Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction ISSN: 0011-1619 (Print) 1939-9138 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vcrt20 Rhythm Nation: Pastiche and Spectral Heritage in English Music Ryan S. Trimm To cite this article: Ryan S. Trimm (2011) Rhythm Nation: Pastiche and Spectral Heritage in English Music , Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 52:3, 249-271, DOI: 10.1080/00111610903380105 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00111610903380105 Published online: 09 Jun 2011. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 139 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=vcrt20 Download by: [University Of Rhode Island] Date: 10 November 2017, At: 15:16 Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 Critique, 52:249–271, 2011 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0011-1619 print/1939-9138 online DOI: 10.1080/00111610903380105 Rhythm Nation: Pastiche and Spectral Heritage in English Music RYAN S. T RIMM ABSTRACT: Peter Ackroyd’s 1992 novel English Music offers a conflicted take on heritage. Appearing in the midst of debates about national heritage, the novel foregrounds legacies, both familial and cultural. The novel’s allusions and intertexts suggest an ethnically restricted version of heritage; however, the novel’s stress on pastiche and counterfeits suggest an alternative mode of conceiving legacy, one framed as a type of possession. This revised version of heritage offers a past open to those who might lay claim to it, a more fitting model for a multicultural society. Keywords: Peter Ackroyd, contemporary Britain, heritage, pastiche, postmodernism, spirit I f, as David Simpson has suggested, tropes of “coming from somewhere [are] usually a precursor to going somewhere else, getting somewhere or something” (19), then the contested concept of heritage is less a gesture of conservation and more one of articulating possible futures. This essay will initiate a reworking of heritage by examining the ambivalence of inheritance in Peter Ackroyd’s 1992 novel English Music. Ackroyd’s text self-consciously situates itself by invoking a national literary canon, a canon explicitly understood as legacy. As a result, English Music constructs a limited view of national heritage as organic cultural possession, an inheritance ethnically restrictive. However, through the novel’s presentation of heritage as both pastiche and haunting, the transmission of legacy proves to be an open process, one that VOL. 52, NO. 3 249 Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 articulates and reworks the past. As a result, heritage functions as conservation of an ethnic cultural inheritance even while its means of transmission betray an open-ended dissemination. Indeed, heritage is finally envisioned as passing to those who assume the mediumship of the past rather than to those next in a genetic lineage. Such a rewriting at once preserves and perverts. Heritage must be reconceived so that, rather than a closed and excluding transmission of the past, it offers an opened history. In the stead of a past that would dictate to the present a rigid legacy, such a view of heritage would summon a past providing new points of departure. Heritage has long had a revered place on conservative lists in the culture wars. Indeed, heritage tacitly elevates the cultural value of a given cultural text, object, or tradition: rather than having merely persisted or survived from times gone by, legacy suggests an intentionality on the part of the past—an inheritance is what a hazy collection of forebearers wanted us to have. Further, the rhetoric of inheritance works to nationalize a range of objects encompassing texts, ancient artifacts, or even the land itself: if today’s citizens are the inheritors, then it must be the nation itself bestowing such heirlooms (even if these objects predate the state or have no explicit nationalist agenda). By taking texts, artifacts, and traditions as given, as handed down from the past, heritage works to naturalize the cultural—and even render the natural cultural. Such use of heritage since the mid-seventies has made it one of the more politically charged words in Britain. The Thatcher/Major years mark the high-tide level for this stress on cultural legacies of the past. Though Margaret Thatcher’s politics emphasized the thoroughgoing modernity of an enterprise culture, she frequently resorted to figures of the past as support for individual policies. Foreign maneuvers like those in the Falklands were conducted with the end of returning the “Great” to Great Britain; likewise, domestic and financial policies were oriented around a return to vigorous “Victorian values.” These political attempts to regain a legacy perceived as lost had myriad cultural parallels, reaching official expression in the creation of a Department of National Heritage. This post reflected a national culture in which the number of museums doubled in a decade, costume drama adaptations witnessed a florid cinematic revival, and numerous campaigns were fought to conserve institutions ranging from the country house and country village to fox hunting and the coastline itself.1 Universities too displayed fascination with the conservation and representation of the past in the rise of “heritage studies,” an interdisciplinary field encompassing archeology, art history, history, museum management, and tourism studies. Though the Blair and Brown administrations made moves away from this heritage culture (as witnessed by rechristening DNH to the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport), even Blair himself saw “Creative Britain” as needing to “use the strengths of our history and our character and build on them for the future—not discarding tradition, but building on it” (qtd. in Luckett 90). Heritage, though, seems a suspect idea of the past, one obsessed with fetishizing and conserving a checkered history. 250 CRITIQUE Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 Further, the idea of legacy is often used politically to exclude minorities: as such groups are not in the image treasured of the past, they are thus prevented from participating in the inheritance (as seen in the rhetoric of the British Nationalist Party). It is for this reason that the standard figure of heritage as a singular legacy, a unified bequest binding a single legator with a single legatee, needs to be reworked. English Music seems to fit all too easily into this nostalgic cultural longing as it carefully restricts its plot to the 1920s and 30s and constructs a catalog of allusions smacking of a conservative canon, a list of must-read classics conveniently petering out in the late nineteenth century. Heritage and inheritance are privileged terms in the novel, forming an explicit engagement with the idea of familial and cultural bequests. The title phrase itself is portentously understood by a dreaming Tim to be “the strains of his own destiny” (221). Because of the lack of interest in the contemporary frame of the novel, Ackroyd apparently offers a “shallow present dwarfed by the specter of the past” (Roessner 121). Indeed, the book ostensibly charts an England John Major would find appealing, a past whitewashed of postimperial minorities and modernist masterpieces. Further, the largely English cast of allusions (save brief echoes of transplants such as James Whistler and T. S. Eliot) marshals a large swath of national cultural accomplishments, the soft power equivalent of a Soviet May Day parade. The novel then offers textbook illustration of what Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel have labeled “national cultural capital” (Love 36). These references, by locking the novel into “an interminable circuit of inter-legitimation” (Bourdieu, Distinction 53), further bind English Music within a self-authorizing English tradition. Given the topical context of the late eighties and early nineties— entrenched opposition to the Maastricht Treaty on European union, tensions with postimperial minorities in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair, conflicts over devolution and the return of Little Englandism, battles over school curricula in literature and history2—the novel seems to articulate a surprisingly insular and narrowly defined cultural nationality. And yet, at the same time, English Music is compulsively allusive and metafictional, an open textuality seemingly at odds with this closed cultural jingoism. It appears, in Michael Levenson’s words, the work of a “Tory postmodernist” (33). This seeming paradox finds reconciliation in the novel’s definition of national cultural capital as more broad than the Great Tradition of an A-level syllabus—a suspect legacy of spiritualists and music hall is also handed down. Such a spectrum of culture does not so much erase the conservative impulse as unsettle or dislocate it, for hallowed high culture must be understood in terms of popular