To Be Human: Noises & Voices in Ye Land of Ye Olde Folks
The following reading of Stewart Home’s novel Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton (2004) focuses on reanimation of redemptive silence through the remix of noise. The remix includes, but is not limited to, acknowledging the silent layers of storytelling and render them accessible: the unuttered literary tissue, cracks in the discursive, lateral paths of cultural remixing. In Stewart Home’s novels, a social commentary is both overtly presented and implied in the interventions manipulating the genre and literary elements such as characterization, tone, and setting. For instance, the characters, featuring emotional sparseness and awkward ways of socializing, are sketches of nihilo-cannibalist culture. Insistence on compulsion and aggression is a caricature of a human being in a soulless world. Disorientation and confusion, presented in the text and coupled with what is infused in the subtext, add up to a sketch of a fragmented culture of robozombies. A sense of isolation, dispassion, and destitution is accentuated through the broken beat plot. Syncopated rhythm patterns make manifest, rather than explicate, how it feels to live in an alienating culture in which fetishized labor relativizes the notion of the everyday in a highly undesirable way, as Terry Eagleton remarks the state of affairs in Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate: “Truly civilized societies do not hold predawn power breakfast” (11).
In Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton, Home portrays the character Eve in a minimalist fashion to suggest detrimental effects of capitalism on an individual, as he states in Bubonic Plagiarism: “[I]n this world we are all prostitutes. It isn’t really possible to jump in and out of commodity culture” (62). Eve explores the transformation of quantity into quality, the distinction between art and crime, the pleasure-pain divide (Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton 13). Among her clients is Adam, who is interested in investigating into prostitution and its cultural aspects. They engage in a joint research discussing contributions of certain cultural figures to intellectual history. Part of the thematic is proliferation and commodification of art: “Needing money to pay off debts, I resolved to transform prostitution into a form of arts” (Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton 27). Further implications in political terms can be imagined along the following lines: “Crime became art and art became crime” (15). This casts light on the novel’s problematizing mutual conditioning between the authorities and the mainstream culture on the one hand and, on the other, criminalized social margins.
What makes this social commentary specific is that, as much as it is overtly stated, it is also delivered through the silent cracks, mainly integrated into the characterization and the tone. The character of Eve, for example, is the epitome of the stigma against junkies and prostitutes. Home makes a point about stereotyping that masks politics of exclusion: “[T]he condemnations that are sometimes directed towards junkies and prostitutes should be deflected back against the alienated social relationships that produce prejudices” (Bubonic Plagiarism 61). Hence, the characterization constitutes tacit cultural critique combined with what is uttered. The fusion of the verbal and what punctures discourse tells a tale about the world in which afflicted solidarity engenders individualism instead of individuality. The culture of self-absorbed, commoditized humans is depicted in the thematization of prostitution between a choice and necessity, between privacy and spectacle: “To begin with transformations. I decided to throw away my own rules. I planned crimes against grammar by immersing myself in the grammar of crime” (7).
In the context of the interlaced social and discursive realities, the Jack the Ripper conspiracy delineates a parallel between the nineteenth century and contemporary culture’s sensationalist susceptibility thriving on insatiable hunger for the euphoric. Closely related to such sentiment is the idolatry situated within the obsession with celebrity culture. Thus, among the candidates for the identity of Jack the Ripper are the characters based on cultural figures such as Henry James and William Burroughs, just as some of the prostitutes’ clients are Martin Heidegger, George Sorel, Albert Camus, Gilles Deleuze, and Jim Morrison.
Such characterization creates a platform for the scrutiny of power-relations within the cultural establishment and a critique of institutionalized knowledge. The novel features obscenities in educational institutions, thereby questioning morality within the mainstream culture. For example, a promiscuous university professor seduces a student and exposes his sexual frustration in a violent erotic act. Images of graphic sex and violence are deployed in order to make prominent corruption and social relations based on exclusion and dominance. By depicting an alienated bodily experience and vulgarized sexuality, the novel makes an implicit commentary about body politics as a form of socio-political control that disguises questionable morality under the language of political correctness.
