821.111-31.09 Amis M. 821.111(73)-31.09 Rushdie S. 316.356.2:159.96 Претходно саопштење
Ivana S. Jovanović1 Visoka poslovna škola strukovnih studija Leskovac
NO HAPPILY EVER AFTER – FAMILY IN MARTIN AMIS’S LONDON FIELDS AND SALMAN RUSHDIE’S THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET
Modern society is said to be one of innovations, new and rising ideas, fast occurring events and enjoyable lives. It is a society of multitudes occurring in all forms and sizes. We applaud ourselves for all the ground-breaking inventions that had brought about the welfare of humanity. Still, we seem to disregard the shortcomings that fast cars, fast food and fast lives bring about. One of those shortcomings is the disillusion of families and family lives. Families of today seem perfect on the outside but if one takes a closer look, one sees the corruption, degeneracy and deadening where love, support and outmost trust ought to be. Contemporary authors (in the light of the role and function literature has always had – and still has) try to draw attention to the pervading distortion of the society’s core cell that family is. This paper examines the works of Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie (London Fields and The Ground Beneath Her Feet) and offers insight into the state of “our” families and society. Their criticism and condemnation of what families have become today oblige us to question the values, principles and beliefs upon which we construct our lives. An in-depth analysis of the characters and the relationships they form leads to the conclusion that without an immediate, drastic change in our way of being, the society of today is doomed. Keywords: M. Amis, S. Rushdie, family, downfall, society, abuse, isolation, separation.
1. INTRODUCTION The society of today is a society of consumerism, of watching TV, advertising, pop music, media-saturation. It is shaped by pluralism, religious freedom, democracy, mobility, access to everything and anything. This society does not “treat” the family issue so well. But what is a family? How do we define it? The definition of family varies according to different points of view. We can talk of traditional and modern (or postmodern) families. A traditional family can be defined as a patriarchal institution in which the structure consists of a male father, a female mother, and children. In this structure woman is submissive to man and children to parents. A modern family on the other hand is any structure except that of a traditional family. Shorter (1975) was among the first to describe the postmodern family 1
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that was emerging in the 20th century. Its characteristics include “adolescent indifference to the family’s identity, instability in the lives of couples, accompanied by rapidly increasing divorce rates and destruction of the “nest notion of nuclear family life with the liberation of women” (Shorter 1977). According to Walker and Crocker (1988), a family system can be defined as any social unit with which an individual is intimately involved and which is governed by “family rules.” If we consider family to be a vital social institution2 providing a network of relations which support and maintain individual identity and if we then look at the divorce figures, data on family break-ups, domestic violence and an ever growing number of single parents, we come to a conclusion that modern family is disintegrating and dying. Our society is one made up of individuals with no clearly defined sense of the self,3 so what has led to such a saturated family? The reasons are numerous and various, but one can say that it is post-industrialization that has led to the abandonment of traditional family forms and individualisation of social life. Lack of faith in the previously established order, increasing individualisation and democratisation, the influence of electronic media – all these have led to formation of new models of family kinship (gay and lesbian families, etc.). According to Judith Stacey (1990), these brave, new families are pioneers of the postmodern family condition, struggling to embrace diversity and flux and to generate more egalitarian relationships. These new family forms can be seen as a form of rebellion against the traditional, old models of family life in which a father, a mother and a child are placed in the roles of the dominant (husband), the subordinate (wife) and the most subordinate (child). Still, numerous intimacy theorists recognize and discuss various disadvantages of a detraditionalised family life. The growing need for the respect of individuality, raised expectations and the increased significance of intimacy have led to disillusionment and a sense of insecurity. Equality of genders has become a reality, but at the same time it has become a new type of fashion, element of mass culture bringing about power struggles in which we have winners and losers, cheaters and the cheated (not equal partners). The appetites of both sexes have grown in size and one can argue about who is where in a contemporary family. This paper neither takes the side of traditional forms of family life nor the side of new, modern families as it turns out that both are faulty and corrupted. It tries to show that in a society eroded by mass, consumer culture any kind of 2 David Popenoe defines social institution as a way of organizing human behavior in such a way that society needs are best served. Social institution consists essentially of normative, accepted codes that indicate how people should act in a certain area of life. 3 In his work Disturbing the nest: family change and decline in modern societies, David Popenoe argues that although families are changing in form and shape, they are not disintegrating and are here to stay. Popenoe analyzes families in a highly developed country (Sweden) and claims that despite the general belief that Sweden has the most advanced family system, its family is in decline. Sweden is also known for an extremely high family disillusion rate (statistics show a high percentage of single-parent, female-headed families, low marriage rate and an oldest average age at first marriage in comparison to other western countries.)
