a creation of the equally fictitious Hush, while Cavendish’s narrative
is a film watched by the fabricant Sonmi. Such imbrications compress
characters, time and space within an intricate intra/intertextual web
where the linearity of human civilization collapses into a cyclical route
 David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 147

towards entropic exhaustion. In that sense, capitalist society’s future is

prewritten in the codification of its present and past, a spiralling rep-
etition that perpetuates itself through the narratological fabulation of
civilizational progress: its only linear journey is towards its own end.
Conclusively,

the increasing unthinkability of the future is already depriving us,

here and now, of the only time we have: the present. The narrowing
of the temporal horizon is already pushing many of us back to the
entropic embrace of a universe that is running out of steam and of
inspiration. We, not unlike our endangered planet, are running out
of breath. (Braidotti 2008, p. 274)

Invoking Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on community, Berthold Schoene

posits that ‘Mitchell’s novels are aimed at weaving an all-embracing
cosmopolitan network of mutually interpermeating lives and stories’
(Schoene 2009, p. 116). Insofar as the main characters transposition-
ally overlap, this is an astute comment, but one must resist regard-
ing Mitchell’s spatio-temporal interweaving simply as celebratory
cosmopolitanism. Rather, he is presenting a compressed vision that
correlates more closely to Braidotti’s critique of phallocentric capital-
ism. Time and space are collapsed in Cloud Atlas to invoke an urgent
awareness that ‘capital desynchronizes time’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 276)
in its universal ‘entropic embrace’ (p. 274). Repetition of scenarios and
events, then, where past, present and future fuse in a ‘narrowing of
the temporal horizon’ (p. 274), warns against the destructive lack of
tomorrow engineered by global capitalism. In a rejection of Cartesian
identification with a central character, Mitchell’s novel decentres the
subject in a Braidottian non-linear nomadic resistance to unified self,
time or place. Although Adam Ewing’s journal apparently frames the
novel and Zachry’s post-apocalyptic narrative is at the nominal centre,
both interweave Möbius-strip-like, with Zachry’s lost brother sharing
the same biblical name of Adam. Jo Alyson Parker notes that ‘As the
chronologically earliest narrative, Ewing’s journal would be the most
deeply embedded [...] Instead, Zachry’s narrative takes this role, the
post-apocalyptic future that it recounts enclosed by a prelapsarian past
inhabited by its own particular Adam’ (Parker 2007, p. 206). As such,
‘Frame narrative and embedded narrative change places depending on
perspective so that the outside (frame) and inside (embedded narrative)
are one and the same’ (p. 206), ultimately pushing the narratological
boundaries of traditional beginning and end.
148 Time-Travellers

As with Winterson’s The Stone Gods, the message is that telling the
same old story or playing the same old tune will inevitably lead to an
irreversible decline, whereas sustainability of humanity and our plan-
etary habitat requires a ‘prophetic or visionary dimension’ (Braidotti
2008, p. 274) that learns from the past in order to advance towards an
alternative outcome. Braidotti emphasizes the importance of the imagi-
nation and creativity as combatant forces against entropic globalization
that envisage a future. Cloud Atlas forms part of that imaginative resist-
ance by a ‘collective endeavour to construct horizons of hope’ (p. 276)
insofar as it

takes a firm stand against the ‘future eaters’ [...] and honours our
obligations to the generations to come. This acts as an equalizer
among generations. By targeting those who come after us as the
rightful ethical interlocutors and assessors of our own actions, we are
taking seriously the implications of our own situated position and of
our practices within it. (Braidotti 2008, p. 276)

The importance of the imagination and creativity is further signalled

in Sonmi’s narrative, for it is a book of fairytales that helps in the
politicization and questioning of grand narratives and transcendence
towards freedom of thought. Mitchell’s multi-layered narrative shifts
across a spatiotemporal spectrum, simultaneously containing Victorian,
twentieth-century and futuristic protagonists. He responds to Braidotti’s
removal of the Oedipal relation across generations, instead levelling and
equalizing the space between through the umbilical birthmark of pan-
human relations. Mitchell’s spatiotemporal imbrications signify that
‘Life in you does not bear your name; it is only a time-share’ (Braidotti
2008, p. 277), thus rejecting unified individualism and its narcissistic
view of death. Like Cloud Atlas’ birthmark,

Those who are inscribed in life under the sign of the desire for change
may be more mortal or vulnerable than most because they need to
live more intensely [...] a desire to go on becoming, to effect multiple
modes of belonging […] love for the world that frames a horizon of
sustainability and hence of hope. (Braidotti 2008, p. 277)

Imagination and creativity are vital for Braidotti’s vision of forging

a ‘non-profit’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 215) future that does not preach
to others, but rather opens up a spatiotemporal existence based on
mutual respect for human and non-human life, including an urgent
 David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 149

requirement that we harmonize rather than utilize our environment.

Cloud Atlas epitomizes this transpositional mobility through nomadic
subjects who interweave the past, present and future of humanity’s
influence on Earth. Linked by a birthmark, each character charts a jour-
ney across time and space where they are out of time insofar as they feel
at odds with dominant hegemony and seek alternative modes of being
in ‘a desire to go on becoming’. As time-travellers who dialogically
intervene with narratives of resistance to the corruption around them,
each character cosmopolitically counts the cost of capitalist destruc-
tion. For Mitchell’s heroic characters, ‘imagining oneself as a stranger
in a limited and creative sense might instructively be linked to actually
becoming estranged from the cultural habits one is born to’ and, as
such, these travellers’ experiences ‘establish that being a stranger can be
invaluable as an opportunity to know the world better and to experi-
ence it in more complex and satisfying forms’ (Gilroy 2004, p. 78). The
birthmark theme is also interesting because of its associated folklore,
including the belief that birthmarks are formed to mark the place of a
traumatic injury in a previous life (see, for instance, Stevenson 1997,
Haraldsson 2000). For Mitchell’s characters, their birthmark signifies
the stigmata of suffering for refusing to adhere to global corruption
and, instead, striving to envision a cosmopolitan planetary empathy.
Medically speaking, there are predominantly six different types of birth-
mark (Nevus sebaceous; Hairy nevus; Nevi; Mole; Cafe-au-lait spots;
Congenital nevus), corresponding to the six sections of Cloud Atlas and
each concomitant character’s birthmark. Each blurs into the other, con-
necting them all within Mitchell’s spatiotemporal tapestry and indicat-
ing that, as humans, we are all connected regardless of gender, sexuality,
ethnicity and so on. Given that their birthmarks are shaped like comets,
each character forms part of an orbital trajectory across time and space:
comets are composed of rock and dust, sharing in our genetic composi-
tion, for ‘A human is made of the same stuff as a rock [...] the Universe
is composed of twelve basic building blocks, only three of which are
required to build everything on our planet, including our bodies’
(Cox and Cohen 2011, p. 79). Scientifically, then, Mitchell’s concept
of rebirth considers the interconnections that exist between human,
planet and universe, just as Cox notes that ‘When I die my constituents
aren’t going to be magically destroyed; they will be returned to Earth
and, given enough time, they will become part of some other structure’
(p. 81). Interestingly, ‘Hindus believe that the purpose of a soul’s time
on Earth is to work through a cycle of rebirth and reincarnation until it
becomes perfect. Only then can it be reunited with the Universal Soul
150 Time-Travellers

and be freed from its material existence’ (p. 81). Similarly, Mitchell’s
characters are regarded as souls repeatedly reborn with a mission to
resist capitalist destruction and to seek a better more ‘perfect’ tomorrow
for humanity and its planetary home. Thus, ‘every atom in your body
was once part of something else. It may have made up an ancient tree
or a dinosaur, and [...] it was certainly part of a rock’ (p. 92).
Using the motif of the birthmark, Mitchell charts the spiralling
interconnections between each character, just as Braidotti advocates a
nomadic intergenerational dialogic conversation across time and space
that decentralizes individual death within the mutable regenerative life
of zoe. According to Braidotti,

Life is half-animal, non-human (zoe) and half-political and discur-

sive (bios). Zoe is the poor half of a couple that foregrounds bios as
the intelligent half; the relationship between them constitutes one
of those qualitative distinctions on which Western culture built its
discursive empire [...] Zoe stands for the mindless vitality of Life car-
rying on independently of and regardless of rational control. This is
the dubious privilege attributed to the non-humans and to all the
‘others’ of Man, whereas bios refers to the specific social nexus of
humans. That these two competing notions of ‘life’ coincide on the
human body turns the issue of embodiment into a contested space
and a political arena. The mind–body dualism has historically func-
tioned as a short-cut through the complexities of this question, by
introducing a criterion of distinction, which is sexualized, racialized
and naturalized. Given that this concept of ‘the human’ was colo-
nized by phallogocentrism, it has come to be identified with male,
white, heterosexual, Christian, property-owning, standard-language-
speaking citizens. (Braidotti 2008, p. 37)

Historically a phallocratic bios has dominated a feminized zoe through

a binary structure of self/other based on differences like man/woman,
Christian/native, white/black, heterosexual/homosexual, civilized/sav-
age, society/nature. Ironically, according to Braidotti, the scientific
advancements of global capitalism have reached an impasse where the
existence of humanity is threatened by risks like climate change, forc-
ing it to recognize the counter-power of zoe against its phallic author-
ity. Likewise, Mitchell recognizes that ‘What made us successful in
Darwinian terms – our skill at manipulating our environment – now
threatens to wipe us out as a species.’3 Simultaneously, advances in
genetics have led to an ever closer relationship between bios/zoe as the
 David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 151

division of human/non-human is increasingly blurred and opened up

as a potential space for transpositional subjects:

zoe has historically been feminized. Women were classified alongside

natives, animals and others as referents of a generative force that was
reduced to a mere biological function and deprived of political and
ethical relevance. The politics of Life itself today redesigns this Relation
[...] giving centre stage to zoe as relations or flows of interaction [...] an
affirmative and empowering bond to our eco-sphere, our habitat and
our world [...] points to the becoming-imperceptible of the former
anthropocentric subject. (Braidotti 2008, p. 270)

Fundamental to this repositioning of life as a self/other transposition of

bios/zoe is the potential for selfless planetary empathy that is the crux of
cosmopolitanism. Paul Gilroy refutes globalization’s destructive impetus
and replaces it with ‘planetarity’ (Gilroy 2004, p. xii), arguing that the
latter has a more intimate and empathetic dimension. As such, plan-
etary ‘conviviality’, for Gilroy, ‘introduces a measure of distance from
the pivotal term “identity,” which has proved to be such an ambiguous
resource in the analysis of race, ethnicity, and politics’ (p. xi). As with
Braidotti’s view that phallocratic narratives of unified subjectivity can
be resisted with transpositional philosophical nomadism in a rethink-
ing of ‘the politics of Life’, so too does Gilroy recognize that ‘The radi-
cal openness that brings conviviality alive makes a nonsense of closed,
fixed, and reified identity’ (p. xi).
This ‘politics of Life’ energizes Cloud Atlas with a transpositional
resistance to entropic diffusion: a panhuman community spanning
across time, space and central characters creates a counter-narrative of
hope for tomorrow. It reaches beyond cosmopolitan human empathy
to incorporate zoe, including fabricants and planet Earth. While cor-
rectly reading Cloud Atlas as part of ‘Mitchell’s cosmopolitan universe’
(Schoene 2009, p. 104), nevertheless such interpretation remains
embedded in the very anthropocentric bios that Braidotti insists must
be superseded in a transpositional nomadic Life that incorporates non-
human or zoe, including our earthly home. Mitchell’s deliberate casting
of a female genome human utilizes fictional space for others tradition-
ally excluded by patriarchal society. In ‘Half-Lives’, the corrupt CEO
of the Seaboard nuclear power plant identifies that ‘Our great nation
suffers from a debilitating addiction [...] Its name is Oil’ (Mitchell 2004,
p. 104), but merely replaces one environmental threat with another.
In ‘An Orison of Sonmi’, this futuristic dystopia tells of ‘Mumbai, now
152 Time-Travellers

flooded’ (p. 236), signalling that climate change has altered geopoliti-
cal territories. Sonmi notes that ‘I understood one’s environment is a
key to one’s identity, but that my environment, Papa Song’s, was a key
I had lost’ (p. 238). Having transcended the confines of this enclosed
space, she realizes the benefits of nomadically crossing intellectual and
physical thresholds in transposing subjectivity beyond the familiar so
that she no longer recognizes that naive self. Mitchell’s choice of ‘envi-
ronment’ also suggests a transpositional addition to Sonmi’s immediate
spatial surroundings: it alludes to the immediate location of each main
character, as well as connoting an ecopolitical dimension that reinforces
the importance of the relationship between humans and their environ-
ment. Thus Sonmi declares that ‘Nea So Copros is poisoning itself to
death. Its soil is polluted, its rivers lifeless, its air toxloaded, its food
supplies riddled with rogue genes’ (p. 341).
To counteract globalization’s destructive entropy, Mitchell takes a
similar view of the Earth’s biodiversity to Braidotti’s concept of zoe,
for ‘I would love to believe in reincarnation, but the answer is no.
There is solace, however, in the carbon cycle, in the nitrogen cycle.
Biochemically, at least, reincarnation is a fact. Donate your ashes to a
fruit farmer.’4 As Sonmi sagaciously muses, ‘Travel far enough, you meet
yourself’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 336). As each narrative criss-crosses the other
sections, the protagonists interact and interrelate with uncanny famili-
arity. They are multiple subjects whose endeavours reach across time
and space, synergizing a post-human resistance to the finitude of indi-
vidualism. To emphasize space-time compression, Timothy Cavendish’s
watch stops immediately upon entering Aurora House, measuring the
distance between his old familiar life and his new living nightmare, for
‘My watch was stuck in the middle of last night’ (p. 171). Social fixa-
tions upon chronological order collapse in this extraneous elderly wait-
ing room for death where residents are stuck in limbo: ‘How can you
forget your age?’ (p. 370), muses Cavendish, as ‘I was stuck in Aurora
House all right. A clock with no hands’ (p. 372). Like the nomadic narra-
tion of Ali Smith’s deceased narrator Sara in Hotel World, whose broken
watch places her outside of time, Cavendish’s space-time compres-
sion demonstrates his disconnection from the familiarity of society’s
chronological norm. It immediately awakens him to the importance of
savouring life and liberty lest it end all too soon and also interweaves
his subjectivity with the other main characters, existing simultaneously
in the narrative present, past and future. With transpositional echoes of
the corrupt nuclear power plant in Rey’s struggle, or the cannibalistic
colonialism of Ewing’s age, Cavendish asserts that ‘Unlimited power in
 David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 153