culture’s cunning illusions and vice versa. Further, the novel’s reliance on pastiche at once trades on canonical legitimacy and counterfeits it, a circulation of facsimiles betraying the spiritual and material underpinnings of cultural currency. As a result, English Music is possessed by the spirit of the past, of heritage, yet this mediumship proves to disrupt and rearrange provenance. VOL. 52, NO. 3 251 Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 The Chorus of Cultural Heritage English Music, it must be said, is a rather odd novel. The plot itself straightforwardly replays the Bildungsroman.3 Timothy Harcombe is a young boy who lives with his medium father in 1920s London after the death of his mother. His grandparents, unhappy at his participation in his father’s performances, move the boy to their rural village. Tim runs away and is returned. He finishes school, moves back to London, flirts with his father’s old mistress, and finally joins his father’s circus act. Using their occult powers, they heal Tim’s crippled friend Edward. Clement Harcombe dies, and Tim begins a long career in the circus where, dressed as a clown, he performs magic tricks. There is a narrative frame set in 1992, but this undeveloped present keeps the focus firmly on a retrospective of the between-the-wars decades. However, other than a few wounded soldiers and bereaved survivors providing period atmosphere, there is little reference or allusion to the upheavals of those decades. The silence regarding such a precisely plotted and weighted time frame is a curious one: Timothy’s story deploys a specific setting it then displays little interest in, maintaining instead a focus on young Harcombe that itself offers little psychological or domestic depth. Rather the emphasis is on a course of educational and cultural development Timothy’s father—and several of his dream interlocutors—label “English music.” Oddnumbered chapters provide a more or less realistic chronicle of Timothy finding his way (though with spiritualist episodes and self-conscious literary parallels), while the even recount his dreams. These dreams, vivid episodes Timothy lapses into after some sort of fainting fit in the realist narrative, allow Harcombe to step into the fused texts of his education, interacting with cultural figures real and fictional. The mode of these dreams is surreal and metafictional, a marked contrast to the realistic narrative of development. As a result, the dream chapters retard or interrupt narrative movement. This novel of development comes to stress continuities within Timothy—and his relationship with English music— rather than any sense of change or transformation. Heritage is naturally a major prop to such continuity, and appropriately heritage is one of the keywords of English Music (published the year National Heritage became a cabinet position). Heritage here is conceived as something largely cultural: “in this book lies our inheritance” (English Music 391). It is solace too, for Tim rests his head on his tutorial texts, finding them “more comforting than any pillow” (22). Indeed, there seems almost something heavensent about these volumes: when his father tells him that one book “has come down,” Tim imagines “the book itself and the raised letters of its title floating down from some part of the sky until it landed softly at my father’s feet” (23). Heritage appears to be its own agent, seeking out those who would inherit. As a result, inheritance is presented as a mechanism that specifies and singles out those who would receive bequests, for not all can be selected. This idea of a 252 CRITIQUE Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 cultural legacy becomes a directed form of communication or transmission, one hailing those who would be its beneficiaries. Consequently, inheritance is less a possession one might acquire and more a force that might itself take possession of the inheritor: Tim thinks of healing Edward as an act in which “the power belonged to neither of us separately, but resided in the very fact of inheritance itself [: : : ] It seemed such an abstract category, inheritance, and yet it glowed with all the power of the world” (378). Heritage transforms the legatee into a medium, one through whom “all the spirits of your past come in dumb show before you” (2). Inheritance is conceived as residing with neither legator or legatee—it is a third term independent of the others. As a result, such a notion of heritage dispossesses, for it cannot be owned. It is not an object to be meekly transferred but an abstraction with agency. Tim treats inheritance itself as an inherited concept, one exercising a controlling hand upon him. When his father tells him upon his joining the circus that “[y]ou’re part of the family now [: : : ] Not that you ever really left it,” Tim finds himself wondering, But how far did the line stretch back, and what was my position upon it? What had I inherited from all of these people, from previous fathers and sons? What was the nature of inheritance? Perhaps it was simply the passage of time itself, that “guiding hand” my father loved to invoke. At this point I was certain only of one thing: as soon as my father had asked me to join his work, I knew that I had no alternative but to accept. (English Music 372) Yet Tim also acknowledges this guiding force can lead one astray. Thinking of his own wasted life, he wonders if “I had inherited all this from my father, which was why I had watched his own slow dilapidation with such anxiety. Was it possible—was this the true nature of my inheritance, the legacy of a dispirited life passed from generation to generation?” (326). Just so, legacy functions as limit, much as it does for Edward who has “not been able to avoid his inheritance. And this place, Upper Harford, was part of that inheritance so he came back” (331). This literal deadening sense of heritage echoes Bourdieu’s conception of inheritance as a force operating through a freezing inertia: “The tendency of patrimony [: : : ] to continue in its state cannot be realized unless the inheritance inherits the heir, unless, by the mediation notably of those who are provisionally responsible for it and who must assure their succession, ‘the dead (that is, property) seizes the quick (that is, a proprietor disposed and able to inherit)”’ (Rules 11). Inheritance here takes spiritual possession of an heir, the beneficiary serving as no more than a medium for the expression of the legacy itself by conforming him or herself to what would be proper for the role bestowed by the inheritance. Inheritance comes to seem one’s fate, a past mysteriously passing down one’s future. Clement approvingly reads Sherlock Holmes’ pronouncement: “‘If we VOL. 52, NO. 3 253 Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 could view the strange coincidences of our destinies, the burden and inheritance of the years [: : : ] working through generations [: : : ] it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable”’ (English Music 95). Inheritance here is not a steady and predictable continuation, a legitimate and clear-cut transmission, but instead unforeseeable, even if the unforeseen is the past itself. Heritage is not assured and stable but stranger than fiction. Heritage operates not through inexorable preservation and repetition of the past but by surprising leaps and transformations. The burden of the past is not an endless retracing of a destiny or echoing terms clearly laid out before but an abrupt movement that shocks and disrupts in unexpectedly yoking moments seemingly peripheral or coincidental, a juxtaposition rewiring heritage from transmission of the past into transmutation of that burden. Heritage becomes the self-othering of the past. Further, the strategic quotation of Arthur Conan Doyle serves to textualize heritage. Heritage, as performed in the full frame of this passage, becomes the startling repositioning of fragments of the past. It is the quotation that astonishes in its new context, a reframing offering a jarring intersection of past and present. In this, heritage keeps well with the palimpsestic theory of artistic creation that has long been an Ackroyd hallmark (most famously deployed in Chatterton). Indeed, the present novel even begins with an epigraph from Joshua Reynolds declaring, “Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory: nothing can come of nothing.” This dictum, with its echo of King Lear putting its own assertion into operation, points toward a more limited sense of heritage in English Music, that of an English aesthetic canon, the particularly national music of the title. For young Timothy, this English music is part of a self-conscious patrimony bestowed by his father4 : “it seemed to me that only he knew of such things, and that somehow the knowledge of the past (indeed the past itself) came from within his own self; it was almost as if it were a secret between us, a secret