• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
 
Aesthetics of Globalization in Contemporary Fiction: TheFunction of the fall of the Berlin Wall in Zadie Smith'sWhite Teeth (2000), Nicholas Royle's Counterparts (1996),and Philip Hensher's Pleasured (1998).
10:1 | ©2007
 
Padmaja Challakere
1.
 
In recent years, the fall of the Berlin Wall has had atremendous rhetorical yield. In the parlance of businessand political economy, it is loudly mobilized as culturalcurrency. This is vividly illustrated in ThomasFriedman's
1
fulsome equation between "democracy andthe unleashing of free market global capitalism," and hiscorrelation between "democratization of finance" and"the fall of the Berlin Wall." By Friedman's reckoning,
2 
"the second great age of globalization and the secondgreat age of unregulated democracy" [read capitalism] began on 11/9 with the collapse of the Berlin Wall." Butthis equation is also to be glimpsed in contemporaryfiction where the symbolism of the fall of the BerlinWall, already heavy with political and culturalsignificance, has been recently rejuvenated. Does thismean that a Friedmanian consensus pervades successfulcontemporary fiction today? It is instructive to examinehow the conceit of the fall of the Wall is addressed incontemporary fiction, especially in relation to thevisually-charged media images which represent EastBerlin and West Berlin as "separated twins raisedaccording to different sets of rules" (Royle
 ,Counterparts
). The cultural preoccupations related tothe coming down of the Berlin Wall are revealed in aninterview
3
 with Nicholas Royle, author of the novel
Counterparts.
Speaking of his interest in the BerlinWall, Royle has this to say:I was particularly drawn to Berlin because of its literal,concrete division. Two halves making a whole, or twoentities that were altered doubles of each other? Twinsthat had been separated and kept in neighboring housesand raised according to different sets of rules as a socialexperiment?2.
 
Royle likens the Berlin Wall to a symptom of incommensurability and sees it as an externalization of already nascent barriers. According to him, the Wall"makes concrete" an already existing gap in what had
 
 been closely correlated and twinned. Wherever walls are put up, they produce interlocked twins who "had beenseparated and kept in neighboring houses and raisedaccording to different sets of rules as a socialexperiment" and in this lies the Wall's dread. The building of the Berlin Wall, as a host of historians havereminded us, was linked to the containment anddisplacement of Germany's Nazi past into East Berlin.The three novels that this essay examines -- ZadieSmith's
White Teeth
(2000), Nicholas Royle's
Counterparts
(1996), and Philip Hensher's
 Pleasured 
(1998) -- all use the metaphor of 'separated twins' and'the fall of the Berlin Wall.' However, my argument alsospeaks in a larger way to the aesthetic codes and valuesof contemporary fiction. I argue that in its articulation of identity and in its conception of the fall of the BerlinWall," contemporary fiction mimics rather than resiststhe metaphorizing mode of neo-liberal capitalism.3.
 
John LeCarre's
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 
(1965) and the recent film Wolfgang Becker's
Good-Bye Lenin
(2000) are paradigmatic popular texts whichevoke the memory of the Berlin Wall. The most widely publicized media image related to the coming down of the Berlin Wall is, of course, that of East Berliners"unpeeling bananas," now famously delivered from thenecessity of having to wait in long lines for ordinarynecessities. While it is true that East Berlin was"liberated" into the consumerism of the West, it is alsotrue that this transformation was based on a marketeconomy model of "what East Berlin must be like"(obviously, like West Berlin). A pliant East Germanmarket was thrown open to deregulation; this slide intowhole-sale privatization visually embodied in yetanother famous image: that of scores of second-handMercedes flooding East Germany.4.
 
In her essay, "The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," published in the
 Nation
magazine in the wake of theTsunami disaster, Naomi Klein notes the emergence of "predatory forms of disaster capitalism that usedestruction, desperation, and fear created by militaryand or natural catastrophe to engage in extreme make-over" and "push through privatization options for reconstruction of public infrastructure" (11). Kleinexplains that such massive social and economicengineering under-girded by World Bank loans are acentral feature of the new "militarization of economy."Within the logic of this no-holds barred capitalism,military warfare and natural disasters present"opportunities"
4
for the overthrowing of old barriers. All
 
"barriers" (old infrastructure) are forcibly removed inorder to turn space into "a blank slate on whichneoliberals can design their dream economy: fully privatized, foreign-owned, and open for business"(11).5.
 
It is familiar by now that the New Economy'sglorification of middle class economic autonomy andindividual sovereignty is based not only upon thecontradictory championing of the 'right of capital' andthe 'right of person' but also upon a fundamental reversalof public discourse regarding the role of the state. Thestate's role is now fundamentally "managerial," and thestate reserves the right to act with ( rather than upon) themega-corporations to do "what it takes"(whether it isconducting military warfare or using public resources or  producing propaganda or introducing massive structuraladjustment policies on a global scale or applyingeconomic sanctions) to give US-based corporationsmarket dominance.6.
 
The rhetorical use of the fall of the Berlin Wall offersa ready template for the articulation of "a market-basedneo-liberal cosmopolitanism," as Peter Gowan terms it.In his essay "Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism",
5
Gowancomments on the emergence of a "strong ideologicalcurrent that has gained prominence in the Anglo-American world, running parallel to the discourse of globalization . . . . whose theorists are to be found ininternational relations departments of the Anglophoneuniversities, in offices of the UN Secretariat or in NATO protectorate in Bosnia" (79). Gowan notes that the mostsalient feature of "neo-cosmopolitanism" is that itcompletely brackets off economic inequality as aconcern and employs "financial and market-access pactsover a democratic social polity based on balance of  power" as a frame for reading progress (91). Thisversion of cosmopolitanism is compatible with "market-access agreements" which require that "economicallyweak nations open their economies to monetary andfinancial movements" and to "structural adjustment policies" to which the employment conditions of their citizens become extremely vulnerable" (91). "Neo-liberal cosmpolitanism" works within its own set of interpretive assumptions and epistemologicalconventions which in turn define the limits of itslanguage. The mythos of 'cosmopolitanism' is groundedin the transformation of mobility and consumption patterns of the middle class but it cannot inscribe a position for the working poor. This discursive barrier constitutes the very mythos of "neoliberalcosmopolitanism." Instead of cosmopolitanismfunctioning as a means of understanding the enforcing
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...