Erratic
Pathways of Power-Narratives
This can further be contemplated upon through
Lee Rourke’s novel The Canal (2010),
delineating redemptive educational capacities of the preservation of the
childlike. Having quit his job, the main character / narrator,
spends his long days on a bench opposite an office building decorated by numberless
computer screens and workers sitting in front of them, at their desks. It can
easily be the building in which he used to work prior to deciding to explore
the realms of boredom of a different kind. While narrating about an
adventureless adventure by the canal, somewhere between London boroughs of
Hackney and Islington, he might as well, somehow, still be in the
office, in front of the computer, imagining a different world to be his
everyday: the palpably intangible space between or within the spaces that
attempt to subjugate everything to the dictum of economic power and upward
mobility:
From where I was
sitting, if I stared straight ahead, I could clearly see that the building was
split into two halves: the ground floor, by the esplanade, above the murky moss
by the water’s edge, was packed with rows of snazzy flat-screen monitors, each
accompanied by an office worker—some on phones, some not. The five floors above
this bustling office consisted of the goldfish-bowl-like abodes of the upwardly
mobile. (Rourke 2010, 5)
As the novel is unfolding along the estuary
storyline, recollections of childhood bring a relief. Back then, one was not
happy because pollution was incomparably lower. One was neither happy nor
unhappy because of that for a simple reason: the child does not care about such
things,
as maintained: “I thought nothing of the pollution back then” (Rourke 2010, 4).
Further,
the episode in which the narrator is being taught by his brother how to climb
the tree and descend from it is suggestive of the modified perception of power
he acquires later on. He urges the brother not to leave him. The brother
encourages him to open his eyes, leads him step by step, confidently catches
him once he comes down, and carries him back home on his shoulders. The trust
of the scared, distrustful one now acquires fully fledged meaning in the
hard-won safety (Rourke 2010, 161).
How different the communication between
them is from the world in which one would be glad to see a lower level of
pollution because one knows what it is. How their shielded conversation is
immeasurably remote from the office space that not only deprives one from the
private sphere, but transforms the public realm into a zone void of
communication, despite the verbal content being the apparent currency. How very
incommensurable the brothers’ understanding of control and power is from the
corporate culture’s corruption, either as a means or as a consequence of
ensuring the dominant position in the arena of unscrupulous progress rush.
Despite the stultifying aggressiveness
of the torpor of those dominance-ridden, demigods’ empires, their energies are
not entirely different from those of the overtly violent street gang Pack Crew,
astonishingly precisely depicted as “a cacophony of teenagers and
testosterone—a heady combination” (Rourke 2010, 20). Indeed, the description of
empty days of empting glasses reflects the meaninglessness of those worlds and
longing for the safety of the imaginary shelter until the knots of the absence of
communication start being disentangled:
I spent the
whole weekend with them, drinking in the same pub, with the same people, the
same faces; drinking the same drinks, saying the same things. After I had
exhausted myself saying the same things I simply said nothing. I let those
around me say the very same things for me. I drank. I can’t even remember
stopping to eat, although I figure I must have done at some point. All I really
wanted was to be back at the canal. My weekend was a waste. I wanted to be back
on that bench, waiting for her. (Rourke 2010, 13)
He realizes the exacerbating effect
corporate surrounding has on him, so he opts for not partaking it. The boredom
of the office environment he finds stupefying. He decides to indulge in daily
observations of passers-by walking or cycling along the towpath. Instead of
sitting in the office, he distanced himself differently. The boredom of the
days spent seated on the bench brought to him different insights, different
stories. One would be prone to assume that it also brought to him an
inalienable right to thoroughly explore the meanings of words and the subtlety
of the distinctions between and among them:
I liked my spot
across from the flat-screen monitors and superfluous balconies. I liked being
bored—I liked what it was doing to me. The word “boring” is usually used to
denote a lack of meaning—an acute emptiness. But the weight of boredom at that
precise moment was almost overwhelming, it sure as hell wasn’t empty of
anything; it was tangible—it had meaning.