inheritance” (English Music 22). Secrecy works to assure the exclusiveness of transmission, suggesting legator and legatee are exceptional. A secret inheritance provides the inheritor with a hidden identity, a sense of self whose sub rosa quality serves only to further single one out. The rhetoric of heritage here suggests legacy, past, and present are all conceived as singular. It is for this reason heritage is such a politically charged trope: talk of a bound inheritance has the effect of limiting present-day inheritors, for it is culturally exclusive. In the same way, if inheritance is restrictive, then distinction signals a preciousness in what is handed down, a value rebounding back onto the other members of this equation. A valued heritage attaches worth both to the inheritor and the one who left this legacy. Jacques Derrida, though, suggests another sense of secrecy in heritage, for inheritance is not so much a singularity as a multeity of contradictory impulses an inheritor must pick through: 254 CRITIQUE Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 An inheritance is never gathered together, it is never one with itself. Its presumed unity, if there is one, can consist only in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing. “One must” means one must filter, sift, criticize, one must sort out several different possibles that inhabit the same injunction. And inhabit it in a contradictory fashion around a secret [: : : ] One always inherits from a secret. (Specters 16) As a result, an inheritance cannot be known even by the beneficiary—the ongoing process of inheritance forever suspends the stability that would permit it to be apprehended. However, we might extend Derrida’s point by observing that if inheritance is never singular, then neither benefactor nor beneficiary can be thought unified. If inheritance is a handing down, a transmission, it is the striking of relations between past and present. A shift of legacy dictates transformation of relations between past and present—different inheritances connect different pasts and presents. If inheritance is always an open question, then the lines connecting—and defining—benefactor and beneficiary are continually being redrawn. English music is of course the precious inheritance in Ackroyd’s novel. However, it has a peculiar double existence: it is at once a whimsical course of study devised by his father in the developmental chapters and an increasingly spiritualized manifestation in his dreams, one serving as an organic cultural frame binding disparate centuries and artistic forms together. Tim’s father defines English music as not only music itself but also English history, English literature and English painting. With him one subject always led to another and he would break off from a discussion of William Byrd or Henry Purcell in order to tell me about Tennyson and Browning; he would turn from the work of Samuel Johnson to the painting of Thomas Gainsborough, from pavans and galliards to odes and sonnets, from the London of Daniel Defoe to the London of Charles Dickens. And in my imagination [: : : ] all these things comprised one world which I believed to be still living. It was a presence around both of us, no less significant than the phantom images which I sometimes glimpsed in the old hall. (English Music 21) The stretching of English music to encompass such wide-ranging cultural objects and figures puts tension on their shared “music”: if such a term can be used to encompass history, literature, and painting, it can only do so through some phantasmatic figurative harmony and rhythm purportedly shared by all. As a result, “English music” ends up appealing more to shared Englishness than common harmony; better, it is the Englishness all share which is appealed to as their shared music.5 The shared nationness depends on the logic of the canon: an enumeration of masterworks, key moments and figures, and resonant images in which the act of listing begs the question of precise relationships between listed items. English music then replays the culture wars in its assumption of some larger spiritual unity binding together culture through the ages and VOL. 52, NO. 3 255 Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 throughout history. Significantly, in English Music (as in the culture wars), this transhistorical unity is only achieved by leaving out history: at no point do we see Timothy studying or dreaming in an historical vein, even in the mode of “great men” or historical legends.6 And yet, this past and its burden are the central concern of the novel as witnessed by the undeveloped contemporary frame. The stress on Englishness furthermore has an inevitable ethnic resonance: that this is English music rather than British suggests a border control of sorts excluding internal and external others—the Welsh, Scots, the Irish, “New Commonwealth” immigrants and descendants. This sifting out is extended in the repeated invocation of something known as the “English line.” The William Byrd of Tim’s dream defines this line as “the English genius for the rising and falling melody, for the undulating cadence” (English Music 195). William Hogarth notes his skill is in “delineating the characters and faces of the English people [: : : ] Look upon these crowds of people, passing before us and around us with such large, flowing, gliding outlines [: : : ] So what is the line or outline which these citizens form? It is the line of our age. It is the line of our country” (252). He reveals to Tim “how all are connected, one with another, in a compact variety of lines governed by the principles of intricacy and harmony” (268). Just as English music harmonizes disparate art forms, so too the packed quality of “line” enables a single strain to be heard in music, the visual arts, and the English people themselves. This organic nativism is further naturalized in its first airing, a passage in which Austin Smallwood, the ersatz Sherlock Holmes, plays a tune on the piano to enable a striking of the “right chord” in their philosophic detecting: Timothy did not recognize the melody but he seemed instinctively to understand it—lyrical, mellifluous, the cadences soaring and then calmly descending, the harmonies so firm and clear that they seemed to hover in the air for a moment before dissolving. He thought of the landscape through which he had passed with his grandfather on the day of his departure, with the gentle line of distant hills and the softer gradient of the pastures; he thought of the pine forest and the slender trees against which he rested; and then he thought of the yellow fog gliding through the streets of this city itself. (127–28) This extension of the English line aestheticizes the very countryside and cityscape itself, for they too are part of the cultured orchestral swell of English music. However, the passage also offers a nativist explanation for the origin of the English line: it’s there in the land itself. As a result, English music in all its forms could not be other than what it is, its form determined by the land, an origin at once both organic and genetic. This shared chthonic source allows the English (in the form of Tim) to understand an unfamiliar cultural text—the Englishness of it all allows a spontaneous possessive recognition, much as Tim had earlier capped his father’s Shakespearean quotation without ever having read the lines (18). English culture is a natural inheritance, a firm legacy granted to those connected 256 CRITIQUE Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 to the soil in the same manner as forms (music, art, literature) partaking of this nativist English line. The English line at once becomes cultural tradition and thread of descent, one endowing those legitimately within its succession with its ethnic bounty. It is for this reason that the ethnic homogeneity of English Music is so troubling: in a book presenting London’s East End in the 1920s and 1990s whitewashed of any immigrant presence, it is hard to dissociate the novel from an act of cultural disinheritance. Those not ethnically entitled to claim the same organic equation of blood and soil are written out of the score, for they cannot sustain the English line. These resonances of Englishness increase in the Robinson Crusoe dream. Here the dream sequence begins with a self-reflexive appeal to “Reader,” one advising us to take the story “from its beginning and continue in its order. Pray do not leap forward or omit the moral passages, for this is an island story in which exordium and narration are judiciously mingled; it is a map, so to speak, upon which may be found the signs of a hidden treasure” (English Music 159). If “island story” is not suggestive enough, the illustration on the facing page, Matthew Paris’s medieval map of Britain, drives home the point by clearly identifying the island in question. The effect at once stresses the Englishness of the “music” at work in Timothy’s dream