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The Otherworlds of Liz Jensen A Critical Reading
Helen H. Mundler
Studies in English and American Literature and Culture Series Woodbridge: Camden House, 2016 Hardcover. 232 p. ISBN 978-1571139627. £60
Reviewed by Christian Gutleben Université Côte d’Azur (Nice)
Helen H. Mundler’s
study of Liz Jensen’s whole work is the first monograph to be published on this
novelist whose importance in contemporary British fiction is more and more
acknowledged in today’s critical and cultural landscape. The monograph is organised
chronologically and divided into eight chapters which analyse Jensen’s eight
novels in the order of their publication; but, and this must be stressed
emphatically, the analysis of each novel constantly and thoroughly establishes
links with the other novels, showing how the first works herald the following
ones and how the later novels expand on, qualify or modify the previous ones,
and this not only thematically but also narratologically and ideologically. The
result is that one gets a very precise picture of Jensen’s oeuvre with its
distinct thematic and ethical continuity and also its outstanding and untypical
attempts. As the title of the
monograph clearly indicates, the most significant common point between Jensen’s
various productions is the creation of a fictional world that is not strictly
mimetic of everyday reality. By implementing defamiliarising chronotopes,
Jensen at once underscores a determination to avert or subvert, to go past or
beyond social or psychological realism – with the exception of War Crimes for the Home (2002) which purports
to be a historical reconsideration of World War II. To designate Jensen’s
improbable, fantastical or science-fictional scenes, Mundler uses Atwood’s
concept of ustopia (i.e., “the
continuum within which utopia becomes dystopia” [14]) which is not only a
technical neologism but almost an ideological statement highlighting the
inevitable failure of idealism. Naturally, imaging other worlds or other times
is just a means to reflect upon the potential forms of otherness of today’s
society, culture and humanity, and Jensen’s ustopian logic is then always at
the service of a speculative type of fiction. This is particularly the case in The Paper Eater (2000) in which the
machine-ruled world of Atlantica gives rise to an elaborate satire of
technology and consumerism and therefore an implicit warning against the
dangers of a society in which humanism is relinquished and commerce a new
religion. In Atlantica, like elsewhere in Jensen’s otherworlds, what is also
crucial is the role of language, for language is not only what societies
create, it is what creates societies. Since language establishes rules, for
example, and since rules determine social and political life, it can be argued,
as do these novels, that language regulates, presides over and even generates a
whole range of attitudes thus gaining a distinct performative potential. The
metatextual musings on this linguistic performativity, clearly reminiscent of
Foucault’s perceptive insights, run through all the novels of the corpus and
reveal an enriching awareness of the power of words, be it harmful (as in The Paper Eater) or playful (as in My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time). Malfunctioning
imaginative worlds tend to end up in catastrophe, it seems almost logical that
an apocalyptic aspect should be perceptible in all the novels – and almost
literally present in Ark Baby (1998),
The Rapture (2009) and The Uninvited (2012). As a marked
intimation of the sense of an ending, apocalypse raises the question of the
novels’ teleology and this distinct teleological momentum enables Mundler to
make fine analyses of the works’ structures and guiding principles. The
systematic deregulation of Jensen’s imagined civilisations may suggest a
particular “bleakness of vision”, but, according to the author of this
monograph, “while these visions are disturbing, […] they are not nihilistic”
[194-195], the reason being that the process of destruction is envisaged as a
path to re-creation as well as a reflection upon what must be cherished and
salvaged at all costs. The presentation of self-destructive societies includes
the cultural dimension, the apocalyptic component affords then also
opportunities for metafictional comments about the state of contemporary, or
post-contemporary, culture, the criticism of certain forms of self-reflexivity
and auto-referentiality, for instance, standing unmistakably for a metaliterary
urge to move beyond late postmodernism in matters of fiction-writing. Since the apocalyptic
turn evidently includes ecological disasters, the concerns for ecology in
general represent another factor of unity for the eight novels under
consideration. Resorting to established critics like Terrence Gifford, Cheryll
Glotfelty, Richard Kerridge, Wendy Lynne Lee and Karen Warren, Mundler defines
Jensen’s novels as “ecofiction” and “ecothrillers” [11], and uses the tools of
ecocriticism to deal with the works’ warnings against environmental misuse or
abuse. Considering the current convergence of ethical and ecological studies,
it could be contended that Jensen engages in an ethics of vulnerability and
precariousness, the vulnerable subject being not a specific type of social,
ethnic or sexual being but the whole of nature. Often taking the form of an
evocation or a reminder of past natural harmony, as in the description of a