(Rourke 2010, 8 original
emphasis)
Immersing himself in daily conversations
with the girl whom he met during his hours spent on the
bench stands in contrast to coercive socio-political mechanisms pertinent to
corporate pantheons that strive to dissolve individuality into a soluble mass
amalgamation. Once he himself was introduced to the enchantment of the sense of
omnipotence. He was sitting in his room from which he could observe airplanes
taking off from and landing at Heathrow Airport. It was a rainy day. He was in the room from which it
was possible to see the verisimilitude of the roofs of Hackney. As if one were
sitting on the bench by the canal. Or, some other spaces.
The narrator draws the reader’s
attention to the imaginative realm of the fantasies of childhood. The
protagonist is in a Dan Air Boeing 727. He likes his food during the night flight
and he likes the turbulences during the descent. Strangely, he is in the
aircraft’s cockpit, where he is at one point accompanied by his father. The
world in front of his eyes is being magically transformed: “When the pilot
allowed me to sit in his chair, seeing the entire world below me, I remember
something seeping into me that I had never felt before: importance. I felt
powerful. I felt like I could control the world” (Rourke 2010, 35).
How incredibly it helps one demystify seductive
travesty of kinship, discern and preclude uncritical identification between
adulthood and maturity, and reveal incommensurability between the childish and
the childlike. How confusing is the notion of virtuality of office computer
screens sometimes mistaken for the original meaning of the word virtual. How
bewildering is the character of the girl with whom the protagonist spends long
jobless hours by the canal: between a chimera and a metaphor of the narrator’s
search for the boredom to bore him to surrender.
How tightly knitted are both the
relationship between those symbolic realms and the character’s being deadened
by militant sedentariness of corporate culture and dulled by its implacable,
unquenchable thirst for obfuscation. How inexplicable is the affinity for adopting
a godlike character. Or not.
In the novel, indicted are certain kinds
of distinctions:
I’ve never been
able to fathom why it has taken us so long to develop a system of existence
that makes no sense to me. I really don’t know if this is my failing or theirs,
or whether I am somehow unhinged, or different—but the feeling is that I now
know something, something blindingly obvious, something they can’t see. (Rourke
2010, 195)
The blindingly obvious might easily be
yet another linguistic subtlety providing a key for reading
in the light of the distinction between the words bondage and bond. Being free
from the forces that confine --“gravity was nothing to me” (Rourke
2010, 199) – is revealed as a diametrical opposite to the previously
recognized appeal of deceptive godlike powers now disentangled.
By the canal, facing his reflection on
the water’s surface, one is no more tempted to worship a delusion of
omnipotence. His struggle over the feeling of dislocation is immortalized in
the symbolism of the dead swan murdered by the gang, entailing the death of the
girl who was trying to save the dying bird. With the disappearance of noise
epitomized by the characters of the girl, the gang, the swan, the setting such
as the canal, the office building, aircrafts, and by other elements of the
novel metaphorizing obstacles to a clear vision, gone is the swan and all
somnambulist logic. The situation illuminates how invaluable cherishing certain
experiences from childhood is. With particular emphasis on the nuances between
different kinds of awareness and unawareness, the view, too, elucidates the
delicacy of versatile sorts of significance. The context invites reiterating
the notion of the gift, as presented in Wark’s parlance. How it is perceived
from the perspective of the child has nothing to do with the utilitarian
version of reciprocity and everything to do with the joy of not owing anything
to the world. (Wark 2012, par. 1). What may be inferred from Wark’s rhetoric is
that growing up in consumer society, one develops a sense of obligation and,
along with it, quite often a fabricated sense of indebtedness. Needless to say,
it causes countless conundrums. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to believe that
selectively preserving memories from childhood can disambiguate the confusion
aimed to be imposed on one, along with an infantile fantasy of carelessness and
valuelessness as liberatory and pure. It may also reveal a blissful abundance
of the potential for learning.
“Enduring Schooling : Against Noise, and in the Service of the Remix.” Genero: Journal of Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies. Eds. Katarina Lončarević, Marina Simić, and Daša Duhaček. Issue 18. Belgrade: Women’s Studies Center, 2014. 65-88. Print.
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