while simultaneously narrativizing and textualizing England. That is, the Englishness established through this passage treats nation not so much as concrete place but more as textual artifact: a story, a map it will construct through the adumbration of narration and moralizing discourse. This textual status intensifies in the description of the land the dreaming Timothy encounters on the next page: And yet what shore was this? Like nothing he had read in his adventures, for, as he peered about, he observed that this island was in the shape of a man’s hand with each finger stretching out upon the sea. The waters themselves were of the darkest blue, resembling good writing ink, as if the hand itself were only in need of a quill to compose its own history. (160) The British isle here is a legible text, one in the process of composing itself.7 This text offers not a bound Englishness but one continually being rewritten. The description at once naturalizes a certain cultural nativism, a chthonic English character (illustration and text equate Britain with England itself) organically rising from the land itself, while presenting this England perpetually being rewritten and recomposed. Further, as the use of Robinson Crusoe implies, England itself is presented as a strange land, “like nothing he had read in his adventures.” England here is “discovered” and altered in a text concurrently stressing a natural and unchanging character (171). And yet, as Timothy reminds himself, it is all an echo of something he has read in Defoe’s novel itself (166)— this self-authoring land proves to have been scripted elsewhere. It is in these intertextual wilds that the novel’s native Englishness loses itself. VOL. 52, NO. 3 257 Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 Counterfeit Legacies Indeed, as Tim is confronted with the uncanny strangeness of this island, he has the Crusoe-like resolution that he “must take all my provisions and barricade myself within. I must take stock of myself, and order every thing safely around me. So should we all take hold upon our certainties in the midst of great distress, though we do but rarely find a cave or shelter within our own selves” (English Music 162). Tim’s immediate response to this grand moral is to seek shelter and order in one of his books. This scenario offers a perfect echo of Homi Bhabha’s account of the English Book: confronted with chaos in the colonies, the colonist responds by looking for an emblem of order. The English Book provides just this source of structure, discipline, and justification (107–08). However, because texts (the Bible, law, literature) signifying the authority of the English Book receive such beatification only when one is beyond English shores, there is an unsettling belated quality to these volumes. Like cultural accounts of a “whole way of life,” such an appeal to harmony and unity, to an ordered totality, can only do so by imagining this whole as stilled and closed, can only do so by assuming a position that permanently locates one outside its bounds. The incorporation of such a scene into English Music thus has the effect of stressing the old truism about tradition: that by appealing to a tradition as tradition, one has already written its obituary. Further, this cultural solace is sought retrospectively on the English isle itself (as identified by the map). Not only does Tim come posthumously to tradition but does so in a way locating England itself as the wilds of otherness. Neither the English Book nor a textualized England are quite themselves—what was to have been a seamless hand-off of national heritage is dispersed in being handed down. Consequently, though the novel stresses the English line, this line exhibits fractures signifying internal division. Similarly, the canonization of an individual text, its location within a tradition, its assumption into English Book, has a strange, disrupting effect. Gauri Viswanathan has charted this instability in her account of the disciplinary uses of English literature in colonial India. The self-conscious cultural deployment of a text has a destabilizing impact, for it locates a certain holographic legibility within it, one shifting from peculiar and particular origins to “universalized” meaning: [T]he moment texts express “truth,” they cease to be part of history. At that moment they become “transparent.” Ambivalence characterizes the text caught in the nexus between process and state, observation and assertion, identity and difference. Paradoxically, it is the text’s instability on the issue of its identity—is it historical process or cultural artifact?—that generates resistance to itself. (Viswanathan 97) As a result, “[a] double vision inheres in a text recognized for its status in culture” (96). In just this fashion, Derrida has noted a literary masterpiece is 258 CRITIQUE Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 specterlike, “wanders like a ghost,” in that it “inhabits, without residing, without ever confining itself to the numerous versions” of a given text (Specters 18). In refusing to materialize a masterpiece through the stability of a specific historical and social context, a canon condemns its listed texts to wandering the earth as spirit. In not being located in a single place, the text can only manifest itself in multiple locations. English music then can never simply stay at home. As a result, the novel’s construction of this English canon begins to pull against the intended high cultural unity. As John Guillory noted in the midst of the culture wars, such lists of high cultural classics are themselves mass cultural artifacts (36).8 Further, this construction of a syllabus, like any such document, immediately puts a strain on how the elements listed relate to one another. It thereby functions as what Guillory describes as the pedagogic imaginary: A tradition always retroactively unifies disparate cultural productions [: : : W]hile such historical fictions are perhaps impossible to dispense with, one should always bear in mind that the concept of a given tradition is much more revealing about the immediate context in which that tradition is defined than it is about the works retroactively so organized [: : : ] If a principle of specious unity is implicit in the construction of any syllabus, this means that the form of the syllabus sets up the conditions within which it is possible to forget that the syllabus is just a list, that there is no concrete cultural totality of which it is the expression. (32–33) As a result, appeals to a unified canon, to the solidity of a given syllabus, betray anxiety about a fragmented society. The more forcefully a unity is located in a set of texts, the greater the sense of disunity in a community. However, the sense of tension between constituent parts will exhibit itself in the tensions within a given canon, within the holes and gaps between, say, the Christian allegory of Pilgrim’s Progress and the whimsical farce of Alice in Wonderland. Ackroyd’s blending of the two, in Tim’s first dream sequence, not only gestures toward a certain English adolescent canon, but also betrays a lack of harmony within that tradition, a cacophony struck by works from very different historical moments.9 This tension between unity and fragmentation is bound to a tension between universality and particularity located in these texts. As part of a list, individual texts are abstracted into some homogenous set—the texts of the Great Tradition always have the same lesson, for the presence of this lesson is what makes them part of that Tradition. However, when individual texts are contextualized, the Tradition is revealed as not harmonious and closed (if always ready to squeeze in one or two more of the right sort) but rather a fractious and contingent grouping, an open line. Further, the impetus of the syllabus projects the list as one now complete. And yet this list is confronted and constructed in belated operation. Canons cannot be conceived before or during the origin of the works to be included; they can only be fabricated afterward, retrospectively. Canons are thus a posthumous ceremony, a ritual performed by inheritors as they attempt to VOL. 52, NO. 3 259 Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 assess precisely what it is that has fallen into their hands. They are an exercise in mediumship, attempting to summon past spirits. English Music ambivalently engages this canon not only through its construction of a syllabus of sorts but also through obsessive pastiche. Pastiche is certainly one of the distinguishing features of Ackroyd’s novels, and in this trope English Music stands out. Indeed, the novel frequently calls our attention to this reuse and recycling.10 Early in the novel, after Clement instructs Tim not to “use up the old” words, he gives him the new word of “palimpsest” (12). The idea of course is that newness is not something never before seen, but that which