the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty’ (p. 182). Suffering
under the harsh repetitive regime of Aurora House, its name ironically
tantalizes yet refutes the hope of the dawning of a new tomorrow. But
by transpositionally placing the interruption to this section with ‘An
Orison of Sonmi~451’, Cavendish’s despair that ‘the old world came to
an abrupt end’ (p. 183) structurally does finish with the postponement
of his narrative and commencement of Sonmi’s, which is a futuristic
world located in another spatiotemporal dimension. In this space-time
continuum, though, there are uncanny resemblances between them, for
Sonmi’s subjugation belongs to a similar system of exploitation of oth-
ers that Cavendish narrates. Discussing the multiple time zones peculiar
to contemporary fiction, Mark Currie argues that ‘We might also view
this as a symptom of divided presence: that is, as a version of that mod-
ern experience of time which tends to install within the present traces
of the past and future’ (Currie 2007, p. 22). Likewise, in Zachry’s narra-
tive we learn that ‘Time stopped’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 295).
In Mitchell’s futuristic dystopia ‘An Orison of Sonmi’, capitalism
reaches monstrous proportions in the creation of subhuman clones who
exist solely to serve humans. Extending traditional classicism’s self/other
dichotomy of racialized, gendered or sexualized differences, this dysto-
pian vision puns on the human soul of religious discourse: an implanted
chip allows humans to access all areas while fabricants are restricted in
their movements. Sonmi ponders ‘how such an insignificant-looking
dot confers the right of consumerdom on its bearers yet condemns those
lacking one to an xistence of abject servitude or worse’ (Mitchell 2004,
p. 335), in a society that functions through demarcated boundaries of
lack stemming from power structures inherited from contemporary
hegemonic discourses. Sonmi’s relationship to the other protagonists
and, by implication, humanity, is emphasized by the trait that transpo-
sitionally connects each through space and time: ‘Only my birthmark
attracted any passing comment [...] they are genomed out. Every Medic
who ever saw it xpressed bewilderment. My birthmark always caused
me embarrassment’ (p. 204). Bucking the cloned trend, Sonmi’s trans-
positional birthmark serves as a genetic tattoo that links her to the
wider infrastructure of planetary life, complicating her relationship with
humans rather than isolating her to the segregated non-human role that
has been imposed upon her ‘kind’. Simultaneously an example of scien-
tific and technological advancement, as well as a victim of capitalism’s
regressively savage pursuit of profit, Sonmi epitomizes Braidotti’s view of
our lack of future based on an unsustainable tomorrow. Braidotti insists
that only by harnessing the potential of scientific development for
154 Time-Travellers

non-profit planetary sustainability rather than the profit-driven agenda

of capitalist enterprise, can there be ‘hope’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 277) of
a ‘possible “tomorrow”’ (p. 273). In that sense Sonmi is reminiscent of
the Robo sapiens Spike in Winterson’s The Stone Gods: though vested
creations of capitalist enterprise, they also epitomize the evolutionary
impetus of scientific development and, as such, both represent the
transpositional potential of the in-between interstices of post-human
hope. Etymologically the use of ‘xpressed’, with the vowel dropped
at the beginning, also echoes the reduction of language in The Stone
Gods, where evolutionary progression has led to a regressive intellect
and redundancy of stories. Names like Luisa and Zachry in Mitchell’s
novel also signify missing vowels and a reductive language: Zachry’s
post-apocalyptic world is primitive in its lack of technology after the
‘Fall’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 286), and it uses a language system that is pho-
netically rudimentary such as ‘comfy mem’ryin’’ (p. 249). Language
is grammatically disjointed, just as the birthmarked characters feel at
odds with their worlds and, in turn, are missing fragments of each other
transpositionally connected by the narrative thread of the text.
Without these interstices of connectivity, left unchecked, capitalism’s
hijacking of scientific technology, according to Mitchell, results in dys-
topian nightmares that echo their will to power throughout history. In
this vision, humans or ‘Purebloods’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 198) are reduced
to consumerist entities who ‘seethed to buy, buy, buy; a many-celled
sponge of demand’ (p. 236) manically programmed by a capitalist
treadmill that penalizes those who fail, for ‘under the Enrichment Laws,
consumers have to spend a fixed quota of dollars each month, depend-
ing on their strata. Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime’ (p. 237).
Capitalist democracy has evolved into corpocracy, with the same class-
and gender-based ‘strata’ maintaining competition and difference,
while the non-humans are utterly denigrated. Like Goose’s observations
regarding humanity’s corrupt will to power, Sonmi’s enslavement is part
of a wider hegemonic control, for

To enslave an individual distresses the conscience, but to enslave a

clone is merely like owning the latest mass-produced six-wheeled
ford. In fact, all fabricants, even same-stem fabricants, are singular as
snowflakes. Pureblood naked eyes cannot discern these differences,
but they exist. (Mitchell 2004, p. 191)

Denying any relationship between human and clone, this capital-

ist dystopia functions at a heightened cannibalistic level of humans
 David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 155

corporately feeding on other humans, who have been labelled as a

nebulous mass of non-humans. But, as Sonmi points out, these geneti-
cally modified people contain individual genetic codes, rendering
them as distinctly singular as those revered as ‘purebloods’. In a world
of extreme consumption, the fabricants are fed the lie that they will
retire to a paradisiacal life in a ‘ship that carried twelvestarred serv-
ers to Xultation in Hawaii’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 357). In fact their fate
is ‘A slaughterhouse production line’ (p. 359), served as recycled food
matter to fabricant embryos and humans, because

The genomics industry demands huge quantities of liquefied

biomatter for wombtanks but, most of all, for Soap. What more
economic way to supply this protein than by recycling fabricants
who have reached the end of their working lives? Additionally,
leftover ‘reclaimed proteins’ are used to produce Papa Song food
products, eaten by consumers in the corp’s dineries. (Mitchell 2004,
pp. 359–60)

This echoes Goose’s sentiments regarding predacity, which is similar to

the Institute in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, where it ‘breaks whole popula-
tions into winners and losers’ (Gray 1982 [1981], p. 410), so that

The efficient half eats the less efficient half and grows stronger. War
is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in
peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual
pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself and the recipe is
separation. (Gray 1982, p. 411)

Likewise, Mitchell’s dystopia envisions a will to power that relentlessly

pits humans against each other to feed its mechanistic appetite for
more. His panoramic vision of epochal shifts argues that it is not human
nature that creates this self/other dichotomy but, rather, a capitalist
hegemony embedded within bios. Ewing’s question of whether this
entropy is genetically inscribed within humanity is ultimately refuted
by the novel, which regards it as a symptom of capitalist ideology. We
are phallocratically encoded with hegemonic narratives that make such
an appetite for power, destruction and wealth seem natural, but which
only serve to enslave us from our full cosmopolitical potential for, as
Sonmi laments, ‘We are only what we know’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 217).
Like Mitchell, Gray’s message is like a repeating signal warning of divi-
sion and the need to unlearn hegemonic narratives, reiterating ‘Man is
156 Time-Travellers

the pie that bakes and eats himself and the recipe is separation’ (Gray
1982, p. 101) and ‘Men are pies that bake and eat themselves, and the
recipe is hate’ (p. 188).
Mitchell’s dystopian society fails to recognize the familiarities
between human and fabricant, regarding them as a nebulous consump-
tive mass of servers rather than a different evolved human species with
traits as individual as their own. Such scientific advances, contests
Braidotti, need to be removed from the narrow grasp of globaliza-
tion’s profiteering and reclaimed for the good of human and planetary
progress in a post-human balance. Such ‘new pan-humanity’ (Braidotti
2008, p. 35) must function as ‘spaces of resistance to the new master
narratives of the global economy’ (p. 34), operating against ‘the master
narrative of global profit’ for the possibility of a future outlook and
‘for the sake of sustainability’ insofar as there becomes the hope of ‘a
sustainable present’ (p. 36). Far from rejecting scientific progress, she
contends that

Contemporary genetics and bio-technologies are central to this shift

towards post-human ideas of ‘Life’ or ‘Zoe’, the non-human. The
mutual interdependence of bodies and technologies creates a new
symbiotic relationship between them. Cyborgs, or techno-bodies, are
the subject of our prosthetic culture in a complex web of dynamics
and technologically mediated social relations. This inaugurates an
eco-philosophical approach to nomadic subjectivity, and hence also
new ecologies of belonging. (Braidotti 2008, p. 37)

In the scientific dispersal of genomes, argues Braidotti, the so-called

unitary individual is disrupted by a fluid, mobile subjectivity of endless
possibilities since ‘Zoe refers to the endless vitality of life as continuous
becoming [...] a transversal form of subjectivity or “trans-individuality”’
(Braidotti 2008, p. 41). The fabricant Sonmi, then, symbolizes the
‘becoming’ other within zoe of life’s mobility that continues to overlap,
disrupt and influence liberal humanist anthropocentricism, for ‘The
potency of bios/zoe, in other words, displaces the humanistic vision
of consciousness, which hinges on the sovereignty of the “I” [...] the
axes of classical “difference”, which are currently being transposed into
lines of “becoming”’ (p. 42). While Sonmi is clearly a post-/panhuman
with integral ties to her human manufacturers, those privileged as
human in Mitchell’s dystopia are equally manufactured: existing in
an extreme consumer culture, the subjects of the phallocratic gaze
continually reshape their identity by attending ‘facescapers’ (Mitchell
 David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 157

2004, p. 336) – cosmetic surgeons like the aptly named ‘Madam Ovid’
(p. 336). This extreme commodity-driven culture leads to the post-
apocalyptic narrative of Zachry who notes that ‘Old’uns tripped their own
Fall’ caused by ‘a hunger in the hearts o’ humans, yah, a hunger for more’
(p. 286). Rather than linear progression, advanced capitalism’s appetite
has caused a cyclical return to a regressive primitive state, since

more gear, more food, faster speeds, longer lifes, easier lifes, more
power [...] rup out the skies an’ boil up the seas an’ poison soil with crazed
atoms an’ donkey ‘bout with rotted seeds so new plagues was borned an’
babbits was freakbirthed. Fin’ly, bit’ly, then quicksharp, states busted into
bar’bric tribes an’ the Civ’lize Days ended, ‘cept for a few fold’n’pockets
here’n’there, where its last embers glimmer. (Mitchell 2004, p. 286)

In Winterson’s The Stone Gods, a similar advanced capitalism of ‘MORE

[who] had been the world’s most aggressive free-marketeers’ (Winterson
2008, p. 160) ensures that it keeps its stranglehold upon its citizens. We
are all, argues Braidotti, part of a culture obsessed with ‘The freezing
of time’ with ‘biopower’ and its ‘denial of death’, while ‘The fast-food
inhabitants of the modern metropolis have collapsed time’ (Braidotti
1994, pp. 48, 50). To offset that ceaseless entropic speed, however,
Mitchell’s text presents those scattered embers of hope to sound a note
of sustainability against the tide of self-destructive enterprise.
Cloud Atlas charts a spiralling spatiotemporal journey commencing
and closing with a depiction of the Social Darwinist fallacious belief
in the evolutionary superiority of Western Christian souls which is all
the time undercut with colonial aggression. Always the hierarchical
structure creates a tension between civilization and environment, as
capitalist power’s repeated imposition is recurrently challenged by oth-
ers. According to Cloud Atlas, the evolutionary success of global capital-
ism has depended not upon racial superiority or Christian purity but,
rather, on the technological advancement afforded by their progress of
weaponry. Just as nature has been aggressively acted upon by phallo-
centric dominance, it is clear that the phallic symbolism of the gun lies
at the heart of humanity’s malaise, for ‘The link between masculinity
and firearms permeates many cultures, both industrialized and devel-
oping’ (Cukier and Sidel 2006, p. 9). As though echoing America’s gun
culture, Joe Napier tells Rey that ‘We’ve got to go via a gunstore. Empty
guns make me nervous’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 445), while, phallically
outmanoeuvred by Ayrs, the defeated Frobisher ‘pocketed his pistol’
(p. 476) and, in narrating his own future end, ‘Shot myself through the
158 Time-Travellers

roof of my mouth at 5am’ (p. 487). Ewing asks Goose whether ‘Your
implication is that white races rule the globe not by divine grace but
by the musket?’ (p. 508). Frobisher learns from Dhondt that wars ‘are
never properly extinguished’ and are pursued relentlessly for ‘power’
and ‘Diamonds’ (p. 462). For Dhondt, ‘You can see the will to power
in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states [...]
The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous pro-
portions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence’
(p. 462). That Freudian death-drive of individuals and civilizations is
an integral divide-and-rule facet of global capitalism, maintaining a
hunger to destroy that which is desired until self-destruction is inevi-
table with the help of a lucrative global arms trade. It is no accident
that Frobisher’s unrequited love for Eva/Eve (‘her name a synonym for
temptation’ [p. 472]) triggers his fall and removal from Ayrs’ family
home. Rejecting her mother Jocasta after their affair, Frobisher takes
the father’s pistol to end his own life, in what is clearly an Oedipal
drama, having previously acknowledged that Jocasta is old enough
to be his mother, as ‘She’s nearly twice my age!’ (p. 85). Though it is
his individual death, Frobisher’s transpositional relationship with his
environment and fellow humans insures that it is not the end of his
story, for ‘Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. We do not stay dead
long [...] my birth, next time around, will be upon me in a heartbeat’
(pp. 489–90). This coincides with the end of his narrative, immediately
resumed by Ewing’s, which demonstrates ‘Nietzsche’s gramophone
record’ (pp. 489–90) insofar as each character is dialogically replayed
in the life of another, for ‘Nietzsche once referred to history as a dia-
logue of greatness across the ages’ (Sterne 2004, p. 306). According to
Jonathan Sterne,

The voices of the dead had their cultural converse in the ears of the
not yet born. Beyond the idea of retaining the voices of the recently
departed for a final graveside performance or for the ears of loved
ones, writers quickly developed a sense of the metahistorical possi-
bilities of sound recording. They hoped that recording would enable
transgenerational speech, where any ‘present’ could address itself to
an almost infinite range of possible futures. (Sterne 2004, p. 306)

Similarly, in Cloud Atlas each character fuses that auditory communica-

tion across spatiotemporal planes, conversing with those not yet born
through ‘transgenerational speech’. As such, ‘the de-Oedipalization of
the inter-generational bond of the young to those who preceded them
 David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 159

[...] join forces across the generational divide by working together

towards sustainable futures’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 277).
In the face of corrupt capitalist profiteering the true prophets in
Mitchell’s text are those who voice their dissent to its hegemonic
insidiousness and leave their indelible echo for generations to come. To
repeat Sonmi’s warning that ‘We are only what we know’, it is impera-
tive that we know more than dominant discourses afford us and partici-
pate in the narrative of our own history. Similarly, Frobisher’s desire to
‘turn back the clock’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 481) at the close of his life, links
him to the next section, which turns the clock back to his historical
predecessor Ewing and compresses each life into a ‘Half-Life’ that is only
complete through the other characters. These transpositional half-lives
who are interrupted and interlinked by historical and geopolitical shifts
provide the only hope existing in an otherwise brutal world. Existing in
a dialogue of nomadic interaction, these characters represent ‘the trans-
national places we all inhabit in late postmodernity’ (Braidotti 2008,
p. 17) and respond to Bhabha’s definition of the ‘subject in terms of a
fundamental restlessness, a “translational” space’ (p. 17). ‘This “transla-
tional” brand of cosmopolitanism’, argues Braidotti, is preferable to the
‘universal values’ imposed by ‘Nussbaum’s “concentric cosmopolitan”’
(p. 17). The mobility offered by translational cosmopolitanism replaces
‘a unitary and “home-bound” subject’ with ‘multiple belongings, non-
unitary selfhood and constant flows of transformation’ (p. 17). It is a
nomadic cosmopolitical resistance to an anthropocentric and andro-
centric tradition that opens up viable spaces within zoe, for

A sustainable ethics for a non-unitary subject proposes an enlarged

sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the
non-human or ‘earth’ others, by removing the obstacle of self-
centred individualism. This is not the same as absolute loss of values,
it rather implies a new way of combining self-interests with the
well-being of an enlarged sense of community, which includes one’s
territorial or environmental interconnections. This is an ethical bond
of an altogether different sort from the self-interests of an individual
subject, as defined along the canonical lines of classical humanism.
It is a nomadic eco-philosophy of multiple belongings. (Braidotti
2008, p. 35)