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family is doomed as long as the world is what it is today. Literature is the reality’s mirror and due to its undeniable role in the construction of men’s consciousness, as well as its use in promoting, promulgating certain values, ideas and beliefs we must turn to it in order to understand the state in which contemporary family is. 2. FAMILY IN AMIS’S LONDON FIELDS Martin Amis’s London Fields appeared in 1989, at a time when the author was at the height of his literary achievements. Following Money: A Suicide Note in 1984, a novel considered by multiple critics to have been and perhaps still is his best and most influential work, London Fields forms part of an informal trilogy that also includes the read and appreciated The Information (1995). It is a perfect example of themes with which Amis dealt, of his techniques and influences. A prolific author, unique and direct in his criticism of modern, mass society and its values, Martin Amis dealt with numerous topics: commerce, shame, exhibitionism, gender, class, violence, victimization, manipulation, eroticism, sexual deviation, drug abuse, male-female relations or more importantly male-female conflict. Amis believed in, and was thus in his writing led by, the idea of a writer’s preoccupation with the decline of social values and his obligation to point out and criticize the lack of direction and meaning of modern life. Thus, his novels are a reaction to a corrupted, amoral, modern civilization and as such should be read carefully by those who are part of the world of lost values and prevailing technology, violence and inhumanity. London Fields is mostly described as a “state-of-the-nation novel, a murder mystery, an anti-love story and a satire… a post-modernist apocalyptic take on the millennium’s finale” (Childs 2005: 46). It can be analysed from various aspects but what this paper will focus on is the family theme. It will explore its looks and deal with questions of how, why and when it changed. By exploring the issue of families we touch upon other themes, all important, burning and terrifying. Families in London Fields are everything but families. If we consider a family to be a system in which all members are closely connected and involved in provision of safety, sense of belonging and emotional closeness of all members, then we can say that the Talent family and the Clinch family are not families but merely a group of people who are related/unrelated to each other. Keith Talent, a “symbol of the horrifying reduced times” (Gregson 2006: 43) is a small-time crook, a low-life, compulsive womanizer, a bloke interested in cheating people, pornography, playing darts, a “very bad guy….the worst guy” (Amis 1991: 5). Although interested in women, he is not interested in two most important women in his life, the ones who constitute his family. Keith is entirely indifferent to his wife Kath, unloving, uncaring and unfatherly towards his child (a girl named Kim), and like Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 61
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all the other relationships in this novel, these are broken, drained of love, affection, intimacy, happiness and genuine care. In a gloomy London of Thatcherite England, a bleak place of growing poverty, human relationships are reduced to a diagram; they are radically simplified and KeithKath relationship is no exception. Keith’s marriage to Kath is a clear parody. When asked about his family, Keith is quick in proclaiming it a worthless, meaningless thing in his life: “You’re married.” “Not really. Put it like this. My wife thinks she is. But me I’m not so sure.” “Children?” “No. Well, yeah, I got a little girl. She’s not even one yet.” (Amis 1991: 85)
Not interested in building a meaningful relationship with his wife, Keith is yet interested in abusing her and their child (directly and indirectly). He is aggressive, both verbally and physically, he does not control his emotions and is quite capable of putting his wife in a hospital, which he did on several occasions (some occurred even during her pregnancy). Keith neither loves his wife nor their baby, as the wife is merely an object, an entity to be used when his masculine needs arise, and the baby is obviously a slippage – “babies, infants, little human beings: they’re a skirt thing. The only blokes who love babies are transvestites, hormone-cases, sex-maniacs…” (Amis 1991: 54). „The trouble with the baby was that it was a girl” (Amis 1991: 7). He tries to name the baby after his dog Clive, evades his duties and responsibilities as a father (he is reluctant to even feed the baby), does not provide any food or clothing, does not create a safe environment for the child. Immersed in the world of pornography, TV and darts, Keith is incapable of showing respect or concern for any woman in his life, and the list of “his women” is not a short one. Peggy Obbs (from whom he contracts a sexually transmitted disease, urethritis), Nicola Six (the one using him, and providing him with pornographic materials), Trish Shirt (the one with a certain quality – that of being nearest to Keith), Debbee Kensit (the special one – “rounded, pouting,” his lover since the age of 12), Analiese Furnish (the one that slept with him because she confused him with Rick Purist) – all of them formed part of Keith’s life and were still nowhere near of being truly appreciated, loved or cared about by Keith. Constantly drunk, Keith cannot stop abusing Kath and she, tired, victimized, ignored, in return abuses Kim: When he met her five years ago she looked like the girl in the advert for double cream: the eyebrows rurally pale, the hair and its innocent russet. Now she looked to Keith like a figure glimpsed at dawn through a rainy windscreen.