predates, freshly adapted for new use. Just so, Tim is instructed “[y]ou honour your father by imitating him, just as we honour an author by the same means” (167). This homage is performed under the sign of heritage: “No one comes into the world fully clothed, for we are what we learn. You have inherited all that you possess” (167). Parroting a range of sources is then the prominent structural device of the book, for in addition to a continuing backbeat of allusion, the even-numbered chapters of the novel are all centered around a pastiche of one or more canonical classics. As such, English Music stresses its ability to serve as medium for the English lit canon. Gerard Genette describes the difference between parody and pastiche as one centered around what is replicated in the epigonal text: “unlike parody—which operates by diverting the letter of the text to another purpose, and therefore makes a point of sticking to the letter as closely as possible—the pastiche, whose function is to imitate the letter, prides itself upon paying it the least possible literal allegiance. It can never condescend to direct quotations or borrowings” (78). In other words, pastiche so closely follows the style of the target text as to be possessed by its spirit. The most cited articulation of postmodern pastiche has been that of Fredric Jameson, who characterizes the device as like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it [pastiche] is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs: it is to parody what that other interesting and historically original modern thing, the practice of a kind of blank irony, is to what Wayne Booth calls the “stable ironies” of the eighteenth century. (Postmodernism 17) British critics in particular, such as Robert Hewison and Andrew Higson, seized upon this characterization of postmodern appropriations of source texts as empty gesture, one lacking parody’s satiric edge or implicit suggestion of a normative position. Postmodern pastiche is understood as empty historicism endlessly repeating the past, a repetition lacking the true apprehension and understanding a proper historicity would deploy.11 Pastiche, in this account, fails to strike a 260 CRITIQUE Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 comprehensible line of relation between itself and borrowed texts, offering only a vague sense of homage and a vacant shrug. However, such a construction of pastiche has the effect of reducing all such imitations to empty schizophrenic stutter, a reduction that cannot account for why a given text might attract stylistic doppelgängers or how “copying” this source text might culturally function at a particular historical moment. Jameson’s account decontextualizes pastiche and thus cannot adequately register specific interventions of such imitative literary acts such as the cultural and political resonance of particular pastiches. As Pierre Bourdieu has instructed us, though, “a work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded” (Distinction 2). Indeed, Gerard Genette similarly understands stylistic repetition as depending on some signal or warning constituting a “pastiche contract [: : : ] this is a text where x imitates y” (86). Pastiche then depends on a self-conscious appropriation and reception of cultural capital. If the reader is not in possession of the necessary cultural capital, has not read the book referenced, then clues or signals will not be deciphered, the imitation will only seem a odd passage or one pointing to some unknown, and the pastiche contract fails to take effect. Because pastiche must mark the cultural weight of its source texts, a cultural heft subsequently measured by readers, such imitation charts a social network of distinction. This web, though, is an unstable one, a skein of relations constantly evolving and subject to the interventions of pastiche itself. That is, pastiche functions to put the texts shadowed into relation, a network of relations including the pastiche text itself. This network maps the relation of these source texts—and the cultural moments they signify—against the moment of the pastiche. Such a reading understands pastiche—and the cultural capital on which it depends—not as mere frivolity or cultural elitism but instead as an active and self-conscious sifting of culture as a system of distinctions. Consequently, as Bourdieu suggests, “the meaning of a work (artistic, literary, philosophical, etc.) changes automatically with each change in the field within which it is situated for the spectator or reader” (Field 30–31). Thus, alterations in a contextual field against which a work is understood necessarily transform the way the work is understood or, more emphatically, alter the work itself. Building on this axiom, Bourdieu observes that “emancipation” from “the most orthodox works of the past” takes the form of intentional mimicry: “In this case, the newcomers ‘get beyond’ the dominant mode of thought and expression not by explicitly denouncing it but by repeating and reproducing it in a sociologically non-congruent context, which has the effect of rendering it incongruous or even absurd, simply by making it perceptible as the arbitrary convention it is” (31). By positioning a familiar text within a radically different scenario or situation (as with the reframing of Henry V in My Own Private Idaho or Emma in Clueless), a cognitive dissonance dissipates the air of naturalness and necessity that had bound a set body of meanings and future possibilities affiliated with that text. Pastiche does assume its postmodern trappings of metafictional or VOL. 52, NO. 3 261 Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 historiographical intervention but in a form stressing play of relations between source and “secondary” texts. It cannot be just any text against which the epigonal texts intervenes, but rather one that in some way has the textual epiphenomenon in a type of literary historical bondage, one that must be altered for the imitative emancipation to spring forth. Moreover, this intervention only works through an awareness of the sociological and class connotations a specific source text possesses, for these resonances must be altered through a suitably unsuitable new context. Pastiche then depends on a strategic exploitation of cultural capital through calculated appropriation; it is a measured inheritance, one that selects and reworks a specific legacy. Through this act of appropriation, pastiche marks the cultural balance of the source text and alters that account by a reinvestment of the text into a new portfolio. However, even in summoning and marking the cultural capital of a particular source text, the pastiche text can only do so by first reauthorizing the standing of the source text: imitations cannot be based on source texts they find unworthy of even mimicry. Pastiche itself is a form of valuation. Pastiche might be thought a counterfeit, one that invokes and depends on the authority of the original but one delegitimizing that original by circulating its facsimile in places where its value cannot remain unquestioned. Here it must be pointed out English Music’s heritage is understood not solely as high culture. Tim is in fact barred from taking formal possession of high cultural heritage: his dreams of studying English literature come to naught (English Music 299, 325), and he ends the book literally as a clown (396). Tim’s father compares his own abilities with consumer products through his echo of marketing slogans: “Bovril prevents that sinking feeling [: : : ] And so do I!” (11). Similarly, Clement’s powers are compared to a wireless in picking up “waves in the atmosphere” and converting them into voices (61). Even in its carefully enumerated canon, the novel includes one or two suspect members—Arthur Conan Doyle and Lewis Carroll certainly do not carry the same cultural cachet as the other authors, being suspiciously popular and middle-brow at best. More significantly, as the repeated stress on Clement Harcombe’s profession indicates, the cultural vein of the novel is understood in a broader sense than just “the best that has been thought and writ.” A popular culture including occultists, circus and fair performers, and the music hall (in the form of the Chemical Theatre rented out for Harcombe’s sessions) is a significant part of Harcombe’s cultural legacy. Many of Clement’s devices are explicitly borrowed from these popular traditions (70). In fact, the even-numbered chapter pastiches might be understood as the literary equivalent of the music hall tradition of monopolylinguism, in which a single performer assumes the voice and roles of myriad different characters (Ackroyd, Collection 344). As such, the novel offers a strange blend of high and popular culture, farce and earnestness, one in which canonical literary pastiche is fused with popular cultural forms in a manner that unsettles the cultural authority of the nativist syllabus of English music. 