Hypocrisy is also problematized through the critique of global politics and the state of affairs in the European Union based on the Old-New Europe divide. Many of the prostitutes, for example, are from the former Communist Bloc, which emphasizes the problems of inequality and inhumane treatment of disenfranchised demographics. Expanding on Marx’s critique of alienation and exploitation in capitalist and allegedly socialist/communist societies alike, prostitution is used as a metaphor for social and existential dilemmas. For example, the character of Eve is portrayed as a well-educated, well spoken artist-prostitute-crackhead. Along with a class reference, crack, as the drug of “choice” of the impoverished, also metaphorizes prevalent affective patterns of our time, characterized by addictive behavior, instantaneous gratifications, and superficiality in human interaction that clearly dissolves solidarity.
The novel shows an individual as dehumanized, bewildered commodity. Through this is addressed the question of freedom under a threat of the military-entertainment complex. The symbolism of the occult demonstrates the characteristics of such culture. Literary techniques, used in the novel as means of an experimentation with the genre, accentuate the cultural critique in question. Home comments on the approach as follows: “Above all, and like all my books, Down & Out is about the impossibility of separating form from content within human expression and the ultimate futility of genre distinctions” (Bubonic Plagiarism 59). Insisting on one hundred words being the exact length of every paragraph, Home aims at subverting the distinctions between poetry and prose (Bubonic Plagiarism 59). The first part of the novel mainly follows conventions of traditional storytelling. As a parody of a bourgeois genre, the novel features “the odd elements of realism” (Bubonic Plagiarism 60). As the parody progresses, elements of goth aesthetic, portraying occult, ritualistic, phantasmagoric scenes, supersede the elements of realism—the narrative is moving from sex to death, again to convey a social commentary: “So the book becomes utterly fantastic and this is one of the ways [he] accentuate[s] [his] interest in the cultural construction of the relationship between sex and death” (Bubonic Plagiarism 60).
In this stylistic spin-off is instigated the idea about cultural constructs as means of control and oppression. Esoteric context is suggestive of manipulative social mechanisms carried out via persecution and prosecution of the social margins. This addresses realities of prostitutes’ activities in gentrified areas, where they, “dressed in widow’s weeds […] are able to solicit business unmolested by cops” (Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton 153). Simultaneously, it reiterates the critique of discursive realities and cultural constructs: ”The reversibility of sex and death is never more apparent than when whores turn tricks in a graveyard” (Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton 159). Such a picture of the modern world inhabited by robozombies deprived of their own will, having projected on their brains “series of pictures with bright and vivid outlines” (Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton 166), evidently references the dilemma of living in media-saturated realities. Similarly, artistic circles are reminiscent of mystical orders in which objectification maintains social relations based on domination and exclusion.
With an exception of Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010), London is typically both the setting and a character in Home’s novels. The portrayal of the character of the London in Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton charters the changes in the area between Bethnal Green and the City. Cultural context indicates a mute collaboration and a mutually conditioned relationship between the authorities and the ghetto via the sustenance of tribulations within the neglected communities and/or neighborhoods. Partly, the problematic can be understood in the context of Habermas’s thought about the politics of distraction. In “Modernity--an Incomplete Project,” he writes about a populist reaction to neoconservative cooption of communication infrastructure. Different forms of resistance to modernization and science in the service of capitalist economy are suppressed under the flag of progress. Habermas reveals the underlying motives for modernization and the resulting socio-political dynamic. Precisely, he implicitly discloses the truth about the scapegoating of certain cultural segments and practices in the name of advancement of the cultural spheres by nature detached from the communication in question. Simply put, it might translate into seeing the key role of economic factors in the circles and activities whose primary interests are of the different character:
But the occasions for protest and discontent originate precisely when spheres of communicative action, centered on the reproduction and transmission of values and norms, are penetrated by a form of modernization guided by standards of economic and administrative rationality – in other words, by standards of rationalization quite different from those of communicative rationality on which those spheres depend. But neo-conservative doctrines turn our attention precisely away from such societal processes: they project the causes, which they do not bring to light, onto the plane of subversive cultures and its advocates. (8)
In this light can be read certain aspects of Home’s novel depicting modernization in urban areas. Focusing on architectural reconfiguration of the cityscape and cultural restructuring, it discloses instrumentality of modernizing policies in the criminalization of the dispossessed. Put differently, the impoverished neighborhoods are being gentrified, while the denizens are being continually marginalized. The underprivileged in the rejuvenated areas cannot meet new economic demands, so they not only remain culturally excluded, but are also forced to relocate to the areas where affordable housing disguises the class divide. In order to endure the hardships, preserve day-to-day living, or, simply to support certain lifestyles, the dispossessed frequently opt for illegal acts. In such cases, the supposedly life-preserving choices are also destructive and degrading. Paradoxically, the authorities keep a blind eye on some aspects of crime because of their own complicity, at the same time not shying away from criminalizing those same social strata on a different basis, thereby sustaining the vicious circle.