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“Look at the state of you,” said Keith, and watched her shoulders tighten over the sink. She paused in her work. “I’m tired,” she said to the window. “I’m so tired” (Amis 1991:71).
Locked in the subjugated position, reduced to a role of Keith’s servant, a sexual object, a manipulative puppet, Kath is but a walking shadow as she, like Keith, has a “failure to thrive” (Amis 1991: 196). From the very beginning, the relationship between Keith and Kath is an unhealthy one. It is based on mere lust with no genuine closeness. Disregard, abuse and lack of love lead Kath to inflict pain on her child and ultimately leave Kim in Samson’s care as “she had resisted the force of her own powerlessness, this time” (Amis 1991: 292). A contemporary family therefore gives birth to absent fathers, silent, monstrous mothers and abused children. Relationship of Keith and Kath is that of exploitation – it is loveless, meaningless, and stormy, and there is no hope that this odd couple will ever form a home, a place where feelings of love, genuine care and unity will prevail. Although more educated and more intelligent than Keith, Kath will, until the very end, remain a victim and she will willingly keep on yielding to her husband’s tyranny and dominance. A man with no capacity to love and a shadow of a woman will remain locked in this joke of a family, each falling apart in their own way, dragging to the bottom the person whose life has not even started – their child Kim. Another London Fields family is that of Guy Clinch. Guy, Hope and their son Marmaduke make up quite a unique but nevertheless dysfunctional family. They live in a beautiful, spacious house on Lansdowne Crescent in West London, but nothing in their relationship and their family is beautiful. The first thing we learn about members of the Clinch family is that they are handsome, in good health and with lots of money on their bank accounts. What we also learn is that there was no life in their masterpiece house in West London. We immediately find out that the happiest time of Guy’s fifteen years long marriage had come during Hope’s pregnancy when „she had taken her fifty percent cut in IQ with good grace, and for a while Guy had found himself dealing with an intellectual equal” (Amis 1991: 20). The happiness has passed, and now a highly intelligent Hope and a rather wealthy Guy were living a life of appearances. As we read through the novel, we find it hard to understand why these two utterly different individuals came to be together in the first place. It seems that Hope had married Guy for money: When they met at Oxford — this was sixteen years ago — there was something about Guy that Hope liked. She liked his curly-ended fair hair, his house in the country, his shyness about his height, his house in Lansdowne Crescent, his habit of hooding his eyes against a low sun, his title, his partiality to cherries (especially ripe ones), his large private income (Amis 1991: 58).
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As for Guy, we are not certain why he married Hope, as she comments in a conversation with her sister that Guy has never been in love with her. Perhaps they accidentally came across each other and became a couple just to escape. But what were they running from? Both Hope and Guy seem to have come from dysfunctional families, in which they both felt underloved and unhappy. Hope dislikes her mother and her mother dislikes Hope. The story of mothers not loving their children and fathers not involved is once again repeated. The offspring of unhappy families creates another unhappy family. Guy feels like he has two of everything except for „two lips, two breasts, the walls of intimacy, enfolding arms, enfolding legs” (Amis 1991: 21). Namely, after their child is born, a son called Marmaduke, a perfect baby yet a monster (as he is proclaimed to be from the beginning), Hope and Guy drift miles apart and the single thing which should bring them closer, a child, is actually driving them apart. A long time after she delivers the baby, Hope spends much of her time in bed, with or without Marmaduke but without Guy, only calling his name occasionally not for love’s sake but as a COME HERE order. Hope, turning into a symbol of indignation and coldness, and Guy, losing himself in his own romanticized version of the world, fall apart. The trips they take to reconnect are useless, and it seems that this family functions well only when all of its members are on their own. Marmaduke, a caricature of a child, is a usurper of his father’s position and can be called anything but a cute, little, sweet baby. He seems not to miss his parents when they are away, or if he misses something it is his mother’s French kisses and molesting his father (Marmaduke would poke his father’s eyes, vomit on him violently, bite him, and make him experience a savage rake of his nails). The product of a wrongful match, Marmaduke is the abuser, as he abuses his parents and does not allow them to even try to save their marriage: “….Mummy” “Yes, darling?” “Mummy? Don’t love Daddy.” “I won’t. I certainly won’t.” “Good.” “….Bye bye, Daddy” (Amis 1991: 290).