262 CRITIQUE Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 Here the line of the conservative canon is altered, for this juxtaposition of canonical (in pastiche form) and popular culture transposes two different cultural codes, a clash mirroring Julia Kristeva’s account of intertextuality. Kristeva associates this term not merely with readerly jouissance in texts, where a text endlessly reverberates with the echo of other texts, but rather “a redistribution of several different sign systems: carnival, courtly poetry, scholastic discourse” (Revolution 59). This collision is a transposition, for the “passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic—of enunciative and denotative positionality” (60). If intertextuality is understood here as a crash of cultural signifying practices and not just a poststructural web of reference, then this forcible intersection of national canon and music hall culture literally propels English culture into an uncertain place, for neither of the constitutive elements sampled in the novel retains a stable, singular meaning. The power of a national syllabus comes to seem an occult attraction, a mass mystification its participants will themselves into, while the cheap pleasures of smoke and mirrors must be seen as part of a hallowed tradition. As a result, a novel poised uneasily between canonical lit and music hall spiritualism uses one to unsettle the other—these cultural forms become “relativized” and “ambivalent” because of this relational distance or spacing located within English Music itself (Kristeva, Desire 73). This louche popular culture thereby deflates the pastiche presentation of high cultural texts. Rather than the expected religious spiritualism, one characterizing high culture familiarly as substitute religion, we are instead offered spirits who remain unexplained. Clement’s healing sessions operate somewhere between music hall show and religious service: “he always played at the beginning of each performance. No, it was not a performance. Not then. It was, in truth, a ceremony. A ritual. My father prided himself on being an artist” (English Music 3). Clement himself hesitates between these same two poles of comparison for his sessions: “[I]t’s not the same thing as a religious experience. It’s more of a theatrical experience,” an assessment delivered shortly before they effect the miraculous healing of Edward (371). As a result, the novel hangs on how the Harcombe act is understood: if we take their medium act at face value, we are left with a world of spirits less than divine, spirits who are remainders of a material world now gone but persistent through sempiternal traces.12 Just so, English music would be precisely this tension between a legacy of particular events and their universal resonance. The novel’s use of pastiche would then signal the incarnation of eternal verities in a specifically English canon. Or the Harcombe act might be understood as charlatanism, as a con, a pastiche or counterfeit of some true spiritual power, a mime of some national spirit dwelling in this English canon. Culture would then be a blend of forged effects and active deception.13 This sense of culture would echo Bourdieu’s understanding of how symbolic capital (such as cultural capital) functions, one he compares with the effect of a magic act on an audience: VOL. 52, NO. 3 263 Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 [T]he problem with magic is not so much to know what are the specific properties of the magician, or even of the magical operations and representations, but rather to discover the bases of the collective belief or, more precisely, the collective misrecognition, collectively produced and maintained, which is the source of the power the magician appropriates. If it is “impossible to understand magic without the magic group,” this is because the magician’s power [: : : ] is a valid imposture, a legitimate abuse of power, collectively misrecognized and so recognized [: : : ] The source of “creative” power [: : : ] celebrated by the tradition, need not be sought anywhere other than in the [: : : ] system of objective relations which constitute it, in the struggles of which it is the site and in the specific form of energy or capital which is generated there. (Field 81)14 Harcombe magic then might be understood as demonstrating the ideational power of culture, one dependent, like Tinkerbell, on our collective belief that it possesses spiritual efficacy, a belief that is precisely the foundation and function of its power. As Simon During notes, “[a]rt’s truth depends on the tricks by which it raises dead enchantments. These tricks are open secrets which allow us to recognize the nullity of modern culture, and to come to terms with the fact that our artistic and literary heritage, for all its power and charm, is not only mimetic and not only (in the main) fictive, but illusory” (65). Culture is a “valid imposture,” a legitimate pastiche of power. The trick, though, can only be revealed through uncertain intersection with its apparent antithesis. By summoning the spirit of legitimate cultural authority, the counterfeit form at once reveals the particularity of the source while borrowing—and extending— its power. The Spirit of Heritage The power of the Harcombes is precisely one of being able to summon “all the spirits of your past [: : : ] in dumb show before you” (English Music 2). The Harcombes then are mediums of one’s heritage. Heritage, though, is certainly not an unadulterated force for advancement. It can also censor the new as Tim himself acknowledges: “I had no real belief I could start a new life, because even then I realized that such a thing was impossible—no life can be wholly renewed when there are so many forces already working within it. Had I not already suspected my father of bequeathing to me his own consciousness of waste and shame?” (326). Consequently, the world “would always be for me a place of phantoms, pervaded by father’s presence” (327). Inheritance here is an unavoidable limit (331). Indeed, this deflationary aspect is born out by the true Harcombe legacy as a lineage of circus performers. In just this vein, the final performance of the Harcombe father–son team is advertised as one in which “all the spirits of your past can be removed,” a performance that slays Clement (380). This fatal exorcism forces a reassessment of heritage as one 264 CRITIQUE Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 involving negotiation with spirits and specters of the past. Clement Harcombe’s entire career involves trade in such occult forces. There is of course the actual specter the Harcombes retreat before, one significantly revealing the horrors of the future (243). However, the novel locates the specter of the past in the afflicted themselves: “There are no haunted houses [: : : ] Only haunted people [: : : ] Haunted by the past, by their own past or that of others. Haunted by everything” (60). Clement serves those “who seemed to carry images of the past within themselves” (9). More broadly, Tim notes the era of his childhood was one of “monotony and anxiety,” a “world dominated by the dead. By the spirits of the past” (8). Even Tim’s future is haunted: the boy sees his father as “one version of what I might become; he was, perhaps, some ghost of the future” (339). A specter is of course a curious paradox, at once corporealization of spirit and making present of what is passed. And yet, the anachronism of this ghostly presence in fact signifies another time still, as Derrida reminds us: At bottom, the specter is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back [: : : ] If there is something like spectrality, there are reasons to doubt this reassuring order of presents and, especially, the border between the present, the actual or present reality of the present, and everything that can be opposed to it. (Specters 39) The specter is only that part of the past that might return, a return staged not in the present (the specter after all is not fully there), but one that might yet transpire in the future. Specters, as the legacy of the past, reveal themselves as inhabiting a moment not yet completed, one that might yet be reopened not by resurrection but rather by bequeathing a future unforeseen within our current view of the past. As the future remains uncertain, there must be a host of specters who might leave this time-to-come to us. Heritage then becomes an on-going process of sifting through spirits of the past. Heritage, as legacy of a haunting past, slips from its position of necessary singularity to a disruptive multeity, one rending the putatively seamless past to find a reopened future: “one may inherit more than once, in different places and at different times, one may choose to wait for the most appropriate time, which may be the most untimely—write about it according to different lineages, and sign thus more than one import” (168). Receiving