Accentuated is the impact of the so called modernization turning the city into a jigsaw puzzle[1] of fashionable facades, bizarre galleries, grotesque shopping malls, olympic villages, and slums. Home elucidates hypocrisy behind such urban policies by pointing out that, contrary to the presentations in the media and arts of the urban transfiguration, the reality shows little evidence of easing social tensions.[2] Rather, they have been intensified through racist exclusion with regard to employment and housing opportunities. The distorted image of cultural realities in the East End of the mid naughties Home comments as follows:
The yuppies really changed the character of the area and have made it a lot worse for the predominantly Muslim local population. At the same time I’d be reading stuff written by art critics in which they’d be going on about how gentrification had solved the problem of racism in the Brick Lane area. This was complete nonsense, since community self-defence against fascism had addressed the most blatantly criminal aspects of this. However, institutional racism remains a massive problem in the area and gentrification has exacerbated it in terms of housing and jobs. (Bubonic Plagiarism 59-60)
New money, thriving on unfathomable valences of economics, a manipulated image of power, and the affinities for sensationalism generates the logic of pricy cheapness that seems to be spreading beyond the East End, as suggested by the title of Home’s pamphlet Bubonic Plagiarism. As it is, it is reasonable to believe that, simultaneously, a web of resistance against those overwhelming corporate threats is spreading in the overlooked, forgotten, masked, parts of the city. One is prone to imagine that the authentic flavor of resistance can still be felt around slightly damaged facades in the originally Huguenot immigrant neighborhood in the Brick Lane area, in the unmowed grass in Weaver’s Fields, in the charming, supernarrow passages off Whitechapel High Street, or, in the buildings to be rebuilt in the King’s Cross St. Pancras area.[3] There is the 5 Caledonian Road radical haven at Housmans bookstore. Lateral alleys of resistance can be found near Bunhill Row. Just off Bunhill Fields, the historic cemetery, where non-conformers such as William Blake are buried, there is a potential to inspire the dormant song of the chimney sweeper. In Finsbury Square, Occupy London calls for vitalizing the cleansing capacities of the remix.[4]
Literary playfulness, contesting cultural conventions, demarcates the ways of resisting cultural impositions, at the same time reconstructing the communal being and reinventing individuality, as Home suggests: ”The one thing I know is that we have to work this out together, no one in isolation and acting on their own will find the solution” (Bubonic Plagiarism 64). In the interstices of text, one finds creative spaces for cleansing the communication channel, for purging it from dehumanizing obstacles. Those recuperating energizes constitute the redeeming power of creation—the source for the remix, an inspiration for a reanimating intervention on behalf of the DJ.
Literature shows both what language can and what it cannot do. It certainly reaffirms that it is not possible to step outside of language in order to verbally express something. However, not only the verbalized is what makes literature literature. There are literary elements, such as tone, characterization, and setting that deliver a message unutterable in and impenetrable through language. That is how silence punctures discourse. As much as cultural constructs condition freedom, they also enable a contestation of the constructed boundaries. Constructiveness of cultural realities makes them reworkable. The remix can generate unifying energies for the restoration of vital ingredients of fruitful communal exchange.
[2] This is particularly prominent in the area bordered by Brick Lane, Bethnal Green, Bishop’s Way, and Hackney Wick; between Dalston Junction and Hackney Central, and all the way to Liverpool Street; and the Bethnal Green- Bow Church-Whitechapel triangle (the information and impressions based on my research trips to London in June, August 2008, July, August 2009, and July, August, December 2010, January 2011, and May 2012).
[3] At the crossroads of Pentonville Road and Gray’s Inn Pl. there is a building usurped by the real estate. To my knowledge, there has been at least three years during which absolutely nothing has been done at what is supposed to be a construction site.
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