Even with Marmaduke out of the way, Guy and Hope can’t seem to say anything meaningful to each other as the communication always breaks down: “What are those pills you’re taking? Oh. Yeast.” “What?” “Yeast.” “What about it?” “Nothing.” “What are you talking about?” “Sorry.” “Christ” (Amis 1991: 96).
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The Clinch family is heading towards a disastrous ending and nothing can stop it. There is no hope for Hope and Guy as their marriage is a “person fatally drowning” (Amis 1991: 233). Neither of the partners cares about the actions of the other. When Guy becomes aware of his wife’s infidelity, he is not devastated but happy – “my wife doesn’t love me… my wife has betrayed me… how absolutely wonderful” (Amis 1991: 180). Hope takes up Dick for lover, and Guy plunges into a relationship with manipulative Nicola. Neither of these relationships will evolve into a meaningful one, neither will bring about the birth of true intimacy as all is flesh, desire, manipulation, false pretences. Love was either dying or already dead. Up until now, Guy and Hope’s relationship, to the child and to each other, had been largely paramedical. After Marmaduke’s renaissance, it became, well — you wouldn’t say paramilitary. You’d say military (Amis 1991:23).
Although Guy is a father who despite everything loves his son, and Hope a mother that accepts Marmaduke for what he is, their family is broken. During a visit he pays to Mrs. Broadener, Hope’s mother, Guy stresses how important it is for family members to love each other, care about each other, protect each other no matter what and stick together. Mrs. Broadener’s response to this is – “IT’S ALL _______ SHIT!” (Amis 1991: 275). The “family prognosis” is therefore not good. In the world of lost values, a world of technology, pornography, lost meaning, lost identity, and lost self, family cannot be a safe haven. In these conditions, family is not a place “where the core values of the preceding generations and the ancestors are transmitted and lived” (Viser 2005: 5). A modern family is thus a source of grief, abuse, superficiality. There is no growth, no continuity – these disrupted families only produce individuals who are not even individuals but destructive “machines” or black holes with no sense of morality, incapable of intimacy, socially isolated and corrupted.
3. DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY IN THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET To talk of Salman Rushdie and his works is a hard, yet rewarding task. To read Rushdie’s works is to read and re-read in search of new themes that easily reveal themselves to attentive and open-minded readers. Prior to writing and publishing The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie wrote Grimus, Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moors’s Last Sigh and other novels and short stories. Some of these novels have been characterized as “family novels” because of the pervading theme of family (predominantly Midnight’s Children, Shame and The Moors’ Last Sigh). According to Matt Kimmich, the family theme provides structure for the abovementioned novels, so they need to be analysed from this point of view. Families Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 61
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and parent-child relationships in The Ground Beneath Her Feet will enable us to understand the characters of the novel, their actions and emotions, the world Salman Rushdie depicts in this novel and the ultimate message he tries to convey to the readers. Through numerous dysfunctional families Salman Rushdie makes us understand the notions of identity, belonging, complexity of contemporary civilization and its corruption. All families of The Ground Beneath Her Feet are unhappy families made up of members who are complex, extremely different, opposing individuals. These families are on-and-off, come-and-go; they have no stability, no firm ground beneath their feet. Let us start discussing this novel’s families from the Camas. The Cama family is made up of five members, each unique and in sharp contrast to other members. There is the head of the family, Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, “tall, ectomorphic, extravagantly moustachioed and gimlet-eyed” (Rushdie 2000: 25), Lady Spenta Cama, “a placid individual, an astigmatic endomorph, heavy-spectacled and heavy-bodied” (Rushdie 2000:24), Khusro and Ardaviraf (known to all as Cyrus and Virus) – Cyrus, a “child with the genuinely malign ruthlessness of a true hero” and Virus, “the slow-witted, sweet-natured child” (Rushdie 2000: 25). Finally, there is the fifth member of the family, the most famous of all – Ormus Cama, a surprise baby hidden in his mother’s uterus behind his dead