As Parker notes, ‘With its embedded narratives, suspensions of closure,

boomerang trajectory, and five-hundred-year-plus range’, Cloud Atlas
‘shows us the dire future that present action (or inaction) may trigger
160 Time-Travellers

and thereby drives home a message about the global consequences of

immediate gratification’ (Parker 2007, p. 202). For Parker, Mitchell’s
‘novel thus serves as a response to one of the great challenges facing us
today – how to get individuals and nations to make the changes (even
sacrifices) in the present to ensure a habitable future on earth’ (p. 202).
Mitchell envisages an alternative cosmopolitical community through
the nomadic dialogic intervention of his characters, who must believe
that ‘no state of tyranny reigns for ever’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 520). Just as
Ewing escapes the clutches of the avaricious Goose by the intervention
of his ‘savage’ saviour, so too does the text offer hope in the face of glo-
bal adversity. Rather than human nature hurtling us towards entropic
extinction, Cloud Atlas posits that it is the greed and fear instilled within
us by capitalist discourse that maintains us in a state of territorial divi-
sion. For Adam Ewing, the survivor, ‘Belief is both prize & battlefield,
within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world’ (p. 528), alluding
to the struggle for dominance that is fought ideologically. Ewing insists
that we get what we settle for in a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom: ‘If
we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation,
exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being,
& history’s Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail’ (p. 528). Those
who are privileged may feel disinclined to challenge such master nar-
ratives on others’ behalf and question why we should ‘undermine the
dominance of our race [...] Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!)
order of things?’ (p. 528). Clearly humanity’s nature is not accepted by
Ewing as it is a far too convenient cop out that perpetuates a smoke and
mirrors capitalist dominance. On the contrary,

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe

divers races & creeds can share this world [...] if we believe leaders
must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of
the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to
pass. (Mitchell 2004, p. 528)

A non-territorial nomadic cosmopolitan diversity is attainable even if

‘It is the hardest of worlds to make real’ for ‘Tortuous advances won
over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s
pen or a vainglorious general’s sword’ (Mitchell 2004, p. 528). Rather
than accepting our alleged fate in a defeatist manner, Mitchell presents
the world as a place that must surely be worth fighting for in a non-
militaristic or violent way. A nomadic cosmopolitical community must
be sought, for it is regarded as the only ‘life worth the living’ and ‘I must
 David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 161

begin somewhere’ (p. 528). That non-unitary I begins, ends and restarts
with multiple characters existing in transpositional spaces, where one
does not take up arms but reaches out and spreads one’s arms in com-
mon panhuman solidarity. In keeping with the link between human
and nature, or bios and zoe, Ewing’s final words ask ‘what is any ocean
but a multitude of drops?’ (p. 529), acknowledging that an intergen-
erational tide of communal resistance to phallocentric enterprise will
inevitably bring a sea change. Cloud Atlas, then, ends on an optimistic
note that challenges capitalist avarice, signalling a

hope for change [...] a gratuitous act of confidence [...] ‘love for the
world’, not as an abstract universal, but as the grounded concerns
for the multidue of ‘anybody’ (homo tantum) that composes the
human community. The pursuit and the sharing of hope is an end
in itself in that it intensifies one’s involvement in and enjoyment
of life defined as the expression of a passionate desire, potentia
or becoming. It is also a strong act of faith in the future, in that
it works to create the conditions to leave behind for posterity a
better world than was found in the first place. Lest our greed and
selfishness destroy or diminish it. Given that posterity per definition
can never pay us back, this gesture is perfectly generous. (Braidotti
2008, pp. 277–8)

Individual demise in Mitchell’s novel does not spell an end but,

rather, a reigniting of life through the transpositional links with other
central characters. While ‘Freud was the first to analyse the blow that
death inflicts on the fundamental narcissism of the human subject’,
‘The process of confronting the thinkability of a life that may not have
“me” or any “human” at the centre is actually a sobering and instruc-
tive process’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 40). Rejecting the Thanatos-driven ava-
rice of global capitialism, Cloud Atlas envisages an alternative outlook
towards anthropocentric life, which offers ‘the very start for an ethics
of sustainability that aims at shifting the focus towards the positivity of
zoe’ (p. 40). Zoe is not the border of life/death but that which goes on
despite human death, just as Mitchell ponders a transpositional world
of cyclical relations that transcends the life cycle of each character. This
overcomes the capitalist emphasis on individualism and replaces it with
the shared values of nomadic ‘communities that reflect and enhance
this vision of the subject’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 270). Mitchell’s outlook
‘acknowledges difference as the principle of not-Oneness’ insofar as it is
‘Anti-Oedipal, post-humanist, vitalist, non unitary and yet accountable’
162 Time-Travellers

(p. 270). Unlike the avariciously driven capitalist individualists, his

novel’s multiple protagonists are

Not bound together by the guilt of shared violence, or irreparable loss,

or unpayable ontological debts – but rather by the compassionate
acknowledgement of our common need to negotiate thresholds on
sustainability with and alongside the relentless and monstrous energy
of a ‘Life’ that does not respond to our names [...] It is a choice for
stillness, deceleration and sustainability. (Braidotti 2008, pp. 270–1)

Weaving in and out of overlapping spatiotemporal scenarios Cloud Atlas

proffers that

We have to learn to endure the principle of not-One at the in-depth

structures of our subjectivity. Becoming-nomadic, by constructing
communities where the notion of transience, of passing, is acknowl-
edged in a sober secular manner that binds us to the multiple ‘others’
in a vital web of complex interrelations. (Braidotti 2008, p. 271)

As such,

Kinship systems and social bonding, like flexible citizenship, can

be rethought differently and differentially, moving away from the
blood, sweat and tears of the classical social contract. Given the
extent of the transpositions brought about by advanced capitalism
and the dislocations of traditional values and social bonding they
have triggered, the conditions for a renegotiation of our being in this
together are timely. (Braidotti 2008, p. 271)

Each of Mitchell’s central characters are interlinked ‘in this together’,

capable of demonstrating cosmopolitan empathy for others without the
need for traditional ties. In such a panhumanist view, ‘Souls cross the
skies o’time [...] like clouds crossin’ skies o’ the world’ (Mitchell 2004,
p. 318), conflating individuals, space and time into the interlinking
entity of zoe. Again,

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor
hue nor size don’t stay the same it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who
can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ’mor-
row? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas,
yay, only the atlas o’ the clouds. (Mitchell 2004, p. 324)
 David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 163

Like the birthmark linking characters, the souls of human hope tran-
scend individual bodily frames to travel across thresholds of time and
space, mutable yet recognizable as the clouds on an endless journey of
reconfiguration and cosmopolitan connection. Meteorologically clouds
are formed by billions of water-vapour droplets and ice crystals, and
they are part of a repetitive water cycle that mirrors the rebirth motif
in the novel. A cloud is only made visible because of the collective
fusion of those particle formations. Clouds are only white due to the
sun since the colour white is formed by all the colours of the rainbow
put together; ‘because all the rays merge to form white light’ (Cox and
Cohen 2011, p. 58). With a keen eye on the clock, Mitchell’s narrato-
logical oscillation between past, present and future offers ‘A prophetic
or visionary dimension’, which ‘is necessary in order to secure the one
element that advanced capitalism is systematically depriving us all
of – namely sustainable becoming or transformations [...] to repair and
compensate that which we are running out of: time’ (Braidotti 2008,
p. 274). He presents us with a post-humanist collective consciousness
of individuals willing to question and challenge the status quo of global
capitalist consumption, to act selflessly for the future sustainability of
all life on Earth. Through philosophically nomadic characters Mitchell’s
fictional space envisages hope, for ‘This anticipation of endurance, of
making it to a possible “tomorrow”, transposes energies from the future
back into the present. This is how sustainability enacts modes of crea-
tive becoming. This is a non-entropic model of energy-flow and hence
of transferral of desire’ (Braidotti 2008, pp. 273–4).
By charting a cartographical journey of intergenerational dialogue,
Mitchell presents an alternative to repetitive entropic destruction by
envisioning ‘an enlarged sense of community’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 266).
Cloud Atlas utilizes the transpositional in-between space of fiction to
create an alternative dialogic between representation and reality in its
nomadic spatiotemporal field of hope that resists phallocratic hege-
mony, for ‘My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher’
(Mitchell 2004, p. 527).
6
‘Remember You Must Live.
Remember You Most Love.
Remember You Must Leave’:
Passing through Ali Smith’s
Hotel World

The contemporary novel, according to Mark Currie, is preoccupied with

time at both a philosophical and narratological level in its engagement
with ontological conundrums confronting the modern human condi-
tion, thus fusing a ‘relationship between storytelling, future time, and
the nature of being’ (Currie 2007, p. 6). With the help of historiographic
metafiction, ‘For many years, the study of narrative has been attending
to the notion of the present as a place from which we continuously
revise stories about the past’, while we have been ‘less attentive to the
relationship between storytelling and the mode of continuous anticipa-
tion in which we attach significance to present moments’ (p. 6). That
future outlook, symptomatic of current fiction, can ‘be related to the
question of prolepsis, or the kind of fictional flashforward that conjoins
a “present” moment to a future one’, for ‘this anticipatory mode of
being might be a characteristic of contemporary culture, the contem-
porary novel, and even of human being in general’ (p. 6). Though this
explosion in

prolepsis flaunts the kind of freedom to roam [...] associated [...] with
the mind, the imagination and fiction. We might also view this as
a symptom of divided presence: that is, as a version of that modern
experience of time which tends to install within the present traces of
the past and future. (Currie 2007, pp. 21–2)

Such a rise in prolepsistic ‘anachrony’ operates, for Currie, as ‘a

performative function which produces in the world a generalised future
orientation such that the understanding of the present becomes increas-
ingly focused on the question of what it will come to mean’ (Currie
164
 Ali Smith’s Hotel World 165

2007, p. 22). Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001) precisely encapsulates that
ontologically driven prolepsis in a narrative that probes the depths of
human existence amidst a surface of globalized commodification, urg-
ing her reader prior to their inevitable demise, ‘Remember you must
live’ (2002 [2001], pp. 27, 30). But in her focal point setting of the
chronotopic Global Hotel, Smith resists examining a historically phal-
locratic human ontology devised by the tenets of Western philosophy
and, instead, ponders the position of predominantly female characters
in order to reconfigure time and space. As such, Hotel World focuses
upon time in a cosmopolitical manner, reminding its reader that time is
of the essence and that our common humanity must urgently resist the
alienating effects of patriarchy’s divisiveness to appreciate values that it
trivializes, such as cosmopolitan empathy. Structurally, its anti-linearity
queers the straightforwardness of conventional time sequences, creating
a spiralling network of intersecting narrative threads that shift between
present, future, past and beyond the grave.
The Global Hotel’s function as chronotope provides a space-time
continuum within which a variety of people pass through on their
temporal travel. In the first chapter ‘Past’, the deceased or passed Sara
Wilby (punning on Doris Day’s ‘Que Sera, Sera, Whatever Will Be, Will
Be’) tells us in Jeanette Winterson fashion that fuses form and content,
‘Here’s the story; it starts at the end’ (Smith 2002, p. 3), narrating her
own sudden death while working her second day in a job at the hotel.
Wilby reveals that ‘We were on the top floor, the third’ which ‘used to
be the servants’ quarters two hundred years ago when the house had
servants in it, and after that the house was a brothel and up there was
where the cheap girls, the more diseased or aging girls, were put to
sell their wares’ (p. 6). Despite its historical shifts in use, the building
continues to house hierarchical social-class differences since ‘now it’s a
hotel and each room costs money every night the smaller rooms still
cost a little less’ (p. 6), with those less affluent or desirable members
of society placed in its attic. Smith creates a link between historical
servant, prostitute and contemporary chambermaid, each employee of
the building forced to sell their physical labour in exchange for money.
Wilby in that sense is also a pun on buying (will-buy), with purchasing
power being all that is valued in a global market. It is no accident, then,
that she works within a Global Hotel chain, a vast soulless monopoly
of cloned capitalist enterprise that is ready to welcome its fee-paying
guests passing through the lobby of its uncannily familiar façade any-
where in the world since ‘All branches – British and international – of
Global Hotels have identical lobby design’ (p. 110). It is an oppressive
166 Time-Travellers

building where in the chapter ‘present historic’ the homeless Elspeth

crosses the street as the omniscient narrator observes that ‘From over
this side of the road you can’t not see the hotel’ and ‘the building has a
kind of face’ (p. 64). Its uncanny/unheimlich presence echoes the men-
acing house in Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde (1886), a temporal plane that
divides wealth from poverty, providing home comforts for the affluent
and no refuge for the homeless residue in the figure of Else, begging at
its door, her Christian name shortened to embody the leftover after-
thought, the ‘something else’ (p. 68) that society pretends not to notice
as it hurries across the threshold of comfort, for ‘People don’t want to
see it’ (p. 43). Notably, part of that ‘identical lobby design’ includes
‘stargazer lillies’ (p. 110), adding a menacingly funereal quality to these
hotels, as well as their horticultural hybridity echoing Global’s global-
ized multiplicity. Just as Global Hotels signify the threshold of affluence
and the aspiration of wealth for others, ‘The pink varieties are also
considered symbolic of wealth and prosperity, as well as being a sign of
aspiration.’1 Traditionally associated with innocence, purity and death,
the lilies link back also to the framing narrator Sara, who died during
the summer at age 19, because Stargazer lilies are known to bloom
‘mid-to-late summer’, have ‘a fast growth rate’ with flowers that ‘face
towards the sky’.2 Sara too has grown and reached her bloom fast during
the summer, while in her ethereal state she is now celestial rather than
earthly. She would have been born in the 1980s, while ‘Developed in
the latter part of the 20th century, the stargazer lily is a recent addition
to the lily family.’3
Hotel World, then, portrays one hotel within the Global Hotels chain,
where its transient guests serve as a trope to the nomadic supranational
citizens who inhabit contemporary British society. The five female
narratives bring the text full circle, starting with Sara Wilby, a young
woman who has fallen to her untimely death, who reflects on falling for
a female worker in a watch-repair shop, while the text concludes with
the shop assistant wearing the deceased’s watch, followed by a final
chapter overseeing the incidental lives of minor characters mentioned.
Time is clearly of the essence, as the circular watch face ticks until
the novel’s close, leaving an unconsummated yet reciprocated lesbian
love. It is very much a momento mori that, instead of wasting time, we
should ‘remember to live’, a line that marks time as it beats throughout
the heart of the narrative. Boundaries of life and death are blurred, as
the first section is narrated by a Lazarus-like narrator, come back to
warn against deferring instead of seizing the day, much like T.S. Eliot’s
Prufrock. Each of the female identities, including a Woolfian stream of
 Ali Smith’s Hotel World 167