lush vegetal life in Egg Dancing or
in the presentation of a democratic natural world in Ark Baby, Jensen’s ecological streak questions the place and role
of humanity for the few glimpses of natural harmony all occur outside the range
of strictly human affairs. What the novels’ denunciation of ecocide ultimately
conveys is the necessity of a holistic approach to the environment, that is, an
ontological repositioning of man and reconsideration of the non-human. What
this also means is that this eco-conscious fiction challenges not only the
place of nature but also the nature of place, the ideology of localism being
necessarily superseded by the ideology of globalism. Jensen’s axiological
priorities, though, so goes the argument, are never one-sidedly ecological, but
always polyphonic and polymodal, including notably an updated interest in
feminism. Taking hold of Elaine
Showalter’s concept of gynocriticism, Mundler sets out to demonstrate how
Jensen’s novels illustrate the limitations and offenses deriving from a phallic
perspective, order or worldview. In order to foster this sexual debate, the
novelist not only adopts homodiegetic female narrators who illustrate the
ordinary and extraordinary plights of women’s lives, but also ventriloquises
male voices so as to delineate the male territory and reveal the male outlook
from the inside. However, just like in the case of ecology, Jensen’s treatment
of feminism is not exclusive nor radical; rather her kind of postfeminism links
the question of femaleness to the broader questions of gender identity and
human answerability, feminism being, for example, inseparable from ecology and
its message of a global responsibility of humanity. In the section felicitously
entitled “Feminist Problematics / Problematic Feminism” [150], Mundler
questions the depiction of Charlotte in My
Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time and sees in this time-travelling harlot a
possible parody of the objectification, not to say the commodification, of the
female subject as a sexual pawn. Be that as it may, nineteenth-century
Charlotte visiting contemporary London is also a tool to re-present today’s
society through the eyes of a historical alien and to denounce the very little
ecology-friendly predominance of technology. Finally, Jensen’s critical
(post)feminism allows her to establish a dialogue with other women writers, particularly
Margaret Atwood, but also A.S. Byatt, Hilary Mantel, Miranda Miller, Emma
Tennant, Sarah Waters and Fay Weldon, and this dialogue is fruitfully explored
in this monograph. In the study of the
intertextual network binding Jensen’s oeuvre to the great works of the past
resides one of the noteworthy assets of this study – as it was already the case
for Mundler’s previous monograph on A.S. Byatt (L’intertextualité dans l’œuvre d’A.S. Byatt, Paris: L’Harmattan,
2003). The Biblical and Victorian intertexts are particularly thoroughly
researched and the analysis of these cultural interconnections convincingly
evidences the literariness of Jensen’s fictions as well as the dialogue they
create across periods and genres. Engaged as she is in writing back to the
canon, Jensen also resorts to popular traditions and pays tribute to popular
voices, so much so that her novelistic art is best characterised as versatile
or multifaceted. What the author of this monograph wishes to insist upon is
that, in spite of her learned parodies and sophisticated rewritings of models,
works or myth from the past, “her work has a marked futuristic bent” [192]. There
is one point of the analysis, though, with which the present reviewer does not
agree, and that concerns the designation of hybridity as the specificity of
Jensen’s work [193]. Being the hallmark of postcolonialism in general and
certainly also one of postmodernism’s main features, hybridity can hardly be
the distinctive attribute of a single novelist. Closely studying
Jensen’s relationships with other writers also allows Mundler to try and
situate this oeuvre in the contemporary literary landscape. If her subtle
deconstructions of traditional or canonical metanarratives manifestly place
Jensen in the postmodernist camp, her visionary ustopias and her bold forays
into cli-fi (climate-change fiction) point to new forms of globalism,
internationalism and cosmopolitanism seemingly typical of the new millennium. Jensen’s
work is thus exemplary of the twenty-first-century novel which seems to have
moved beyond postmodernism without entirely forsaking it and which seems therefore
in quest of a new identity – which has variously been called postpostmodernism,
hypermodernism or supermodernism. The inscription of Jensen’s novels in this as
yet undefined aesthetic trend of the new millennium generates thought-provoking
assumptions and tentative formalisations of such innovative fiction.
Accordingly, Mundler’s study is aimed at and should interest not only amateurs
of Jensen’s fiction but also scholars or students concerned with the evolution
of the contemporary British novel in general. But, of course, this monograph
mainly intends to – and manages to – show the coherence and diversity of a
novelistic work whose importance and impact on the global literary scene can
only expand. Here the critic is at the service of the novelist and this critical
stance enhances both the writer and the scholar.
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