twin’s larger body. Everything about this family is strange and problematic. The parents, Sir Darius Cama and Lady Spenta Cama, are rather different characters. Darius Cama is a staunch rationalist, a great metropolitan creation of the British, barrister-at-law (a false one, as it turns out later in the novel), a person of noble origins, a sportsman, while Lady Spenta Cama is “preternaturally calm,” “a soul fully occupied on the spiritual level” (Rushdie 2000: 24). The birth of their third son, Ormus and an accident (an injury Darius Cama unintentionally inflicts upon Virus) bring about a great change in their attitudes towards life, their behaviour, their treatment of family life and their children. While there seemed to have been love among them prior to these events (and although some of that love survived until Spenta found out that Sir Darius „had built his entire professional life on a falsehood” (Rushdie 2000: 132)), Darius and Spenta Cama have drifted apart into their own, separate, distinct worlds. Sir Darius did not like his wife’s literalist religiosity and had difficulty in repressing his unease when it came to Spenta’s saints. Even an event such as the birth of a child does not bring them together, as we learn that Darius immediately “made his excuses, went so far as to kiss his wife and rushed off, somewhat too eagerly…to play cricket” (Rushdie 2000: 27). Lady Spenta Cama does not seem to mind this kind of behaviour, as she is entirely immersed in her spiritual word. Both of them seem to disagree with the actions of the other, but neither rebels, neither objects, nor shows displeasure or dislike. With Virus’s silence comes the silence of the entire family, especially of Darius and Spenta. Sir Darius turns into an alcoholic, withdraws from everyday life and turns to hemp and opium. He gets immersed into the 174
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fictional world of his imagination in which he envisions to return to the bosom of his beloved mother. On the other hand, Lady Spenta does nothing to connect with her husband, to help him or save him from the doom to which he is heading. She remains trapped in deep sadness and in her mystical world, paying scarce attention only to Virus. The only thing that seems to matter to Spenta at the time of Darius’s decline is keeping up the appearances. What prevails in their marital life until Sir Darius’s death is a tragic silence, and what silence equals in this relationship and this house is death of love, life, and of true and genuine care for the partner and family. Neither of them can be said to have been a good parent. Darius Cama oppressed all his children equally, awaking his sons in the middle of the night to accuse them of decadence, defeatism, homosexuality and weakness of new generations. Sir Darius’s gradual decline brought about the true nature of his being, making him a bad father, a bad role model, a father who makes his sons wrestle hands with him and then laughs at them. He turns a deaf ear to all their needs and Lady Spenta is no better. With the birth of Ormus and simultaneous death of his twin brother, Spenta becomes a nervy, unsettled, easily flustered woman who is incapable of loving her newborn son. She rejects him completely (as if he had been born with a disease), does not attend to his needs, does not wash him or feed him: To Ormus she continued to be distant, never fond. Events had neutered her maternal feelings towards him. Raised by servants, he was left to find love where he could (Rushdie 2000: 40).
While Lady Spenta changes her attitude towards her son Ormus and helps him recover from a car accident (not before she buys her freedom from him so that she could leave him and start a new life with a new, wealthy husband), she seems to be constantly changing in her behaviour towards her other two sons. For a moment the reader feels that Lady Spenta loves and cares for Virus, but as soon she is married to Lord Methword she dispatches him to a nursing home. After the family finds out that Cyrus is a serial killer, she completely erases him from her life, declaring that she no longer has a son called Cyrus Cama and that his name is never to be spoken in her presence again. She feels betrayed by her son, yet she never stops to ask herself whether she or her husband had anything to do with their son’s violent behaviour. Physical displays of affection between Lady Spenta and her remaining two sons are uncharacteristic and infrequent. A mother capable of saying goodbye to her child with a simple “OK” is not a good mother: So she was saying goodbye after all, she thinks, and foolish tears blub out: What are you saying Ormie, have I not been, she can’t finish a sentence, because she knows the answer, which is No. A good mother? No, no” (Rushdie 2000: 255).