consciousness by the dead girl’s sister, Clare Wilby, offers an experimen-

tal engagement with our temporality and insignificance in global terms.
The border of privilege and poverty is also explored, where the homeless
sleep at the threshold of this hotel, yet endure the hardships of dispos-
session, which feed global capitalism but at the cost of those who serve
it. In this Global Hotel multiple identities converge, only to move on
elsewhere; it is a stop-gap, a transient space, where clientele and casual
workers nomadically pass through in their journey between one place
and another. For the deceased chambermaid that journey transcends
the boundaries between this world and the next, indicating that, like
those who pass through the hotel, we too are only passing through
on life’s journey. Pushing ontological boundaries of life and death is a
certain trend in contemporary fiction, with the likes of Alice Sebold’s
The Lovely Bones (2002), narrated by the raped and murdered teenager
Susie Salmon, and Alan Ball’s darkly humorous television drama Six Feet
Under (2001) that centres around the Fisher family’s undertaker business
following the death of the father.
Seeing what is really there is a dominant theme in Smith’s narrative,
urging its reader to look beyond the superficial workaday banality and
recognize our own ticking clock of mortality. Constant references are
made to being invisible and to eyes: as her spirit fades away, Sara can no
longer remember the word eyes just at the point of realizing how much
she will miss ‘Seeing fires. Seeing grass. Seeing birds. Their wings. Their
beady . The things they see with. The things we see with, two of them,
stuck in a face above a nose. The word’s gone’ (Smith 2002, p. 8). When
‘People go past. They don’t see Else, or decide not to. Else watches them’
(pp. 39–40). The homeless woman is as invisible as the dead teenager,
people refusing to see that which makes them uncomfortable or chal-
lenges their narrow outlook. Sara realizes this: ‘I appeared to the father,
I appeared to the mother. I appeared to the sister. The father pretended
he couldn’t see. The more he saw, the more he looked away [...] I came
only twice to the mother. It made her cry’ (p. 13). Firmly planted in the
so-called real world, her father rejects any supernatural possibilities or
inner sight of emotional transcendence and dismisses it with reason,
while her mother responds to seeing her ghost with emotional upset.
Notably, it is the younger member of the family, Clare, who has a sen-
sory emotional intellect that has yet to be deadened by socialization to
allow the porous boundary between life and death to be breached in her
longing to connect with Sara, for ‘the sister drained me with a terrible
thirst. I couldn’t appear enough for her’ (p. 13). Aptly, Clare means clear
or bright, which signifies her clarity to distinguish her sister beyond
168 Time-Travellers

the threshold of so-called reality. The theme of seeing clearly is similar

to Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, in which many of his charac-
ters’ names signify light, just as Smith’s character Clare can also mean
bright, light or illustrious, which epitomizes her illuminated outlook.
Fading away – ‘Now it’s the deep of winter’ – Sara, narrating her story
on this, ‘my last night’ (p. 3), realizes too late the priceless preciousness
of life, for ‘now that I’m nearly gone, I’m more here than I ever was.
Now that I’m nothing but air, all I want is to breathe it’ (p. 5). Her love
for the girl working in the watch shop is another reminder that life is
a ticking clock and every moment must be lived to the full. Sara con-
templates, ‘Happy is what you are a fraction of a second before it’s too
late’ (p. 17). Smith couples Sara’s recognition of the freefall experienced
with love – ‘I fell in love. I fell pretty hard. It caught me out’ (p. 17) – to
her headlong descent to her death down the dumb waiter at work. Of
course, the play is on the notion of waiting to act on her feelings being
dumb since no one knows the minute that their time is up, leaving
her to see clearly at the moment when it is too late and her hesitation
has rendered her a ‘dumb waiter dumb waiter dumb waiter’ (p. 17).
Likewise, when ‘People go past. They don’t see Else, or decide not to.
Else watches them’ (pp. 39–40), Smith is playing with the instability
of meaning to provide a Derridean haunting of the sign. As ‘People go
past’, they are already dying or passing by and ‘They don’t see Else’, who
functions as a ghost-like seer of their fate. She ‘watches them’ pass by,
with the double sense that she ‘watches’ or times them, for their life is
limited to a short time.
Sara’s ghostly narrative points out the schizoid division between the
presence and absence of life and death by returning momentarily to
converse with her decomposing earthly body but ‘the fitting was ill,
she was broken and rotting’ (Smith 2002, p. 15). Notably, ‘The things
she saw with had blackened’ (p. 15), as the ability to see life has been
lost forever. Schizophrenically, she narrates ‘We were a girl, we died
young [...] Hers/mine. She/I’ (pp. 9–10). The late Sara Wilby is simulta-
neously present and absent in this narrative, having passed she is pres-
ent to tell us that her time has gone along with her bodily frame. Smith
is self-consciously alluding to the first-person narrative process itself,
which Currie identifies as ‘the schizophrenia involved in self-narration
and the split that it entails between the subject and object of narrative’
(Currie 1998, p. 117). Sara’s disjointed narrative ability to travel rapidly
through time and space no longer constrained by her physicality is a
feature of contemporary fiction and cultural globalization since ‘the
schizophrenic experience is somehow more faithful to the condition
 Ali Smith’s Hotel World 169

of postmodern culture than the normal controlled admission of mean-

ings as an unfolding sentence or narrative’ with ‘an inability to observe
the proper boundaries between meanings’ and ‘to experience selfhood
not as an ordered narrative but as multiple identification amongst the
babble of discourses’ (Currie 1998, p. 103). Like Sara, ‘There may then
be a sense in which we are all moving towards a schizophrenic mode
of cultural experience, as our minds change in response to space-time
compression’ (p. 103). Experiencing time and locality as fragmentary
mirrors her broken body and its severance from her consciousness
which generates a fragmented narrative: ‘Here’s the story. When I hit
the basement whoo I was broke apart [...] I went to the funeral to see
who I’d been [...] it is very nice, where they buried her’ (Smith 2002,
p. 9). Disconnected from the spatial, chronological and psychological
ties of her former reality, ‘I chose the saddest people and I followed
them to see where we’d lived. They seemed vaguely familiar. They sat at
the front in the church. I couldn’t be sure. I had to guess [...] After the
funeral we went home’ (pp. 9–10).
Engaging with the fragmentation of contemporary life, Smith creates
an entirely schizophrenic text of multiple discourses, each dialogical
commentary connected but divided from the other chapters, just as glo-
balization creates links yet generates divisions across humanity since, ‘if
globalisation is conceived as a process of unification, it is at the same
time a process of diversification, of an increasing awareness of diversity
or an increasing individuation of cultures on the global stage’ (Currie
1998, p. 104). As a queer Scottish woman writer, Smith is concerned
with those on the peripheries of Anglo-heteropatriarchal hegemony just
as ‘Literary studies shows a marked tendency towards fragmentation,
or towards little narratives, local narratives, small identity narratives,
which break the hegemony of universal values, demoting grand narra-
tives and their universalistic pretensions’ (Currie 1998, p. 108). In Hotel
World, queer, young, female, Scottish, homeless, sick, deceased and
grieving voices are centralized narratives, those traditionally excluded
and rendered invisible by mainstream culture. Like Woolf’s Mrs
Dalloway, which charts the larks and plunges of life’s highs and lows,
Smith explores the complexities of the everyday tragedies and joys that
mortals are faced with, summed up in Sara’s accidental death plunge
that opens the novel with the unpunctuated, ‘Woooooooo-hooooooo
what a fall what a soar what a plummet what a dash into dark into
light what a plunge’ (Smith 2002, p. 3). Refuting the conventions of
acceptable English, Smith’s narrative fuses fragmentation and fluidity,
rejecting the boring railway-line sentence despised by Woolf. It inverts
170 Time-Travellers

the conventional narrative order, with the dead Sara saying ‘Here’s the
story; it starts at the end’ (p. 3), playing on the conventional beginning
and end of a novel as well as life.
Rather than dying in old age, Smith inverts the so-called natural
order by killing Sara off at the tender age of 19 with her whole life in
front of her yet already past. Emphasizing the fluidity of her queerly
feminist text, Smith casts Sara as a champion swimmer, an amphibian-
like human who is in her element when she is in water, functioning
as a liminal space. Jago Morrison similarly regards Winterson’s writ-
ing as a disruption of the conventions of time, gender and sexuality
that have often been met hostilely as arrogant, ‘But then, her work
poses some awkward challenges to the status quo. Time and sex/gender
are interlocking dimensions of the cultural and ideological complex
that allow us to “know our place”’ (Morrison 2003, p. 96). ‘They are’,
continues Morrison, ‘prime constituents of the social narratives that
enable us to articulate our identities, even to ourselves’ (p. 96). As a
queer female writer, however, Winterson questions rather than accepts
the conventionally subordinate place of female identity, particularly
lesbian, within heteropatriarchal ideology. The weight of antagonism
against her, according to Morrison, is a direct correlation of her political
resistance to conventions, for ‘In Winterson’s dissection of structures so
integral to the body of culture, it is hardly surprising that she uncov-
ers some raw nerves’ (p. 96). If Winterson refuses to know her place,
this is very much also the case with her contemporary Smith, who also
defies Western philosophical logic at the heart of our cultural being and
replaces it with a queer counter-discourse. It is no accident that Smith
intertextualizes Winterson, mentioning ‘the Powerbook’ (Smith 2002,
p. 133) in reference to Penny’s laptop, but undoubtedly also alluding to
Winterson’s publication of that name just one year prior to Hotel World,
while ‘buried treasure’ (p. 195) is something that crops up throughout
The Powerbook (2000) and Winterson’s other works like The Stone Gods
(2007). Indeed, Winterson wrote an article on Smith for The Times on 25
April 2003, arguing that ‘Ali Smith can’t be captured easily. Her ambi-
tion is to shatter the way we usually see things. She doesn’t want the
obvious frame, the arranged picture’ (Winterson 2003). Believing Smith
to be ‘The real thing’ (Winterson 2003) is high praise indeed for some-
one who is clearly looking back through Winterson’s literary continuum
to build her own queer outlook (Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping [2004]
pays homage to Smith as well as Scottish writer Muriel Spark in the epi-
graphs ‘Remember you must live’ and ‘Remember you must die’, while
the novel itself reworks Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island [1883]
 Ali Smith’s Hotel World 171

with characters Silver and Pew). Like cosmopolitanism, Smith’s fiction

refuses to be pinned down into a ‘captured’ interpretation. Through
her framing deceased narrator Sara, Smith disrupts conventions and
comfort zones while gaining access to multiple spatial time zones,
just as Morrison argues that, for Winterson, ‘the subject born without
the anchorage of a descent line becomes a wanderer, who is capable
of travelling outside the boundaries of “normalcy” and the known’
(Morrison 2003, p. 108). As with Winterson’s wandering changelings
like Jeanette in Oranges who can travel beyond recognizable thresholds,
Sara can nomadically shift between dimensions and time zones capable
of scrutinizing and laying bare the bones of life that are suppressed by
the patriarchal gaze. Intent on avoiding Western philosophical notions
of time and ontology, Smith’s text porously manoeuvres between fixed
boundaries, wandering as Sara ‘hovered’ (Smith 2002, p. 10) across space
and time. Rosi Braidotti considers this kind of philosophical nomadism
as a vital way for feminists to disrupt Western philosophical thought’s
hidebound certainties and flout conventional binaries in favour of fluid
cosmopolitical empathy, for ‘nomadic thinking is a minority position’
(Braidotti 1994, p. 29). The problem with ‘Philosophy – as a discipline
of – thought is’ that it ‘is highly phallogocentric and antinomadic; it
maintains a privileged bond to domination, power, and violence and
consequently requires mechanisms of exclusion and domination as part
of its standard practices’ (p. 33). In comparison, ‘nomadic consciousness
consists in not taking any kind of identity as permanent. The nomad is
only passing through’ (p. 33). Sara is precisely an example of Braidottian
‘nomadic consciousness’, a disembodied ethereal being who is capable
of travelling across temporal-spatial ground to enlighten us of the illu-
sion of reality and attempt a shift of priorities.
Like Tiresias, without eyes Sara can now see clearly to warn us against
wasting life and time, saying ‘I have a message for you, I told the spar-
row and the empty pool. Listen. Remember you must live’ (Smith
2002, p. 27). She continues, ‘Wooooo-hoooooo I have a message for
you, I tell the black sky above the hotel’ (p. 30) and, at the final part
of her ‘past’ narrative she addresses the reader directly: ‘You. Yes, you.
It’s you I’m talking to’ (p. 31) to impress the relevance of her untimely
death upon us lest we fritter away precious hours. For Sara ‘the story’
is to ‘Remember you must live. Remember you most love. Remainder
you mist leaf’ (p. 30), reflecting ‘Ah, love. The full weight of an other’
(p. 28). In disjointed language full of gaps and silences, Sara wants us
to savour life and the connectedness of loving an Other to enhance our
self before all that remains of us is mist, for ‘Remember you must leave’
172 Time-Travellers

(p. 28). Structurally Smith connects Sara’s chapter to Else’s, Penny’s and
Lise’s towards the end of the first narrative: ‘Here’s a woman being swal-
lowed by the doors. She is well-dressed [...] Here’s another one inside,
wearing the uniform of the hotel and working behind its desk. She is
ill and she doesn’t know it yet’ (p. 30). As a blind seer, Sara’s insight
into the future narratives of other characters anachronistically notes:
‘Life, about change. Here’s a girl, next to me, dressed in blankets, sit-
ting along from the hotel doors right here, on the pavement. Her life,
change’ (p. 30). It is through her dead eyes that we are introduced to
the circumstances that are yet to unfold for the other narrators who all
converge through the chronotopic hotel, with their futures already his-
torical knowledge for Sara. Thus, the third-person narrator of ‘present
historic’, the chapter featuring Else, is, ultimately, narrated by Sara, who
has shifted away from her own subjective schizoid narrative to offer an
omniscient perspective on other characters, given her ghostly presence
that can see everything just as Eliot claimed that all other characters
converged in Tiresias in The Waste Land (1922), throbbing between the
two lives of here and hereafter. Capable of time-space compression, Sara
travels and sees everything, noting all the ills and joys of the world to
behold that escape our focus and, as such, frames the remaining chap-
ters for us to view. She is comparable to Amber in Smith’s The Accidental
(2005); as Currie astutely observes, ‘That Amber is in some way external
to time is something that the novel continually suggests. She wears a
watch which is stopped at 7 o’clock, so that when time is passing for
Magnus, it is static for Amber’ (Currie 2007, p. 116). Sara too exists out-
side of time, an ethereal commentator on humanity’s ignorance of its
mortality for, like Amber, ‘one day my watch stopped’ and ‘The hands
of my watch were stuck at ten to two, though that wasn’t the right
time’ (Smith 2002, p. 17). Taking it to be repaired, ‘I fell’ for ‘the girl
behind the counter’ (p. 18), her erotic hurtled awakening serving as a
forerunner to her thanatotic plunge. But to extend Currie’s comments,
I would argue that Smith positions these characters outside of time to
queer it: when Sara’s watch worked ‘I had expected all my life to fall for
some boy, or some man or other, and I had been waiting and watch-
ing for him’ (p. 17), setting her inner assumptions to those of external
interpellations and putting the life she should be living on hold by
futilely ‘waiting and watching for him’. However, it is when patriarchy’s
symbolic watch time malfunctions that Sara has the time to query and
notice her own queer desire, which simultaneously throws her into the
dilemma of being true to her inner self or succumbing to heteronorma-
tive discourses, for ‘It caught me out. It made me happy, then it made
 Ali Smith’s Hotel World 173