more than one inheritance puts one in the position of receiving multiple bequests, of being haunted by multiple specters, with each spiritual legacy marking particular lines of connection and transmission. With each separate haunting, each particular heritage, one must play a different role or assume a different self in terms of how one will play epigone. In just this way, Tim finds himself “strangely delighted” after his grandfather notes his similarity to his mother: “it was almost as if I had acquired another self and for a moment I felt somehow lighter, less bound down to that time and that place” (English Music 97). A haunting inheritance offers a stereoscopic identity, one allowing VOL. 52, NO. 3 265 Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 displacement, a being possessed, freeing one from a rigid chain of necessities dictating present circumstance. Through conceiving heritage as specter, a looking back to the past becomes a facing forward to a reopened future.15 However, this spiritual heritage is always kept in check by the necessity of material manifestation. This deflation is provided by Tim’s friend, Edward Campion, for whom heritage is never otherworldly. Edward worries about “where I come from,” a concern not about metaphysical or cultural lineage but based on knowing from whence he derived “his poor, twisted shape” (English Music 187). Edward continues in this skeptical, materialist vein, reacting to the news of the passing of Tim’s grandparents with wry appreciation: “They left you everything [: : : ] Now’s that what I call an inheritance” (398). Heritage, both as possession and being possessed, takes form only through material expression. Like the specter, it uncertainly flickers between the spiritual and the corporeal. As a result, the novel instructs us that this haunted heritage can be exorcised only by a full acknowledgement of its power. It is precisely this operation that permits a full bequest, a sense of possession of—and by—the past concluding with a cultural note: Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last. It belongs with my father, and with his books, but it also belongs with me. And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back. Edward was wrong when he described the recurring cycles of history: they disappear as soon as you recognize them for what they are. Perhaps that is why I have written all this down in a final act of recognition [: : : ] I no longer need to open the old books. I have heard the music. (English Music 399–400) This ambiguous finale seems to indicate a final taking possession or being possessed—Timothy no longer will devour the texts of English music, for he has literally internalized its lessons. However, the possession is a weak one at best, for it is in the form of a “final act of recognition.” This acknowledgement of the pattern of the past appears to be less control of its efficacy and more wry admission of the extent it has controlled oneself. Further, the novel’s finale views heritage in an uncertain light. Timothy, “an old man now” (399), has always been the inheritor. Yet the book concludes without any clear benefactor around to receive his legacy. Indeed, the Harcombe line seems destined to die with Tim and with it the lineage of spiritual performance. The final anecdote Tim tells about burying a bird with Cecilia, Edward’s granddaughter, offers only a bare succession and not a transmission: “another bird flew down from a tree in front of us, perched upon the gate and, after a short time, filled the white lane with its song” (400). If heritage depends not on the lineage but on the song for its legitimacy, then it is those who will pick up the music, those who will become possessed by its rhythm, who are the inheritors. Legacy goes to those who will counterfeit the song, singing it with new voices and from fresh locations. 266 CRITIQUE Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 English Music then offers a paradoxical conception of heritage. It enumerates a traditional canon, one whose selectiveness signifies an exclusive nationality. At the same time, the dissemination of legacy locates alterity in heritage through its very transmission: a heritage can be copied or imitated, is assumed by those who seize its voice. Heritage, like Chantal Mouffe’s idea of tradition, might be seen as a means of thinking “our own insertion into historicity, the fact that we are constructed as subjects through a series of already existing discourses, and that it is through this tradition which forms us that the world is given to us and all political action made possible” (39). Tradition then offers the terms in which we think. In such a circumstance, a new rationality is neither desirable nor fully possible—instead tradition and heritage must be used to open up new spaces. Heritage might be seen as the temporal spacing in an imagined community, one that binds and connects.16 By plotting the gaps and dissonances in the line of heritage presented in English Music, we might add that this spacing might be located within tradition itself. The past becomes a force that possesses and something one might take possession of by articulating it, by claiming its voice. Such a model of heritage eschews singular legacies, benefactors, and beneficiaries. In its place, it offers a model of sifting and appropriation, a summoning of multiple specters who bequeath a multeity of futures. Indeed, this dynamic engagement with the past seems to be a necessary condition of cultural citizenship: “Arguing with the past, like paying taxes, like observing the law, like queuing, like not playing music full blast when others will be disturbed, has suddenly become a vital part of being a member of society, an ordinary but important act of citizenship, a factor in establishing the idea of a home as a place you would like to belong, and might be allowed to stay” (Marina Warner, qtd. in Parekh 4). It is this spirit of heritage that might allow it to become not a chorus but rather the music of counterpointed voices. U NIVERSITY OF R HODE I SLAND K INGSTON , R HODE I SLAND NOTES 1. See Eric J. Evans’s Thatcher and Thatcherism and John Corner and Sylvia Harvey’s (ed.) Enterprise and Heritage. For a discussion of these “heritage wars,” see Robert Hewison’s The Heritage Industry, Andrew Higson’s English Heritage, English Cinema, Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory, and Patrick Wright’s On Living in an Old Country. 2. As the novel’s obsessive and self-conscious concern with sketching out a plan for development and education is centered on taking possession of a little Englander canon, these curricular battles for a national education stressing a heritage-based history are particularly apropos. See M. Corbishley and P. G. Stone’s “The Teaching of the Past,” Suzanne Keen’s Romances of the Archive, Valerie Krips’s The Presence of the Past, and Raphael Samuel’s Island Stories. Similarly, Jacques Derrida suggests the archive depends on some organizing concept that presupposes “a closed heritage and VOL. 52, NO. 3 267 Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 the guarantee sealed [: : : ] by that heritage [: : : ] the archive seem[s] at first [: : : ] to point toward the past, to refer to the signs of consigned memory, to recall faithfulness to tradition” (Archive 34). However, as this essay explores with regards to English Music, “the question of the archive [: : : ] is a question of the future [: : : ] the question of a response” (Archive 36). 3. It is for just this reason that Great Expectations is the most frequent point of reference and allusion in Ackroyd’s novel. Indeed, Ackroyd has characterized Dickens’s novel as centered on “the meaning of the past which imbues the present like a stain” (Introduction 162), a description that also fits English Music. Along these same lines, Franco Moretti has identified the “recognitioninheritance” pattern, in which a Bildungsroman hero is recognized for his/her true identity and thus comes into an inheritance, as being the most typical type of happy ending in English versions of this genre (205). 4. As “patrimony” indicates, English Music presents heritage as a mostly male affair, though Tim does realize a few legacies from his mother. John Peck has commented on this masculine focus in Ackroyd’s fiction. 5. The Englishness of this list is abetted by stopping the syllabus precisely before the advent of modernism and its emphasis on the cosmopolitan. For arguments exploring this cosmopolitan methodology of high modernism and its aftermath, see Fredric Jameson’s “Modernism and Imperialism” and Jed Esty’s A Shrinking Island. 6. Tim does dream about three real historical figures: Charles Dickens, William Byrd, and William Hogarth. However, the Dickens’s dream is a surrealistic blending of plot elements from the fiction of the master of nineteenth-century melodrama. The Byrd and Hogarth dreams both revolve around imagined tutorials Tim receives on English aesthetics. As a result, in these dreams, the actual history and biography is mostly a prompt for costume, atmosphere, and dialogue than a detailed engagement with sketching out historical causation or relations. 