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The three, or better yet say the four Cama brothers, although connected at an inexplicable, psychological level (Virus and Cyrus, Ormus and Gayo), are not really communicating or helping each other. They exchange thoughts, but they do not really listen to one another. Lacking love in their family, they seem to be running towards one another, searching for salvation, hope and care, but what they get is not what they desperately long for. Another family which started off with love but somehow lost it down the road is the Merchant family. Vasim Vaqar Merchant and Ameer Merchant, as they like to believe, have been thrown by chance into each other’s arms; for them it was Destiny that was determined to unite them and make them fall in love with each other. V.V. Merchant is mild, shy, tender-hearted, and unworldly temperament while Ameer Merchant is “rich by name, a disappointed altruist, an angry woman, a daughter of an even angrier man, Ishak Merchant, a man so interminably choleric that at the age of forty-three his inner organs literally burst with anger and he died, bleeding copiously inside his skin” (Rushdie 2000: 80). These two opposing personalities came to care for each other, form a family and even bring a baby to the world – their son Rai. They started off well as a couple, cared for their son (as Rai says, it was a childhood of being loved, of believing in the safety of their little world), shared responsibilities (a fifty-fifty regime, parental equality), dedicated time to the family, but somehow Vasim and Ameer slowly started to drift apart. The danger of falling apart was present from the very beginning, but the happy couple, deeply and desperately in love, did not see it. Vasim Vaqar was a dreamer, a great, tender soul, a digger of the past – an excavator, architect and historian searching for fixity in the knowledge from the past. His diggings of the city’s past might be interpreted as his quest for his mislaid personal identity. On the other hand, Ameer was sharp, explosive, and incapable of accepting any kind of cavils; she was an entrepreneur, a developer, a believer not in gods and ghosts of the past, but in the future, technology, development. One dreaming of unknown depths, other dreaming of unknown heights, Vasim and Ameer came to lose themselves in their respective worlds, just like Lady Spenta and Sir Darius. Consequently, they lost each other, their home, their safety, their unity. V.V. Merchant turned to gambling and got into huge debts, while Ameer allowed her cynicism to corrode all her youthful principles. She became bitter, ready to start a fight at any moment, constantly nagging and accusing V.V. Merchant that he had utterly and cruelly wronged her in numerous ways. They no longer communicated and as the author says, V.V. Merchant was “unable to talk to her about his grave concerns, was obliged, instead, to follow the dictates of his nature, and dig” (Rushdie 2000: 155). V.V. Merchant went on digging until he dug up what would ruin Ameer, while she joined forces with Piloo Doodhwala, a ruthless, corrupted businessmen involved in all kinds of shady transactions. Ameer is ready to sell off their family house without thinking so that the construction of 176
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Cuffe Parade could go on. Her husband objects, and as a result they fall out even more. After insulting each other heavily, they destroy others (e.g. Vina receives a heavy rain of insults from Ameer on that occasion). Everything ends with fire. Villa Thracia, once a home, a place of love, laughs, joy, mutual respect and happiness is burned to the ground: “the smoke, black, unfeeling smoke, took over, the illusion was destroyed and darkness covered all” (Rushdie 2000: 168). The darkness did cover all, as after this event the Merchants are never again a family. They go on arguing, living on their own, fighting for the child (turning him into a yo-yo bouncing between the pair of them), and they ultimately die. Ameer, the “cynical Mammon worshipper” (Rushdie 2000: 207) will die of a tumour which will consume her in six weeks’ time. V.V. Merchant, after fighting his gambling addiction and trying to win his wife back but being rejected with a definite “it’s over, for sure” will fall apart physically and emotionally and will eventually commit suicide. Their son Rai is left alone with a painful memory, desperately searching for a little love. The third family we examine is that of Vina Apsara. Here we can talk of several families in relation to Vina Apsara as she moved from one family to another. Born Nissa Shetty, Vina grew up in the middle of a cornfield in Virginia with her mother Helen (Greek-American), a woman of humble origins, a stepfather John Poe, a jack-of-all-trades builder, two siblings and John Poe’s children (four of them). As we immediately see, Vina is not living with both of her biological parents. Someone is missing from the picture, and that is her father – an Indian gent, a lawyer who went to jail for malpractice during World War II. He came out of jail after Nagasaki and then decided to abandon his wife and three daughters. He became a butcher and started a new life with his male lover. After being abandoned with three children left at her care, Helen Shetty turns to drinking, pills and debts, and the children “went to hell at high speed” (Rushdie 2000: 103). It was then that she was rescued by John Poe who was determined to help Helen and her children, but in his own way. While he never differentiated between his own and Helen’s children and provided money and food for every member of this large family, John Poe was still a man demanding traditional behaviour from all family members, especially from Helen and Vina. Vina was taught not to contradict John Poe (a kind but a dominating man), accept everything as it is (the same meals, same clothes, same routine day after day) and put a smile on her face while doing it because John Poe needed “regular thanking for the blessings he bestowed” (Rushdie 2000: 104). The Poe family home was a home without privacy: children were stuck in their bunk beds, four in a room. In a family of dominating, controlling father and a quiet, broken-down mother, children had no other option but to grow up quiet and inward. Still Vina rebelled. She decided to run wild and acted accordingly. Without any true love or affection offered to her, being abandoned and unprotected, Vina struggled with her childLipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 61