me miserable. What to do?’ (p. 17). Procrastinating rather like Hamlet,

she winds up with her own skull in her hands, broken and battered at
the bottom of the dumb waiter, realizing at the moment of impact that
her queer cosmopolitan love should have been celebrated not feared.
As omniscient narrator of ‘present historic’, she relates Else’s present
to us, though it is already history in our act of reading the text, while
hinting strongly at her future demise. Just as Sara frames the other
chapters, Currie notes that ‘Amber [...] is a framing device for the novel
as a whole’ (Currie 2007, p. 117). Smith embodies omniscient and first-
person narrative within the disembodied Sara and, as such, it might be
closer to what Nicholas Royle refers to as ‘telepathic narration’ (Royle
2003, p. 269) in his discussion of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, a text that
I have already acknowledged to be similar to Hotel World in its preoccu-
pation with time. But, to my mind, a more apt terminology for Smith’s
text would be ‘nomadic narration’ rather than ‘telepathic narration’,
insofar as it exemplifies Braidotti’s concept of ‘nomadic consciousness’,
a philosophically wandering narrator who deconstructs our ontologi-
cal comfort zone. Queering conventional literature, Smith rejects its
heteropatriarchal norms and presents an alternative worldview, for
‘Telepathy is both thematically and structurally at work in modern fic-
tional narratives’ in their desire to resist ‘that promoted by the religious,
panoptical delusion of omniscience’ (Royle 2003, p. 261). For Royle, it
is futile to talk of omniscient narration when psychoanalysis reminds
us of the ‘impossibility of complete knowledge of one’s own thoughts
and feelings, let alone complete knowledge of anyone else’s’ (p. 261).
This point is also addressed in Currie’s discussion of Royle, where he
agrees that ‘“Omniscience” [...] is simply the wrong word for this basic
predicament in fictional narrative’ (Currie 2007, p. 127). Omniscient
narration is ideologically entwined with Christian discourse ‘in which
Christian subjects are the objects of knowledge to an all-knowing god’,
but it is also problematic ‘because it is simply misleading’ (p. 127) in its
failure to acknowledge the unfathomable depths of the unconscious.
According to Royle and Currie, this omniscient shortfall is bound up
with a text’s unconscious and relates to ‘Derrida’s notion of the secret
as literature’s essential characteristic’ (Currie 2007, p. 128). As someone
who has ‘past’, Sara returns to tell us the secret to living well, but she
is nevertheless incapable of omniscient knowledge given that she too
is a fictional construction. Even as she narrates, Sara loses words, the
very tools necessary for narration, and informs us that she cannot be
certain who her family are (only that ‘They seemed vaguely familiar [...]
I couldn’t be sure. I had to guess’ [Smith 2002, p. 10]) or which shop girl
174 Time-Travellers

she had loved while alive, for ‘I hope it was the right shop. I hope she
was the right girl’ (p. 29). To emphasize the uncertainties and schizo-
phrenic narration, Smith splits Sara into rotting corpse and fading mind:
‘she was broken and rotting’ (p. 15) and ‘she said [...] Go away. Don’t
come back. We’ve no business with each other any more’ (p. 26), while
‘I want to ask her the name again for the things we see with [...] I have
already forgotten it again, the name for the lift for dishes [...] I lose the
words’ (p. 26). Hotel World explores the narratological complexity of the
relationship between narrator and character, just as Mrs Dalloway does,
but offering not just a telepathic communication but a nomadic com-
munication that flies in the face of the absolute certainties of Christian
omniscience and its fixed territorial boundaries: Sara’s corpse asks her
ethereal consciousness/unconsciousness ‘Don’t you have a home to go
to? Aren’t you supposed to go to heaven, or hell, or somewhere?’ (p. 26),
as the surety of grand narratives slips away.
Through the queer lens of Sara’s telepathic narrative of disappear-
ing language, the homeless Elspeth begs for spare change, the words
reduced to the refrain of ‘(Spr sm chn?)’ (Smith 2002, p. 35) that is
repeated throughout. Like the diminished signs that are a repeated
mumble, Elspeth’s reduced circumstances leave her short changed with
even a shortened name of Else. The chapter opens ‘Else is outside.
Small change is all she’s made’ (p. 35), signifying with staccato sen-
tence precision her poverty – on the ‘outside’ of society looking in and
only able to accumulate financial dross. Her patch is poignant, ‘a good
place here outside the hotel, and it’s hers [...] The sky is the ceiling’
(p. 35), emphasizing the fine line of the hotel threshold separating the
haves and have nots which is nevertheless insurmountable. Like Sara’s
ghostly visitations ‘most people don’t see Else there at all’ (p. 36), as
people remain detached and ignorant of others. From her street posi-
tion of invisibility ‘Else watches the girl’ (p. 36) who in a later chapter
is introduced as Sara’s bereaved sister, Clare. As Sara informed us in the
previous chapter, Else is ill with a persistent pneumonic cough that
will undoubtedly quicken her demise, due to sleeping rough which, in
turn, is making life even tougher on the streets since ‘You never make
anything if you’ve got a fucking cough. They walk around you in a wide
berth’ (p. 42). Suffering abject poverty, ‘Else remembers that word, from
school. Poor. Then it was a word from history [...] The poor. What his-
tory worked to improve, to make things better for. But that was then.
This is now’ (p. 44).
Paralleled with the Victorian poor, Else exists in a time-space com-
pression where social progress has left her and countless others behind.
 Ali Smith’s Hotel World 175

In a political statement ‘She wraps newspaper round her feet’ which

reports ‘BRITAIN MASSIVELY MORE UNEQUAL THAN 20 YEARS AGO.
ONE IN FIVE PEOPLE LIVES BELOW BREADLINE’ (Smith 2002, p. 45).
The history of social-class struggle is being reversed in an individualis-
tic globalized greed which widens the poverty gap, with history itself
reduced to another consumer commodity, for

This historic city she’s sitting on the pavement of, full of its medieval
buildings and its modern developments teetering on top of medieval
sewers, is all that’s left of history now; somewhere for tourists to
bring their traveller’s cheques to in the summer. Actual history is
gone. (Smith 2002, p. 45)

As with the title Hotel World, the world itself has become like a hotel:
globalization allows tourists to travel geographically and through the
internet at fast speeds that compress geographical space and compress
time travel between places. The street Else is sitting on, like the chro-
notopic hotel, is a timespace of different eras spanning up until the
present that imbricate and converge in this space, just as her own his-
tory and present overlap in her consciousness, remembering ‘ten years
back. She is in London’ (Smith 2002, p. 57) and ‘she is fourteen and
just home from school’ (p. 60). She is like a relic from history living
now, for ‘Her insides are blistered [...] When Else breathes, when she
moves, it feels like broken glass’ (pp. 49–50) and ‘She has shattered her
insides, living the way she is’ (p. 50), like the broken body of Sara who
is also now past. Consigned to history books, people refuse to see Else
as the victim of a contemporary social ill, keeping her abject horror out
of their field of vision. Emphasizing Else’s abjection, Smith shows us
‘Her own spit, from inside her lungs, over there catching the light on
the stone’ (p. 56). She is the residue of society, discarded into the gutter
of global consumption’s waste, for ‘So many of the things on the street
were close to people, intimate with them, even inside their mouths,
before they ended up here’ (p. 56), as ‘something Else’ (p. 68). Like the
hotel, her body is not valued as a permanent home for someone’s love
but regarded as a temporary commodity to be prostituted, just as her
memory of her 14-year-old self shows ‘Mr Whitelaw and she [...] having
sex in the front room’ (p. 60), where she lies on the couch as compli-
ant as her Snow White puppet for his sexual satiation. Working as a
receptionist at the hotel, Lise (almost an anagram of Else) demonstrates
the capacity of humanity to show cosmopolitan empathy as a buffer
against the hostilities of globalization, metaphorically encapsulated by
176 Time-Travellers

the harshness of the winter weather. Hearing Else’s cough, Lise reasons
that ‘it’s supposed to get to minus six windchill tonight. We’ve a lot of
rooms. Nobody in most of them. You’d be welcome to one of them’
(p. 57). The corporate vastness of Global Hotels and its empty rooms
emphasizes the cruelty of Else’s homelessness outside its doors, which
will only welcome ‘guests’ with cash flow, which is at odds with Lise’s
humanitarian offer of shelter and food.
In the chapter ‘future conditional’, Sara’s omniscient narrative offers
a proleptic insight into ‘some time in the future’ (Smith 2002, p. 81) of
Lise’s life when she is bedridden and incapacitated by illness. This is the
continuation of Sara’s narrative in ‘past’ when she sees ‘a woman [...]
wearing the uniform of the hotel and working behind its desk’ who ‘is
ill and she doesn’t know it yet. Life, about change’ (p. 30). Continuing
the message of remembering to live, Lise’s name puns on the idea that
our lives are only leased to us as temporary abodes that are in perpetual
motion rather than permanently fixed points in time. Like a broken
watch her life has stopped, lying isolated ‘in a block of tenement flats
six floors up’ (p. 82), while outside of her four walls ‘people were getting
on with lives’ (p. 83). Like Sara’s spectral loss of language, Lise’s fading
memory and immobility render her ironically incapable of filling in her
application for ‘Incapacity For Work Questionnaire’ (p. 86) and creating a
fluid narrative that mirrors her confused weak state. Given her compas-
sion towards Else in the previous chapter, we tend to agree when she
feels the injustice of her illness, given that ‘I am a nice person’ (p. 81).
But the utter randomness of life is emphasized in Smith’s novel because
it refutes traditional heteropatriarchal literary and cultural traditions of
structure and meaning where life’s journey is deceptively plotted with
linear precision. Instead of experiencing wellness, ‘lying unmoving in
bed’ she felt ‘as if she had been upended over the wall of a well like that
one in the last paragraph and had been falling in the same monoto-
nous nothing way for weeks, down in it like Alice hazily pondering bats
and cats, through nothing but languid gravity’ (p. 84). Through self-
consciousness and intertextuality Smith draws attention to the seem-
ingly unreal state in which Lise finds herself, trapped in a menacing
Wonderland of lost time, where ‘all this time she (Lise) had seemed to
be hardly moving, though in reality the sides of the tunnel were flying
up past her’ (p. 84). Such confusion of time and space reflects time’s
relativity rather than linearity, paralleling the quite different timescale
of Sara’s fall to her death, for ‘the importance of Einstein’s work was
certainly immense, supplanting Newton’s conception of a universal,
abstract, mechanistic time with Relativity’s quite different model of
 Ali Smith’s Hotel World 177

a flexible four-dimensional space-time’ (Morrison 2003, p. 26). Again

there is an echo of Eliot’s Prufrock and its thematic concern with time,
for ‘In a minute she would sit up, in a minute find the pencil’ (Smith
2002, p. 87) responds to ‘In a minute there is time / For decisions and
revisions which a minute will reverse’ (Eliot 1986, p. 11). In her preoc-
cupation with this subject Smith is positioning herself alongside her
peers since ‘time has emerged as one of the central issues that need
to be grappled with in contemporary fiction’ (Morrison 2003, p. 26).
But Smith’s utilization of space-time compression and prolepsis offers
a fiction of chrono-spatial queerness that can disrupt the conventions
of phallocratic traditions – charted in Woolf’s attack on Big Ben in
Mrs Dalloway – bending the rules of chronological, spatial, linguistic
and literary order and disfiguring the cogito to incorporate the other.
Collapsing the threshold between reality and fiction, Lise’s mother
Deirdre, a composer of commercial rhymes, considers her illness as
‘real art at last’ (Smith 2002, p. 92), inspiring her to write ‘her new
epic poem, to be called “Hotel World” [...] a metaphysical pun [...] on
the Global Hotel chain where Lise had worked’ (p. 93). In terms of
time, her mother turns up at a precise point each day – ‘Four o’clock’
(p. 120) – and is clearly shaken by her daughter’s incapacity, for ‘Her
hand held itself back so that it almost shook’ (p. 120), while ‘Gently she
lifted the hair off Lise’s face, tucked it behind her daughter’s ear, away
from her eyes [...] Ah, love’ (p. 122). The repetition from earlier regard-
ing the importance of love reiterates Smith’s message that as humans we
must connect with each other rather than remain isolated. The world is
otherwise a cold, heartless place, since ‘Being ill is revelatory. It reveals
to you exactly what well people think of ill people’ (p. 99). Shut away
from society, Lise’s illness is out of sight out of mind and is met with
the same discomfort that passers-by feel for the homeless Else or the
ghostly Sara, each of them in turn rendered invisible in their otherness.
As queer seer, Sara (who exists outside of conventional time sequences)
gives hope through her proleptic narrative, which anachronistically
shifts between the present of Lise’s current healthy working life in
‘present historic’, and her near future condition which occurs as the
present in ‘future conditional’. Within the ‘future conditional’ chapter,
then, Sara is prophetically offering a window into Lise’s future. Lise’s
memories of her former healthy working life relate back to the ‘present
historic’ chapter when she was unaware of her illness. Sara’s narrative
also sees a more distant future time, for ‘In bed ill in six months’ time,
Lise will be unable to recall the precise scent of the Global lobby’, while
‘In two years’ time, on holiday in Canada [...] she will shelter in the
178 Time-Travellers

Ottawa Global and as she enters its lobby will unexpectedly remember
small sensory details of her time spent working for Global’ (p. 111). All
of these spatiotemporal shifts span between ‘her old gone life before she
was ill and before she got better’ (p. 111). Just as Lise offered Else shel-
ter when she worked as a receptionist, the same Global Hotel chain is
where she seeks refuge from the inclement weather. All the time Smith
is concerned with the preciousness of human life and its temporari-
ness: gifted with future recovery, Lise’s fate will be inevitable morbidity,
and its timespan utterly random. Rather than devaluing human life by
remaining invisible to each other and lacking cosmopolitical empathy,
Smith pulls our attention towards the priceless value of humanity and
away from the vacuous globalized commodification that otherwise
consumes us. In that sense, ‘Life, about change’ (p. 30) is a reminder of
our ontological clock and the shifts that occur within our lifespan but
also a rejection of the other ‘change’ that preoccupies us in terms of
economic currency.
Intent on taking us on our visit like Eliot’s Prufrock, Sara then gives
an insight into ‘Penny’ in the chapter entitled ‘perfect’. It is no accident
that Penny channel hops onto porn and then to a medium whose man-
tra is ‘Remember you must die. Remember you must die’ (Smith 2002,
p. 129), the bridge between erotic and thanatotic again emphasized.
A journalist, ‘Penny had been spending another dreary night working
on another publicity job in another hotel’ (p. 138), her affluence noted
when checking in by Lise, for ‘someone who stays in hotels like this one
are paid for with the credit card of the national Sunday broadsheet for
which she works’ (pp. 111–12). An embodiment of global capitalism,
Penny is ‘someone whose year of birth is the same as Lise’s yet whose
clothes come from shops where even the air hanging over the clothes
is exclusive; clothes blessed by the smell of money, unbuyable in this
town or this part of the country even now in new postmodern Britain’
(p. 112). Reflected through Penny’s gaze, Lise internalizes her own com-
parable insignificance, ‘A neat no one [...] emptied of self’ (p. 112) and
the unbridgeable gap between them despite postmodernity’s alleged
breaking up of the discourses of power in favour of marginalized voices.
While ‘Lise’s sensitivity about money is heightened’ (p. 113) due to her
bank confiscating her cheque book, Penny – with plenty of wealth and
a coined name – responds to Clare’s request for ‘a two or a ten pence
piece’ with ‘I never carry money’ (p. 136), since she has the luxury of
charging expenses to her employer’s credit card account. Ironically it is
the homeless Else who can spare some change to help Clare unscrew
the boarding that is concealing the dumb waiter shaft that her sister
 Ali Smith’s Hotel World 179

