ABSTRACT
In today’s world of transnational capitalism, what better does England have to offer for profit than its heritage? Such is the thinking behind ‘England, England’, a Disneyland-like theme park on the Isle of Wight that gathers and replicates English landmarks and traditions for the enjoyment of leisure tourists from around the world. The conception, development, and operation of the island project occupies the bulk of Julian Barnes’s 1998 novel, and its satirical treatment challenges our value-laden distinctions between ‘original’ and ‘copy,’ ‘reality’ and ‘performance.’ But the comedy is bracketed by two shorter sections which pursue with greater seriousness the paradoxes of the England, England narrative. The theme-park plot becomes a kind of parable about the fate of a national identity, as Barnes’s characters wrestle with doubts about the reliability of memory (both personal and national), the uses of the past, and the possibility of authentic contact with others in a world of simulation and hyperreality. Throughout, the novel is preoccupied with the question of England’s collective selfhood in a postempire age. What fate awaits a ‘nation fatigued by its own history’ (Barnes 1998: 253)? The future as envisioned by the novel involves a dystopic choice: to trivialize and commodify the trappings of ‘Englishness’ for profit on the island theme park, or to retire to the increasingly isolated and impoverished mainland, ‘Old England,’ as it comes to be known abroad – in other words, England must either sell out or declare bankruptcy. Within the context of such futuristic extremes, Barnes explores the psychological mechanisms of desire and longing that comprise identity, using the juxtaposition of private self and public role to highlight the anxious search for authenticity underwriting ‘Englishness’ at the end of the twentieth century.