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hood, struggled to form an identity and yet she never succeeded. Discriminated for the colour of her skin, insulted (called cabritos and cabrono) by other children, Vina searched for solitude so that she could be a part of music and not silence that prevailed in the home of John Poe. Her childhood, and childhood of all the children of the Poe family for that matter, was without hope and none of the parental figures could provide it. Her mother ultimately commits suicide but not before killing everyone in the household except Vina. A wife kills her husband, a MOTHER kills her children (“crazy woman ran amuck, big hadsome woman like her…things got to her, she snapped…shit happens”) (Rushdie 2000: 108). This one line is enough to explain and help us understand the degree of dysfunctionality of this family. Vina, only ten and already abandoned for the second time in her life, gets abandoned for the third time by her father who, after the abovementioned massacre, decides to ship Vina out to Helen’s distant relatives living in Chickaboom. There Vina becomes part of the Egiptus family. She is given the family name and becomes Diana Egiptus, but this is all she gets from the new family, since it was equally dysfunctional as all previously mentioned ones. Although we are not given a lot of information on what this family is like, from what the author provides we can tell that Vina was not treated well in that family. The head of the Egiptus family, in this case a woman, Mrs. Marion Egiptus, is Vina’s primary tormentor; however, all other members of the Egiptus family seem to be equally interested in torturing Vina. Without any guidance, love or advice to help her grow, Vina turns to delinquency, violence and excessive use of pills. No Egiptus family member is family for Vina, and they eventually toss her out. Her biological father once again turns his back on Vina, offering her crumbs of love (one dinner, one dance) in exchange for freedom – “don’t call, don’t write, have a good life, goodbye” (Rushdie 2000: 111). Vina is then shipped off to yet another broken family – that of Piloo Doodhwala. A capitalist, ruthless and self-centred, Piloo Doodhwala is no new fatherly figure to which Vina can turn to for protection, guidance or love. Both wife and children are completely under his command. Vina is accepted into this family only because of Piloo’s strive in politics. Here, as with all other families in this novel, what looks good on the outside is quite rotten on the inside. What these broken families produce can be shown on the example of Vina Apsara: What a piece of jetsam she was then, what a casualty! Literally selfless, her personality smashed, like a mirror, by the fist of her life. Her name, her mother and family, her sense of place and home and safety and belonging and being loved, her belief in the future, all these things had been pulled out from under her, like a rug. She was floating in a void, denatured, dehistoried, clawing at the shapelessness, trying to make some sort of mark (Rushdie 2000: 121).
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Rushdie’s 575 pages long novel is full of misery, sorrow, unhappiness, turbulence, change, complex, unhealthy relationships which produce unhealthy individuals as part of an unhealthy society. Partners are on an on-off basis; their love and affection, although strong and true in the beginning, quickly diminishes and leaves behind nothing but bad feelings, bad intentions, and bad actions. No stability, no affection, and no family centre eventually lead to the creation of broken children, people who are never to find their true place in the world and live happily ever after.
4. CONCLUSION Family – “that elaborate circuitry of passion and power – is a topical and politically sensitive issue but at the same time one that has preoccupied and conditioned Western culture, in one form or another, for centuries” (Senn 1996: 9). Family forms have evolved from small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled institutional agrarian families and finally to modern nuclear and newly diverse and permeable post-modern families (Zeitlin 1993). A number of literary works focus on representing family and its issues. These discuss family values and their importance for society in general, enforced family separations, violence within the domestic environment, disruption, and family as a shield against moral and socio-political conditions of the modern society. Through the family issue we discuss multiple other issues such as identity, authenticity, nation, history, sense of belonging, love, etc. By reviewing society’s families we comment on the whole of society – its past, current and future conditions. Contemporary fiction often portrays families or homes which are unconventional. It portrays families from different cultures, made up of different personalities, influenced by different beliefs, values and traditions, but somehow in the 20th century literature they are all quite similar. They are all crumbling under the pressure of the modern societies, in a state of crisis, disharmonious, and with little chance for success. Salman Rushdie’s and Martin Amis’s novels (although not considered family novels) show exactly this: how families, due to advancement of wrong values, ideas, and beliefs, due to increased consumerism, wars and industrialization have become small – in value, action, identity, uniqueness, genuine affection, intimacy and ultimately life. All family relations have gone utterly wrong and the question is – can they be fixed? Literature has the role of pointing out problems, making judgements and suggesting alternatives together with ways of resisting the contrived images – the alienated world. A cheating husband obsessed with pornography, a selfabsorbed wife with her eyes on money, a victimized or a monsterized child taken either separately or together (as a “family”) are certainly not the solution for the rising problem of disorientation and loss of self. Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture / Year XVII / Volume 61
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Literature is not magical, and it cannot simply offer one good solution to the problems of humanity. As the world becomes bigger, more complex and more industrialized, the greater the role of literature will be to talk of injustice and bolt us into re-evaluating, re-thinking, and re-constructing our families, our homes and thus our lives. Anglo-American literature of the 20th century provides enough family novels for the public and through them alternative ways of improving ourselves. Once jolted into acting, we are all to undertake other steps towards a better present and a better future. It is quite clear that these “other“ steps are not an easy task, as there exists a wide range of family related issues which are to be dealt with. Even the most prominent of sociologists cannot offer a universal solution to the problems of abortion, pornography, gender roles or divorce. It is even more unclear how to tackle the notions such as tolerance of different life styles, individual and cultural diversity, rising women power, individual autonomy, changing gender roles etc. which are all said to have contributed to the transformation of family unit. How do we determine which society is doing the best job? Are we to follow the example of those who foster social order or those who promote individual development? Where do we draw the line and say what is wrong and what is right? Do we even have the right to do that, and are the opinions and actions of a single human being enough to bring about a drastic change in the modern world? The questions are numerous and the answers might seem vague, but it should be clear that what we need are actions. We cannot accept the situation as it is. While this paper does not offer answers to the abovementioned questions, it aims at making a difference through informing its readers about what our families have turned into as is evident in contemporary literature. Awareness of the message that contemporary authors are sending through their literary works is the first step towards creating a better society.