Sara fell down. Offering assistance because she was otherwise bored,
Penny’s ‘finger and thumb were numb at the tips, raw, red and scored
where she had gripped the money’ while ‘the design on the money had
imprinted itself in her skin’ (p. 145). Stamped by the currency which
she represents, Penny feels ‘cheated’ that behind the removed panel lies
only ‘a long shaft of nothing at all [...] Nothing. The nothing that ran
the length of this hotel like a spine had appalled her’ (p. 145). Like the
emptiness at the heart of capitalist greed, Global Hotel is centred upon
a void, a nothingness which swallows up cheap labour and generates a
perpetual cycle of guests in a tide of cash flow. As Penny notes, ‘every-
thing had pretended luxury and been slightly shabby [...] Hotels were
such a sham’ (pp. 130–1). Experiencing a momentary transcendence
away from class divides, she connects with Else, symbolized when ‘She
pulled off her glove and held out her hand’ (p. 173), the touching of
hands indicating a humanitarian union. However, it is short-lived for
‘By the time she was back at the hotel Penny had become anxious about
having written a cheque for so much’ (p. 174) and immediately calls her
bank to cancel it, reassured that ‘For a minute she thought she’d gone
soft [...] something inside her which had been forced open had sealed
up again’ (p. 178). Like the panel concealing the empty spine at the cen-
tre of the hotel, Penny has briefly felt exposed during her connection to
Else and responds by retreating to her comfort zone of hard emptiness
while condescendingly justifying her lack of empathy, for ‘If you were
poor, you were poor. You couldn’t handle money. Money was nothing
but a problem if you weren’t used to it. It must be a relief, to have none.
It was no accident that the words poor and pure were so alike’ (p. 178).
For Penny, life is indeed about the currency of change.
Despite her vast wealth in comparison to Else, Penny ‘had the hotel
shampoo [...] all packed away in her case for her early start back down
south tomorrow’ (Smith 2002, p. 179), as Smith succinctly captures
the continued poverty gap between the North/South divide in ‘Blair’s
Britain at the Dawn of the New Millennium’ (p. 177). Though a Scottish
writer, Smith resists geopolitically pinpointing her setting apart from
a passing reference to ‘High in the north on a street in a town in the
misty, cold-bound Highlands’ (p. 226) or ‘Down the country and over
the border’ (p. 227), or Lise’s illness-ridden dream of travelling on a pig
‘at a dangerous speed over a landscape, fluid beneath her, that looks like
Wales or the Scottish borders’ (p. 107). While attempting to categorize
Scottish women writers, Aileen Christianson and Alison Lumsden nev-
ertheless point out that ‘What perhaps is most notable about Scottish
women writers today is their diversity [...] it is important to celebrate the
180 Time-Travellers

plurality within Scottish women’s writing’ (Christianson and Lumsden

2000, p. 6). Smith’s writing is best regarded in that light given her fluid
fiction that often only mentions Scotland as part of a wider geopolitical
canvas that cosmopolitically travels between the border of Scotland and
England, while positioning itself within a wider globality, with mention
for instance of Canada, to where many Scots have relocated. In that
sense Smith is following a literary trend with the likes of A.L. Kennedy
and Janice Galloway who, ‘both in their different ways move away from
traditional constructions of both Scotland and the Scottish woman.
Most importantly, perhaps,’ continues Kirsten Stirling, ‘they are able
to break away from the idea that being a Scottish writer requires a
particular subject-matter or style’ (Stirling 2008, p. 126). Thanks to the
cosmopolitical influence of devolution in Scotland, Berthold Schoene
posits that

No longer regarded, or led to regard itself, as exclusively Scottish and

thus found or finding itself lacking, it becomes free to reconceive
of itself in broader terms, with reference to other cultures (not just
English culture), indeed as situated within a vibrant network of inter-
dependent cultural contexts. (Schoene 2007, p. 9)

Nevertheless, Schoene later contradicts this assertion by discussing

‘the injurious limitations of the Scottish outlook [...] with Scottish
literature’s ongoing proliferation of solipsistic narratives’ (Schoene 2009,
p. 74), while refraining from pinpointing precisely what he means and
generalizing about an entire rich body of literature. Smith is precisely
one of those Scottish writers who, particularly with her multiply fluid
identity manoeuvring across the interstices of being female, lesbian,
working-class by upbringing but now middle-class, Scottish by birth
but now living in England, and no doubt numerous other categories,
spans the spectrum of identity performativity. For Eleanor Bell, ‘The aim
of contemporary Scottish literature is to emphasize individuality and
intra-communal difference rather than to construct dubious all-in-one
myths of a nationalist quality’ (Bell 2004, p. 144). As such, rejecting
those who would essentialize Scottish fiction, she asserts that ‘While
retaining its own characteristic timbre and twist it has become truly cos-
mopolitan’ (p. 144). It is that cosmopolitan ethos that is clearly at work
in Smith’s writing, defying reductive geopolitical, gendered or sexual
categorization while imbricating all facets of imagined identities into
creating a richly diverse negotiation of humanity’s capacity for love,
empathy and loss amidst the dehumanization of global capitalism. In
 Ali Smith’s Hotel World 181

the relentless march of history, Smith offers a glimpse of human suffer-

ing and hope, showing our temporality and insignificance in the grand
scheme of things while simultaneously pointing out our priceless value
and the need to cherish a life that is ultimately fleeting. While history
is safely impersonal and distant – alluded to by Else as she remembers
the poor being a subject studied in history at school – Smith shows the
personal face of suffering and loss in our present time. The importance
of love and human connectivity in the face of our mortal briefness and
the forces of global capitalism is precisely the same message conveyed
in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, where he says, ‘From this exis-
tence of two moments, we have to steal a life’ (Aslam 2004, p. 279). To
remain grounded the best we can do, it would seem, is to lose ourselves
in an other by falling head over heels, like Sara does for the girl in the
watch shop, as ‘Falling for her had made me invisible’ (Smith 2002,
p. 23). Each day Sara stands outside the shop to catch a glimpse of her
beloved and ‘On my eighteenth day of waiting, I let myself look for
one last time [...] as she passed [...] It was my first night at a new job’
(p. 24). Given that ‘On my second night we were up on the top floor’
(p. 24), Sara dies after 19 short days of being lovesick, just as she has
only lived 19 short years. Remembering her last visit to see the girl, Sara
mentions that ‘she passed’, as the girl walks by her, but also narrating
through the hindsight of knowing that the girl is now ‘passed’ to Sara
as she is about to die. Smith, in many ways, is following a cosmopo-
litical Scottish outlook that is evident in the work of Alasdair Gray: in
his postmodern fusion of fantasy and realism in Lanark (1981), where
the surrogate author metafictionally explains that ‘The Thaw narrative
shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by your
narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason’ (Gray
1982, p. 484). Without personal and collective communitarian love, as
a cosmopolitan necessity, these texts signal that globalization will per-
petuate division, discord and anomie.
In ‘future in the past’, Sara observes her sister Clare following her
bereavement and trying to cope with her personal loss. Reflecting the
incoherent yet highly astute mindset of someone suffering trauma,
Sara’s insight into Clare’s stream of consciousness offers a narrative that
spills out of Standard English parameters, often without conventional
punctuation and spattered throughout with many ‘&’ symbols rather
than the conventional ‘and’. As Clare’s name signifies clarity and preci-
sion, it is surely not accidental that it echoes Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway,
who also offers an insightful perspective and whose name shares the
meaning of clear and bright. Sara’s passing, for Clare, is notably ‘like it
182 Time-Travellers

is like reading a book yeah like say you were reading a book & you were
halfway through it really into the story [...] it just goes blank it stops
there aren’t any more words on it’ (Smith 2002, p. 190). Metafictionally,
Clare’s stream of consciousness is alluding to Hotel World in its thematic
preoccupation with life, love and death, just as she is personally refer-
ring to the chaotic experience of sudden bereavement, where in meta-
phorical mid-conversation with someone the line of communication
is abruptly broken because they cease to exist. Those traumatic gaps,
silences, sudden endings and mid-beginnings experienced in the book’s
content are structurally charted through its anti-linear structure which
Smith succinctly narrates through the already passed Sara: ‘Here’s the
story; it starts at the end’ (p. 3), signalling from the outset that the text
will defy chronological, spatial and narratological conventions. A work
of contemporary philosophical fiction, Hotel World epitomizes ‘the
strange temporal structures that have developed in the novel in recent
decades’ and carries a ‘domain of understanding or knowledge’ that
is ‘occupied by the contemporary novel on the subject of time’, pon-
dering ‘what effects these structures might exert in the world’ (Currie
2007, p. 1). Sara’s narrative is fragmentary, each character providing a
fragment of the whole structure: the main characters that we empathize
with are Sara, Clare, Lise and Else and, interestingly, their names collec-
tively sound and look rather like Clarissa. Sara says that ‘When I hit the
basement whoo I was broke apart’ (Smith 2002, p. 9) – her shattered self
not only divides her consciousness from her own body, but also divides
between the other characters to come in the narrative. They are all con-
nected to her, as the narrative events occur only after Sara’s death. In
a world fragmented by phallocentric hegemony, Smith weaves a con-
nection between these women in her queer cosmofeminist text. Sara
leaves it too late to use her voice in a heteropatriarchal world, afraid to
declare her love for the shop-girl, and her narrative exists as a reminder
that women particularly must speak up for themselves and be willing
to query and potentially queer conventional love rather than remain
silenced within the confines of phallocratic authority. Clarissa Dalloway,
then, uncannily haunts the text as a feminist remembrance – rather
than declare her love for Sally Seton she suppresses her queerness and
enters into the heteronormative conventions of an unsatisfactory mar-
riage, just as Sara fails to announce her love prior to death. Importantly,
too, the association mentioned earlier of Sara’s narrative with the blind
seer Tiresias in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is further connected by Eliot’s
‘Notes on The Waste Land’, which inform us that ‘Tiresias [...] is yet the
most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest [...] all the
 Ali Smith’s Hotel World 183

women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias’ (Eliot 1986,
pp. 46–7). In Hotel World, the character who does not converge as part of
Sara/Clarissa is Penny. The latter is a woman who has bought into patri-
archy’s global capitalist hegemony and, as such, refuses to recognize
the plight of women as outcasts in such a hostile world and thus fails
to connect in a cosmofeminist response. Clare’s narrative with its gaps,
abbreviations and silences mirrors her deceased sister Sara’s, with the
latter serving as a framing narrative for the entire text. Words are disap-
pearing or not ‘remembered’ because, ultimately, people are losing the
ability to communicate in a rapidly globalized world. Smith is advocat-
ing cosmofeminist community and the language of love as a response
to this silence, just as Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses the need for
‘cosmopolitanism’ to ‘develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its
older meaning, of living together, association. And conversation in its
modern sense, too’ (Appiah 2007, pp. xvi–xvii).
The final chapter, ‘present’, brings us up to the present of the narra-
tive setting and Sara’s ghostly voice sounds ever more like the seer as
she guides us through lives and landscape and offering glimpses into
the minutiae of people’s otherwise hidden lives, while also referring to
‘the ghost of Diana, Princess of Wales [...] again today on the pages of
this morning’s Daily Mail, still selling its copies by breathing her back
to a life that’s slightly more dated each time’ (Smith 2002, p. 227) or
‘Solomon Pavy, child actor who died aged scarse thirteen nearly four
hundred years ago in the summer of 1602’ (p. 228) or ‘the ghost of
Dusty Springfield, popular singer of the nineteen sixties’ singing about
‘the endless spinning cycles of love and the trivia of living’ (pp. 229–30).
Noting the lesbian singer whose voice charts the pain and hope of love
and life, Smith again queers the conventions of love, while ‘spinning
cycles’ is later echoed in fellow lesbian Scottish writer Zoe Strachan’s
Spin Cycle (2004). It also brings the text full circle in spiralling ‘spinning
cycles’, which began at the end with Sara describing her death fall as
‘Woooooooo-hooooooo’ (Smith 2002, p. 3) in a Kristevan semiotic that
breaks the frame of the symbolic order’s conventionally recognizable
language. Sara’s cinematic gaze pans back to the girl in the watch shop
who now wears her repaired watch, everyday waiting for her to come
in and pick it up, oblivious to the fact that she has passed on. Breaking
the frame of the ending is the refrain that has run throughout, as it
comes after the last page, ‘remember you must live remember you most
love remainder you mist leaf’. This is followed by a largely blank page,
except at the bottom on which is printed ‘WOoooo-hooooooo oo o’.
Typographically, the letters descend the page much like Sara’s descent
184 Time-Travellers

down the dumb waiter shaft, and each letter also diminishes in font
to indicate that Sara is fading away with the last word (which is not a
symbolic order word but a semiotic sound) on the page of her narrative.
Sara weaves her way through all the characters, reminding us that she
is everywoman and a marginalized voice in society, that must fight to
be heard lest it is erased. As with Hotel World, ‘Such novels are about
time in the sense that they explore the theme of time, perhaps even
the nature of time, through the temporal logic of storytelling’ (Currie
2007, pp. 1–2). According to Brian Cox, the cosmos itself is moving
to the rhythm of an entropic clock, where ‘The arrow of time [...] will
slowly but inexorably lead the Universe to its death’ (Cox and Cohen
2011, p. 240). Just as Smith reminds us to live as our time is fleeting, so
too ‘The arrow of time has created a bright window in the Universe’s
adolescence during which life is possible, but it’s a window that won’t
stay open for long’ (p. 240). During the universe’s billions of years of
existence, life’s apparently random establishment on Earth is but only
momentary ‘And that’s why, for me, the most astonishing wonder of
the Universe isn’t a star or a planet or a galaxy [...] it’s a moment in
time. And that time is now’ (p. 240). Like the empty hole at the core
of Global Hotel’s dumb waiter shaft (into which Sara is gravitationally
pulled) that represents the emptiness of global capitalism, ‘We are all in
orbit around the super-massive black hole that lies at the heart of the
Milky Way’ (p. 205).
Thus, while Smith considers the demise of an individual, there are
wider ontological implications in her work in its assessment of our brief
human mortality that relate to the demise of the cosmos. Ultimately,
Smith queers any hegemonic logic of sequential ontological time by
reminding us through her narrative momento mori that, like Sara, we are
only passing through.
Conclusion: World Without
Frontiers?

In this consideration of cosmopolitanism and its representation within

contemporary fiction, it has been established that the term cannot
be subject to discursive hegemony. Instead, cosmopolitanism offers a
queer perspective that resists conventional national-bound identities
and opens up spaces of empathy, connectivity, community and love.
The term has been wrestled from some attempts to secure its definition
and re-presented as a nomadic process of endless becoming. Braidotti
criticizes Martha Nussbaum’s ‘humanistic cosmopolitanism’ as being
constrained by ‘American liberal individualism’ (Braidotti 2008, p. 15)
and which is thus contradictory since it ‘does not split or open, but
rather solidifies the subject’ (p. 16). Humanistic cosmopolitanism, acc-
ording to Braidotti, is anthropocentric and offers a traditional view of
individuals as unified and stable. As such, she echoes Bhabha’s critique
of Nussbaum and his definition of the ‘subject in terms of a fundamen-
tal restlessness, a “translational” space: an interstitial temporality that
stands in contention with both the return to an originary “essential-
ist” self-consciousness as well as a release into an endlessly fragmented
subject-in-process”’ (p. 17). Favouring ‘This “translational” brand of
cosmopolitanism’, Braidotti notes that ‘In this shift, a unitary and
“home-bound” subject gets redefined in terms of multiple belongings,
non-unitary selfhood and constant flows of transformation’ (p. 17). It is
this endless becoming of the subject that mirrors cosmopolitanism itself
as a dynamic spatial interstice of dialogic transpositions.
On a recent trip to Iceland, I was struck by the way in which its
landscape is being rent asunder by a fault line resulting from the colli-
sion of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. On one side
of the fault line lies North America, with Europe on the other, while