7. Paris’s map (as well as the reproduction in English Music) does not depict Ireland and gives at best only cursory sketches of smaller islands. As a result, the focus is on the island comprised of England, Scotland, and Wales, a concentration further narrowed by the novel’s neglect of all things not English. 8. As the mention of Guillory indicates, the culture wars were not confined to the U.K. and many of the battles over curriculum have also been manifest in the U.S., materializing in battles over the Western Civ syllabi at universities, the politicization of education and scholarship in figures such as William Bennett and Lynne Cheney, and the appearance of such infamous books as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and E. D. Hirsch’s Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Certainly one major difference between the States and the U.K. is the fact that the British rhetoric of heritage served to nationalize a canon, whereas American battles were fought over an ill-defined “Western tradition.” See both Guillory and Smith. 9. Valerie Krips in fact charts the replacement of the Progress with Alice as the major text of childhood as itself signaling a tectonic cultural change, one marking a shift from “moral ponderability” to “reading pleasure” (7). 10. In these dream sections, one source text often stands out as the designated target of that chapter (as with the Robinson Crusoe chapter). However, as the style always mimics more than one source and as allusions in these dreams are never restricted to a singular source, pastiche is a far better label than parody. 11. See John Duvall’s “Troping History” for a useful elaboration and evaluation of Jameson’s tension between historicity and historicism. Margaret Rose offers a valuable genealogy of pastiche and parody vis-à-vis postmodernism. . Further, Ackroyd refers to pastiche as a type of “mediumship,” divining the historical patterns of London speech or London writing that lie just below the surface of our contemporary language” (Collection 350). Similarly, Gerard Genette has pointed out that pastiche inevitably leads to the location of the uncanny within a text. Discussing traditional French pedagogical techniques for mastering reading and composition in a foreign language, he notes “pastiche [: : : ] would be an exercise in theme [translation into a foreign language]. Ideally, it would consist of taking a text written in familiar style in order to translate it into a ‘foreign’ style: i.e., a more distant one” (81). 13. Jeremy Gibson and Julian Wolfreys argue this thematic of possession helps us understand the narrative’s own games: the older narrating Tim is a medium or ventriloquist for his younger 268 CRITIQUE Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 self (136). Such a reading stresses the uncertain slip between possession and counterfeit in the novel’s conception of identity. The fact this spiritualist tension is never resolved helps locate English Music in what Tzvetan Todorov has labeled as the fantastic. The fantastic depends on a sense of uncertainty as to whether an apparently otherworldly event might be attributed to a moment of imagination/sensory distortion or whether the supernatural is at work: “Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (25). Ackroyd himself has linked the English legacy of the Gothic and the fantastic as stemming from a compulsion to “to comprehend and master that which is not English” (Albion 270). Indeed, even the heritage of Eng Lit is itself a specter: “[t]he antiquarian and the hunter after ghosts is, therefore, a twin being intent upon gathering the living presence of the past. The English tradition may itself then be glimpsed as a revenant, reaching out to the living with uplifted arms. That is why the ghost story is recognised to be a quintessentially English form” (375). 14. Similarly, Jacques Derrida discusses the authority of canons and pedagogy in terms of spirits: Authority is constituted by accreditation, both in the sense of legitimation as effect of belief or credulity, and of bank credit [: : : ] Accredited in this way, a “true” corpus is still, perhaps, counterfeit money; it may be a ghost or a spirit, the spirit of the body and of capital (for a title, a heading, is a capital). One might draw from this all the consequences regarding the institution of a body and a corpus and regarding the phenomena of canonization that follow. Also regarding what is called spirit. There would be no problem of the canon if this whole institution were natural. There is a problem because [: : : ] that institution only moves “on credit” and under “the authority of teaching.” (Given 97) 15. It should be pointed out Derrida’s specter, the revenant who signals the arrivant, ultimately signifies the immigrant (Specters 196). As a result, this spectral heritage belies the Englishness of English Music by pointing beyond the Little Englandism of its canon to postimperial reworkings such as The Satanic Verses and White Teeth. 16. My argument that heritage is the temporal spacing of a community translates and extends Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community. Community in Nancy’s account is founded on the impossibility of communion: if there were true communion, then there would be no gaps for communication to take place. Transmission depends on difference. Community is then grounded on its inability to assimilate the singularities contained within it. As a result, communities must be thought of a containing an internal spacing, a realm of interior gaps through which the communication that characterizes community takes place. Heritage might then be seen as transmission over time, an act bridging different temporal moments of a given community. WORKS CITED Ackroyd, Peter. Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. London: Chatto, 2002. . Chatterton. New York: Ballantine, 1987. . The Collection. London: Chatto, 2001. . English Music. New York: Ballantine, 1992. . Introduction to Dickens. New York: Ballantine, 1991. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. . The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Trans. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. . The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. VOL. 52, NO. 3 269 Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 Bourdieu, Pierre, and Alain Darbel. The Love of Art. Trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Corbishley, M., and P. G. Stone. “The Teaching of the Past in Formal School Curricula in England.” The Presented Past: Heritage, Museums and Education. Ed. Peter G. Stone and Brian L. Molyneaux. New York: Routledge, 1994. 383–97. Corner, John, and Sylvia Harvey, ed. Enterprise and Heritage. New York: Routledge, 1991. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. . Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. . Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. During, Simon. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. Duvall, John N. “Troping History: Modernist Residue in Fredric Jameson’s Pastiche and Linda Hutcheon’s Parody.” Style 33.3 (1999): 372–81. Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. 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The Presence of the Past: Memory, Heritage, and Childhood in Postwar Britain. New York: Garland, 2000. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Trans. Alice Jardine, Thomas Gora, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. . Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Levenson, Michael. “Tradition and the National Talent.” The New Republic 208.3 (1993): 29–33. Luckett, Moya. “Image and Nation in 1990s British Cinema.” British Cinema of the 90s. Ed. Robert Murphy. London: BFI (British Film Institute), 2000. 88–99. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 1987. Mouffe, Chantal. “Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?” Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism. Ed. Andrew Ross. Trans. Paul Holdengräber. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. 31–45. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Trans. 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Cleveland: Case Western Reserve UP, 1973. Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Wright, Patrick. On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain. London: Verso, 1985. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Downloaded by [University Of Rhode Island] at 15:16 10 November 2017 Ryan Trimm is Associate Professor of English and Film Media at the University of Rhode Island; he is Chair of English. His current project examines the cultural politics of heritage in contemporary Britain. VOL. 52, NO. 3 271