References Amis 1991: M. Amis, London Fields, New York: Vintage Books. Childs 2005: P. Childs, Contemporary novelists: British fiction since 1970, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Gregson 2006: I. Gregson, Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction, London: Continuum Keulks 2003: G. Keulks, Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis and the British Novels since 1950, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Popenoe 1988: D. Popenoe, Disturbing the Nest: Family Change and Decline in Modern Societies, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. Popenoe, 1992: D. Popenoe, The Declining American Family: Taking a Reasoned Moral Position, New York: Rutgers University. Rushdie 2000: S. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, London: Vintage.
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Shorther 1977: E. Shorther, The Making of the Modern Family, University of Michigan: Basic Books. Senekal 2008: B.A. Senekal, Alienation as a fictional construct in four contemporary fictional novels: A Literary – theoretical Study, Unpublished MA Thesis: University of the Free State. Senn 1996: W. Senn, Families, Swiss papers in English Language and Literature, Vol.9, Tubingen: Gunger Narr Verlang. Thomas, S. Posing as a Postmodernist: Race and Class in Martin Amis’s London Fields, Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London, Volume 1 Number 2, September 2003. The Literary London Journal. 18.08.2016. Viser 2005: I.Viser, Family Fictions: The Family in Contemporary Postcolonial Literatures in English, Groningen: University of Groningen. Zeitlin et al 1993: M. Zeitlin et al, Strengthening the family to participate in development, Medford: Turf University. Ивана С. Јовановић / НЕМА СРЕЋНОГ КРАЈА – ПОРОДИЦА У МАРТИН ЕЈМИСОВИМ ЛОНДОНСКИМ ПОЉИМА И ТЛУ ПОД ЊЕНИМ НОГАМА САЛМАНА РУЖДИЈА Резиме / Савремено друштво називамо још и друштвом иновација, нових идеја, изненадних догађаја и угодног живота. Свакодневно хвалимо себе за сва достигнућа која су на један или други начин допринела расту животног стандарда и уопштеном напретку. Међутим, чини се да не узимамо у обзир недостатке које употреба брзих аутомобила, брзе хране и сами брзи животи имају. Један од веома битних недостатака је и распад породица тј. породичног живота. Данашње породице делују савршено али су далеко од савршенства. Уистину, када их мало боље сагледамо видимо изопаченост, исквареност и пропадање. Без љубави, међусобне подршке и апсолутног поверења који треба да постоје међу члановима породице, чини се да су данашње породице осуђене на пропаст. Савремени аутори (у складу са улогом коју је књижевност одувек имала у друштву – и још увек има), покушавају да скрену пажњу на све видљивију деформацију основне ћелије друштва коју породица представља. Анализирајући дела истакнутих аутора садашњице Мартина Ејмиса и Салмана Руждија (Лондонска поља и Тло под њеним ногама), детаљном анализом ликова као и односа које граде у делу, долазимо до закључка да аутори оштро критикују стање у коме се налазе данашње породице те стање друштва у целини. Њихова критика и осуда онога у шта су се данашње породице претвориле приморава нас на преиспитивање вредности, приниципа и веровања који нам дефинишу начин живљења. Циљ рада је да скрене пажњу на тренутно стање друштва те да упозори да без хитне акције и драстичне промене „стила“ живота пут којим идемо је онај без повратка. Кључне речи: М. Ејмис, С. Ружди, породица, пропаст, друштво, злоупотреба, изолованост, раздвојеност Примљен: 5. децембра 2016. Прихваћен за штампу децембра 2016.
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