185
186 Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction

Iceland co-exists in the interstitial tensions between. This dynamic

tectonic-plate activity caused the land mass to rise up out of the ocean
and become the youngest geophysical country in Europe, with its end-
less volcanic activity. Iceland has utilized its volatile geographical space
in an ecologically balanced manner, for its ‘use of geothermal power is
one of the most creative in the world, and the country’s energy experts
are now advising both Chinese and Indian industries on possible ways
to harness geothermal sources’ (Parnell and Presser 2010 [1991], p. 58).
That creative harnessing of sustainable energy from its active fault line
also benefits from tourists eager to witness its geysers, hot springs, mud-
pots, glaciers and volcanic rock formations. Iceland (the name itself sug-
gests a mobile transpositional fusion of liquid and solid, of intense heat
and cold) is a liminal space regarding its earth density’s proximity to
the ocean as well as to molten lava, for in some places the land is only a
mile thick since ‘The earth’s crust in Iceland is only a third of its normal
thickness, and magma (molten rock) continues to rise from deep within’
(p. 58). Politically, Iceland secured its independence from Denmark in
1944, while demographically there are only around 320,000 inhabit-
ants. In keeping with the global bank collapse and recession, Icelandic
banks suffered spectacular losses, which resulted in Gordon Brown’s
premiership having to bail out their UK branches by reimbursing British
investors, while controversially securing any assets under terrorism laws.
The citizens of Iceland responded to their economic turmoil by pro-
tests, known as the Kitchenware Revolution, finally ridding themselves
of their political leader and electing a new Prime Minister. Jóhanna
Sigurðardóttir is not only the country’s first female Prime Minister, but is
the world’s first openly gay political leader (Iceland is also credited with
electing the first female head of state: President Vigdis Finnbogadottir
served 1980–96). A member of the Social Democratic Party, with a back-
ground in trade unionism during her employment as a flight attendant,
Jóhanna is also Iceland’s longest serving Member of Parliament, con-
sistently in office since being elected in 1978. Embarking upon a civil
union (legal in Iceland since 1996) with her partner, the writer Jónína
Leósdóttir, they married in 2010 when same-sex marriage became legal-
ized. While Britain is currently only considering such legislation (while
civil partnerships have been recognized only since 2004), amidst vocal
protests from religious factions, Iceland has already passed this motion,
ensuring that same-sex couples are given legal equality and, thus,
regarded as full rather than second-class citizens. It is worth pondering
that when the world’s only superpower, America, was busy demonizing
the comedian Ellen DeGeneres for coming out in 1997 amidst Christian
 Conclusion 187

right death threats and the resultant demise of her career until it was
revived again with her recent talk show, that relatively tiny Iceland had
already legalized civil partnerships. Throughout Reykjavik I saw adverts
proudly anticipating the annual Gay Pride event in August, ‘Iceland’s
second-biggest festival’ (Parnell and Presser 2010, p. 87). In this cos-
mopolitan country, the Pink Pound is valued as an integral aspect of
Iceland’s stability, while its queer citizens are not demonized as other
but are respected as fellow humans. Britain, on the other hand, is per-
fectly content to rake in money from the LGBT community in terms
of taxes, pride events and general expenditure, but is by no means as
accepting as Iceland. While predominantly a secular country, the rem-
nants of religious discourse continue to present a hegemonic sense that
LGBT citizens are somehow second class and unnatural.
In 2010, referring to her government’s ban on strip clubs, or any
other means of employers financially gaining from the nudity of their
workers, Jóhanna stated that ‘The Nordic countries are leading the way
on women’s equality, recognizing women as equal citizens rather than
commodities for sale’ (Clark-Flory 2010). Despite its economic and
geophysical instabilities, Iceland is demonstrating a cosmopolitanism
that incorporates empathy, community, equality and queer resistance
to global hegemonic discourses of power and heteronormativity. Rather
than clinging to the relics of patriarchy for cold comfort at a time of
global uncertainty, Icelandic citizens have taken the rather mature step
of placing their confidence in a cosmopolitan outlook that allows for
alternative approaches within the dynamic interstices of its geopolitical
tectonic plates. Recognizing a link between the increase in lapdanc-
ing clubs and the sexual trafficking of women and girls, Icelandic
politicians took the cosmofeminist decision to outlaw such distasteful,
predatory and avaricious capitalist enterprise. Julie Bindel’s article in
The Guardian, ‘Iceland: The World’s Most Feminist Country’, states that,
‘According to Icelandic police, 100 foreign women travel to the country
annually to work in strip clubs. It is unclear whether the women are
trafficked, but feminists say it is telling that as the stripping industry
has grown, the number of Icelandic women wishing to work in it has
not’ (Bindel 2010). This is ‘unlike the UK where heated debates rage
over whether prostitution and lapdancing are empowering or degrad-
ing to women’ (Bindel 2010), where individual ‘choice’ appears to be
driven by consumer interest rather than cosmopolitical ethics. Jóhanna
Sigurðardóttir and Jónína Leósdóttir encapsulate the transpositional
conviviality of cosmopolitanism in their queer union of politician and
imaginative writer: combining real political action and utopian creative
188 Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction

envisioning, this is an ideal example of cosmopolitan love and empa-

thy. In 2009, Forbes listed Jóhanna among the top 100 most powerful
women in the world. On our planet, political power is traditionally
associated with men and certainly never with lesbian women. Unlike
Margaret Thatcher’s premiership (‘which produced lots of anti-feminist
effects, not to mention lots of politics which adversely impacted on
women’ [Eagleton 2003, p. 154]), Jóhanna’s power does not mimic het-
eropatriarchal authority; instead she queers the corridors of power with
her own particular cosmofeminist empathy for others. As such, her
present leadership offers hope for a tomorrow that can be better, for a
world not inscribed by the phallocratic repetition of self/other division
but for a cosmopolitical wind of change that looks for connections and
empathizes with all its citizens.
Iceland is positioned in the North Atlantic towards the Arctic, its
nearest neighbours being Greenland and the Faroe Islands – it is a
country dependent upon the sea for its fishing industry, and whale-
watching tourism. (Like all countries, Iceland is not perfect and their
fishing rights are controversial, particularly regarding whaling, though
internal and external pressure is increasing in this predominantly
tourist-driven malpractice that keeps the demand for whale meat
going.) Its bleak other-worldly northern landscape helped to shape its
imaginative creativity from the Icelandic Sagas to current writers, and
Peter Davidson’s The Idea of North contemplates this literary fascina-
tion with such a desolate space, for ‘The north grows in rumours out
of the dark [...] “north” can never be a sole or simple descriptor: there
have always been as many norths as there have been standpoints from
which to look northwards’ (Davidson 2005, p. 21). Iceland as a region in
the far north clearly inspires such dynamic imagination, focusing on a
space which offers multiple perspectives of north, just as cosmopolitan-
ism is also prone to fluid possibilities. In literature, ‘The idea of north’ is
often regarded ‘as a place of purification, an escape from the limitations
of civilization’ (p. 21), thus allowing Iceland to offer a queer alterna-
tive to hegemonic norms. In its literature, culture, environment and
politics, Iceland’s mobile northern hinterland provides a transpositional
cosmopolitan space that is ‘always a shifting idea, always relative’ (p. 8).
While Iceland is not without its faults politically as well as tectonically,
it is certainly shifting in the right direction in terms of its cosmopolite
citizenship, accelerated by its lesbian leadership. Environmentally, it
is ‘hoping to reduce its dependency on imported fossil fuels, and it
has begun to invest in hydrogen-fuel research with the aim of phasing
out petrol-and-diesel-powered cars by midcentury’ (Parnell and Presser
 Conclusion 189

2010, p. 58). In The Stone Gods, Jeanette Winterson warns against the
destructive repetition of heteropatriarchal power and seeks alternative
ways forward to break the master grand narrative of male dominance,
and allow women positions of authority for a sustainable rather than
entropic future. Iceland’s northern spatial creativity is at the forefront of
such cosmopolitical thinking in its current journey towards decentring
phallocentric hierarchical norms and introducing queer consensual
alternatives, which ‘represents lesbian existence as a form of resistance
to patriarchal power’ (Palmer 1993, p. 45).
While Iceland’s citizens responded to their dissatisfaction by replac-
ing their government with a more cosmopolitical leader, it was reported
in May 2011 that this has resulted in a ripple effect, as ‘The so-called
“Kitchenware Revolution” in Iceland is said to be the inspiration behind
ongoing protests in Spain against unemployment and perceived govern-
ment inaction.’1 Meanwhile, there have been links made between the
Arab Spring of 2011 and the UK riots and looting in August 2011, with
‘British [economics] professor Rodney Shakespeare’ suggesting ‘that
there are several main factors behind the sudden eruption of rioting in
the UK, including the protests sweeping North Africa and the Middle
East’.2 It would seem that Iceland’s response to their recent economic
and social unrest is quite different from Britain’s: the former rejected
their government in favour of a former trade union activist. In May 2010
the British voted in a more reactionary leader, with David Cameron at
the helm of the so-called ConDem coalition, and it is predictable that
he is responding to the UK’s social unrest by ever more coercive tactics.
As though confirming his mantra of a Broken Britain, the riots have
empowered him further as he is now almost being given carte blanche by
a large section of the British public to come down hard on the offenders.
This goes hand in glove with the introduction of the Welfare Reform Bill
2011 which, as of February 2012, is currently still attempting to make
its way through Parliament, for ‘After a possibly unprecedented seven
defeats in the Lords, the bill today returns to the House of Commons,
where the government has vowed to overturn a raft of amendments
passed by peers.’3 In his belief that the Bill intends to penalize those
who do not actively seek employment, in his response to these planned
reforms, TUC general secretary Brendan Barber argues that

Long-term unemployment has doubled not because of a sudden

increase in work-shy scroungers, but as an inevitable result of
economic policies based on cuts that destroy growth. Of course no
welfare support is perfect and a small minority play the system, but
190 Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction

just as conjurors divert your attention when doing a trick, today’s

proposals are based on blaming the jobless for their own unemploy-
ment in the hope that voters won’t notice the real cause.4

An obvious contradiction is arising between large-scale redundancies,

rising unemployment and the government’s insistence that those out
of work will be penalized for being unemployed. With echoes of the
individualist Thatcher era which, in turn, echoed Victorian values of
self-help, those who are poor and out of work are being levied with the
blame and responsibility for reversing their fortunes in an economic
climate which is in free fall. It is the same old repeating story of divide
and rule. Meanwhile, rather than seriously addressing the underlying
causes of Britain’s unrest based on a vacuous consumer society and
celebrity culture that suggests everyone, no matter how disadvantaged,
can acquire material success, Cameron’s inevitable response is to blame
those on the margins for the effects of global capitalism. Insisting that
the social fabric is being rent asunder by the dysfunctions of the fam-
ily is a reverberation of John Major’s policy of ‘back to basics’ in the
1990s, which served to demonize the likes of single mothers and the
LGBT community. By contrast, in Iceland ‘there’s no stigma attached to
unmarried mothers’ (Parnell and Presser 2010, p. 37), while the ratio,
like other Scandinavian countries, is on a par with Britain.
In her inaugural speech for The Manchester Literature Festival enti-
tled ‘The Manchester Sermon 2010: The Temptation of Jesus’, Jeanette
Winterson virulently attacked consumer culture, arguing that ‘Like
many of us I hoped that the current economic crisis, so severe and with-
out excuse, would be a global and generational opportunity to re-think
our values’ (Winterson 2010). She continues:

Unfortunately late Capitalism – the Thatcher/Reagan revolution, did

not believe that there is more to life than money. There was plenty
of lip-service about morals and family values and folksy feel-good
sentimental hogwash about marriage and stable societies being the
blah-de-blah bedrock. But money was all that money had to offer [...]
Got a car? Get two. Got a house? Get a bigger one. Holidays? Borrow
the cash. Credit cards? How many do you want? (Winterson 2010).

In Winterson’s assessment,

The last thirty years – 1979–2009 – have been about grotesquely

multiplying our animal needs and making it pretty impossible to
 Conclusion 191

attend to our human needs. Education is hopeless, the arts are called
luxury items, time off is for wimps, and love is part of the upgrade
culture. Keep me for two years and get a newer model. Everything
in our ethos and our society has been towards consumption – all the
stones we’ve eaten that we were told were bread have made us ill
and fat and stupid and discontented and finally depressed to death.
The World Health Organisation says that by 2020, depression will be
the second largest cause of death in the western world – right behind
heart disease. (Winterson 2010)

When the money disappeared ‘overnight like the faery gold it was’,
human avarice that allowed global capitalism to corrupt us entirely has
had a rude awakening from its trance-like state, so that

now, our animal needs won’t be met in triplicate – they won’t be met
at all. You won’t be able to own your house. You can’t afford decent
food. You will work until you are 70 in a job that offers nothing. You
won’t have a pension and your kids will be paying back student loans
until they are 40. (Winterson 2010)

Rather than buying into a vacuous consumerism, Winterson urges

us to think outside its box and aspire to cosmopolitan empathy and a
sense of community rather than individual enterprise, for

We can blame the banks. We can feel like victims. But we bought
into this. Money has been our only currency and our core value,
which is insane, as it doesn’t really exist. You exist – the person
I love. My body exists – my one true home. The planet exists –
beautiful, blue, long-suffering, fragile, and irreplaceable. Friendship
exists, and our kids, and books and pictures and music, and the
feeling we get, when just for a second, life in all its unlived possi-
bility stands in front of us. Stones are not bread. There is no short-
cut to a life that is nourishing and satisfying. It can’t be bought.
(Winterson 2010)

Rejecting aggressive territorialism in favour of planetary consideration,

she argues that ‘the whole world is not there to be rendered into a prod-
uct for my benefit – and even then, even if I were to eat up the whole
world, it would not satisfy me’ (Winterson 2010). Winterson recognizes
that ‘When money becomes the core value – when as Engels put it, peo-
ple regard each other only as useful objects – then celebrity culture offers
192 Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction

a seductive way to redefine yourself’ (Winterson 2010). By approaching

life through the lens of queer cosmofeminism, for Winterson

The only way to be more than a number, more than a useful object,
more than a consumer, more than a CV or a facebook profile, is to
identify what is valuable to you, what is worthwhile to you, worth
living worth for – perhaps even worth dying for, and then to keep
faith with the you that you are. I don’t mean in a rigid paranoid way;
the self changes but the self isn’t for sale. (Winterson 2010)

As a secular sermon, Winterson warns against allowing minorities to

be convenient scapegoats in a conservative backlash:

I have noticed that when right-wing religious folk talk about going
back to the Bible they generally mean putting homosexuals and
the homeless in gaol, putting women and minorities in their place,
and putting white men back in power. But I tell you now that the
religious right have a vision for our society, and if we are not careful
they will get their way. It started with Bush and Blair destabilising
the world in the name of truth and freedom because God had told
them it was so. It will end with Sarah Palin and the Tea Party running
America. (Winterson 2010)

The recent government-led calls for family values sound like the famil-
iar repetitive demonization of others that has occurred throughout
historical turbulence. Like her parallels between Jeanette and Jesus
in Oranges, Winterson’s cosmopolitan sermon associates Christ with
those on the social margins who, likewise, serve as scapegoats to
be demonized and ostracized. With a note of despair that society
has a propensity to regressively and divisively cast blame rather than
cohesively unite,

I said at the start that I had hoped that the economic crisis would
cause us to rethink our values – what is so upsetting is that the
progressive secular Left has not done any rethinking worth the
name – just a bit of apologising and tinkering – while the really scary
Right has gone for an all-out war on all those touchy-feely policies
they hated – as though subsidised theatre and the arts and single
mums and welfare payments brought us to our knees – not a totally
naked and savage free market god. Even Baal the flesh-eating god of
the Philistines wasn’t as demanding in his sacrifices as the god of
 Conclusion 193

the free market. All of the planet and all of its peoples fed into the
money-making machine. (Winterson 2010)

One hopes that Iceland will hold its nerve and continue to move
forward along its cosmofeminist trajectory rather than allow the false
claims of capitalism to dominate in the guise of conservative tradition-
alism and, by doing so, Britain and America could certainly learn a
thing or two about cosmopolitan fusion. Certainly, the texts that have
been discussed in this book signal that there is an emergence of cosmo-
politan ethics.
As we have seen in the preceding chapters, cosmopolitanism, like
feminism, contains many different facets, none of which can domi-
nate, and all of which interrelate in its continuous queering of hegem-
onic structures. The literature discussed has opened cosmopolitanism
to the multiple perspectives of a variety of writers and their texts,
each creating an imaginative response both to globalization and the
ways in which cosmopolitical insights can respond to this. Indeed,
as an aspirational non-locatable concept, cosmopolitanism is ideally
suited to fictional representation with all of its dynamic multifarious
creations, as well as the endless interpretations that respond to liter-
ary works. Although regarded as contemporary British fiction, each
text has mobilized itself beyond a static border and opened itself up
to a variety of perspectives and nomadic journeys, travelling beyond
the familiar locations of ‘home’ into altogether different spaces,
times and geographies. These novels, then, are perpetually looking
outwards rather than concerned with territorial thresholds, and all
are concerned with the interstices of dynamic energy available within
fictional space. In future discussions of cosmopolitan fiction, atten-
tion might be focused upon the ways in which the literary text as
a physical product is itself prone to global demands, such ‘that it is
not merely that literature represents the effects of such global con-
nectedness, but that it is itself affected by that connectedness in its
expressive modes, its textual forms, its receptions as literature’ (Gupta
2009, p. 53). As such, ‘literature, so to speak, grows in scope’, so that
‘One may say that the cosmopolis is not merely something that lit-
erature sometimes talks about; literature gradually begins to perform
cosmopolis within itself in its new media and environments’ (p. 53).
Literature as a structure, then, ‘performs within itself some of the
characteristics of that realized but virtual space of cosmopolitan con-
nectedness: the cosmopolis of the World Wide Web’ (p. 53), and cer-
tainly this is a feature in Winterson’s fiction. Meanwhile, the effects of
194 Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction

e-books like global retail company Amazon’s Kindle, remain to be seen

in terms of how the book will evolve and how literature will respond
to its new format.
This literature is continually reconfiguring the world and its response
to it, dynamically engaging with and offering its own particular cos-
mopolitanism within an ever-expanding field of thought. Ultimately, it
strives towards envisioning love as an empathetic force that can mobi-
lize itself across the spectrum of difference in the endless imaginings of
a world without frontiers.
Notes

1 ‘Cross that Bridge’: Journeying through Zoe Strachan’s

Negative Space
1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7478913.stm.
2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7478913.stm.
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Artois.
4. http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/stmagnus/relics.htm.
5. http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/stmagnus/magcath.htm.
6. http://www.imv.uit.no/english/science/publicat/waynorth/wn1/part02.htm.
7. http://www.imv.uit.no/english/science/publicat/waynorth/wn1/part02.htm.
8. http://www.users.qwest.net/,mojito/flettfamilyscotland.htm.
9. http://www.users.qwest.net/,mojito/flettfamilyscotland.htm.
10. http://www.orkneyjar.com/folklore/witchcraft/index.html.
11. http://www.orkneycommunities.co.uk/imagelibrary/picture/number7043.
asp.
12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_the_Zealot.
13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iram_of_the_Pillars.
14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iram_of_the_Pillars.

2 ‘Boundaries. Desire’: Philosophical Nomadism in

Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook and The Stone Gods
1. http://www.delanet.com/~ftise/pullman.html.
2. http://webpages.shepherd.edu/ltate/WebQuestWoolf.htm.
3. http://www.apple.com/powerbook/.
4. http://www.salon.com/april97/winterson970428.html.
5. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/everything.html.
6. http://www.salon.com/april97/winterson970428.html.
7. http://www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis/wormholes.htp.

3 ‘Fellow Humans’: Cosmopolitan Citizens in

Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers
1. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/nadeem-
aslam-a-question-of-honour-731732.html.
2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13278255.
3. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A730801.
4. http://socyberty.com/folklore/moth-and-butterfly-in-myth-and-folklore/.
5. http://www.fi.edu/learn/heart/development/development.html.

195
196 Notes

4 ‘The Bridge to the Stars’: Travelling Home in Philip

Pullman’s His Dark Materials
1. http://www.damaris.org/content/content.php?type=5&id=369.
2. http://geology.wcupa.edu/mgagne/ess362/homework/constellations/lyra.htm.
3. http://www.damaris.org/content/content.php?type=5&id=369.
4. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/despatches/americas/25908.stm.
5. http://street-children.org.uk/colombia.htm.
6. http://www.damaris.org/content/content.php?type=5&id=369.
7. http://webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/4C.html.
8. http://www.answers.com/topic/north-pole.
9. http://www.delanet.com/~ftise/pullman.html.
10. http://www.delanet.com/~ftise/pullman.html.
11. http://www.damaris.org/content/content.php?type=5&id=369.
12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy.

5 ‘Around We Go’: Transpositional Life Cycles in

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
1. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6034/the-art-of-fiction-no-204-
david-mitchell.
2. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6034/the-art-of-fiction-no-204-
david-mitchell.
3. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6034/the-art-of-fiction-no-204-
david-mitchell.
4. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6034/the-art-of-fiction-no-204-
david-mitchell.

6 ‘Remember You Must Live. Remember You Most Love.

Remember You Must Leave’: Passing through Ali Smith’s
Hotel World
1. http://www.proflowers.com/flowerguide/flowermeanings/stargazer-meanings.
aspx.
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilium_%22Stargazer%22.
3. http://www.proflowers.com/flowerguide/flowermeanings/stargazer-meanings.
aspx.

Conclusion: World Without Frontiers?

1. http://www.icenews.is/index.php/2011/05/21/spain-adopts-icelands-
kitchenware-revolution-idea/.
2. http://english.irib.ir/news/political/item/78051-rioting-in-uk-influenced-by-
arab-spring-says-british-professor.
3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/blog/2012/feb/01/welfare-benefits.
4. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12486158.
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[Accessed 14 August 2011].
Wood, Naomi (2001) ‘Paradise Lost and Found: Obedience, Disobedience, and
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Wood, Naomi (2005) ‘Dismembered Starlings and Neutered Minds: Innocence
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Index

Althusser, Louis 84, 94, 113 capitalism 2–3, 11, 14, 17, 23,
Anadolu-Okur, Nilgun 81 46, 65–6, 68, 70, 103, 119,
Anderson, Benedict 7, 11, 98 141–67, 178–84, 190–3; see also
Ang, Tom 27 globalization
Annas, Julia 115 Carroll, Lewis 48
anthropocentricism 3, 6–7, 9, 63–4, Alice in Wonderland 119
66–8, 122–3, 151, 156, 159, 161, Carter, James 131
185 children’s literature 12, 15,
Appadurai, Arjun 144–5 109–38
Appiah, Kwame Anthony 1, 83, 102, Christianson, Aileen 26,
183 179–80
Aslam, Nadeem Clark-Flory, Tracy 187
Maps for Lost Lovers 14–15, Colebrook, Claire 47, 110, 115, 130,
77–108, 112, 168, 181 133
Attfield, Robin 6 contemporary fiction 10–15, 41, 88,
107–8, 123, 137, 164–5, 167–9,
Baggini, Julian 135 177, 180, 182, 185, 193
Ball, Alan 167 Coomaraswamy, Radhika 82
Bano, Samia 82, 83–4 cosmofeminism see feminism
Barnstone, Willis 38 cosmopolitanism 1–2, 4–16, 24,
Beck, Ulrich 9, 89 29, 37, 51, 77, 88, 91, 98, 101,
Bell, Eleanor 39, 44, 180 147, 151, 159, 171, 183, 185–90,
Beneria, Lourdes 5 193–4
Bhabha, Homi K. 15, 44, 50, 77–8, Cox, Brian (and Andrew Cohen) 1,
91–2, 98, 129, 159, 185 2, 110–11, 116, 149, 163, 184
Bindel, Julie 187 Craig, Cairns 11, 13, 38, 40
Bird, Anne-Marie 115 Cranny-Francis, Anne, et al. 22
Blake, William 48, 61, 94, 111, Cukier, Wendy 157
113–14, 116, 130 Currie, Mark 11, 53, 153, 164, 168,
Brace, Marianne 87 169, 172–3, 182, 184
Bradford, Clare, et al. 10, 46, 49
Braidotti, Rosi 9, 67 Davidson, Peter 28, 188
Nomadic Subjects 11–12, 41, 46, 52, Delanty, Gerard 12–13
65, 157, 171, 173 Deleuze, Gilles 27, 142
Transpositions 3, 6, 7, 16–17, 44, Devine, T.M. 23–4, 29
52, 64, 69, 141–2, 143–8, 150–1, Disney 145
152, 153–4, 156, 159, 161–3, 185 dystopian 15, 64, 66, 151–6
Brown, Alice, et al. 24
Brown, Gordon 186 Eagleton, Mary 188
Budd, Mike 145 ecofeminism see feminism
Eliot, T.S. 31, 117, 166, 172, 177–8,
Calder, Angus 44 182–3
Campbell, Tom 25 Ellam, Julie 69–71

203
204 Index

feminism 4–5, 50, 89–90, 97–8, 105, Lacan, Jacques 46–7, 60

122, 193 Le Guin, Ursula 121, 128, 133
cosmofeminism 5–6, 68, 69, 70, Lenz, Millicent 110, 118, 137
80, 89, 97, 182, 183, 187, 188, lesbian 12, 14, 16, 21–2, 29, 32,
192, 193 36–7, 42, 46–7, 50, 54, 58, 61, 63,
ecofeminism 28, 69, 70, 121, 122 68, 71, 166, 170, 180, 183,
postfeminism 21–3, 28, 35–6, 38, 188–9
39, 44 Lister, Ruth 97, 175
Ferns, Chris 45, 51–2 Lorentzen, Lois Ann 5
Fowles, John love 10, 14–17, 28, 41–2, 48, 52–4,
The Collector 31 57, 58–63, 66–74, 77–108,
Freud, Sigmund 36–7, 90–1, 158, 161 110–12, 126, 134, 137, 146, 148,
Friedman, Susan Stanford 14, 50–1, 158, 164–83, 185, 188, 191, 194
74, 99, 105 Lovelock, James 120, 125
Fuss, Diana 37, 46 Lumsden, Alison 26, 179–80

Gifford, Douglas, et al. 39, 44 Mengham, Rod 8

Gilroy, Paul Meyer, Marvin 38
After Empire 2, 3, 14, 60, 149, 151 Milton, John 113, 120, 137
Between Camps 60 Mitchell, David
Gioia, Ted 100 Cloud Atlas 15–16, 63, 141–63
globalization 1–6, 16, 89, 97, 102, Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 89–90
127, 141, 144–5, 148, 151–2, 156, Morrison, Jago 13, 170–1, 177
165–6, 168–9, 175, 178, 181, 193 Moruzi, Kristine 132
global warming 63 Murdoch, Iris 115
Gooderham, David 132
Gray, Alasdair 155–6, 181 Noakes, Jonathan 48, 49, 57
Grosz, Elizabeth 47 nomadism 1–17, 41–6, 51–2,
Gupta, Suman 193 62–3, 66–7, 70–1, 91, 117, 125–6,
141–3, 147, 149–52, 156, 159–63,
Hall, Donald E. 59–60 166–7, 171, 173–4, 185, 193;
Haralambos, M. 117 see also Braidotti, Rosi
Haraldsson, Erlendur 149
Hawthorne, Susan 6 O’Brien, Jodi 52–3
Heald, R.M. 117 O’Connor, Michael 79, 86–8
Hekmat, Anwar 97 O’Neill, Michael 26
Hellmer, Ellennita Muetze 145
Herrick, James A. 98 Palmer, Paulina 36–7, 44, 189
Higgins, Kathleen M. 78 Parker, Jo Alyson 147, 159–60
Hines, Maude 128 Parnell, Fran 186–8, 190
Hunt, Peter 116, 118, 137 phallocentricism 21, 37, 64, 83–4,
147, 157, 161, 182, 189
Iceland 68, 185–93; see also physics 59
Sigurðardóttir, Jóhanna Grand Unified Theory 56
quantum theory/reality 55–6, 72,
Jackson, Rosemary 62, 132–3 133
see also universe
Khan, Nighat Said 104–5 Pinsent, Pat 124
Kristeva, Julia 46, 183 planetarity 89; see also Gilroy, Paul
 Index 205

Platt, Kamala 123 Spender, Dale 98

Plumwood, Val 28, 122–3 Squires, Claire 114, 137
Pollock, Sheldon, et al. 4, 97 Stangroom, Jeremy 135
postfeminism see feminism Stanton, Katherine 10, 88, 102
postmodernism 51, 53–4, 58, 70, 99, Sterne, Jonathan 158
159, 169, 178, 181 Stevenson, Ian 149
Presser, Brandon 186–8, 190 Stevenson, Robert Louis
Pullman, Philip 15, 49, 95, 100, Jekyll and Hyde 166
109–38 Treasure Island 170–1
The Amber Spyglass 56, 110, 112, Stirling, Kirsten 180
114, 116–38 Strachan, Zoe
Northern Lights 111, 113, 115, Negative Space 13, 21–44, 99, 112,
118–19, 127–9, 131–2 128
The Subtle Knife 61, 117–18, 120–1, Spin Cycle 183
125–9 string theory 56–7; see also universe

religion 15, 33–4, 36, 81, 86, 91, Tew, Philip 8

94–7, 100–3, 105, 112, 117, Thatcherism 23–4, 188, 190
124–5, 135, 137 time
Reynolds, Margaret 48, 49, 57 existing outside of 50
Richards, Jennifer 98 narrative and time 72, 74, 141–63,
Robbins, Bruce 4–5, 9, 24, 27, 29 164–84
Roszak, Betty 6 prolepsis 16, 164–5, 177
Royle, Nicholas 90–1, 173 relativity 176–7
Russell, Mary Harris 138 time and space 8, 10–11, 43, 55,
64, 72–3, 141–63, 193
Schoene, Berthold travelling through 11, 33, 54, 64,
The Cosmopolitan Novel 7–9, 89, 141–63, 164–84
98, 102, 107, 147, 151, 180 transnationalism 10, 89, 102–3, 159;
The Edinburgh Companion see also nomadism
to Contemporary Scottish Tripathi, Salil 77
Literature 28, 40, 180 Tucker, Nicholas 15, 137
‘The Walking Cure’ 21–2 Turpin, Jennifer 5
Scott, Carole 113
Scottishness 11, 21, 23–6, universe 1–2, 9, 55–9, 64, 71–2,
29–34, 36–7, 39–44, 169–70, 84, 107–16, 119–34, 147–9,
179–83 184; see also time: time and
Sebold, Alice 167 space
Secomb, Linnell 78–9 utopianism 7–8, 10–11, 14, 28, 45–7,
semiotics 46, 51, 61, 122, 184; see 49, 51–2, 54, 60, 63, 69, 119, 124,
also Kristeva, Julia 187–9
Showalter, Elaine 71
Sidel, Victor W. 157 Walby, Sylvia 105
Sigurðardóttir, Jóhanna 68, 186–7 Walker, Marshall 101
Smith, Ali Walsh, Clare 111, 114, 123, 129
Hotel World 16–17, 54, 152, Walter, Natasha 65
164–84 Werbner, Pnina 5, 25, 41
Smith, Karen Patricia 138 Wilde, Oscar
Solomon, Robert C. 78 The Picture of Dorian Gray 9
206 Index

Winterson, Jeanette Wood, Naomi 114–15

Lighthousekeeping 170 Woolf, Virginia 12, 32, 46, 55, 71,
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit 90, 130, 166–7
57–8, 61–2, 70, 171, 192 Mrs Dalloway 169, 173, 177,
The Powerbook 14, 45–74, 85, 131, 181
170 A Room of One’s Own 130
The Stone Gods 14, 45–74, 85, 90,
148, 154, 157, 170, 189 Yuval-Davis, Nira 5, 25, 41