ABSTRACT
Julian Barnes’s England, England, true to the echolalic title, is about doubleness, more specifically the specular dualism of originality and replication. It questions the notion of authenticity as megalopolitan England atrophies and dies when beamed with the idea of England, and the image of a theme park named England, England. In his eternal quest for the top dollar and long yen, Jack Pitman-Sir Jack, an entrepreneur of the late-capitalist variety-fabricates England, England in the Isle of Wight, with fifty quintessences of Englishness (Royal Family, Big Ben, Man Utd., Class System, etc.). The French intellectual hired to hone the philosophical angle of this project sums it up to the coordinating committee as a “rivalization of reality.” We prefer the replica to the original because it opens up endless possibilities of differential reproduction:
The non-identical replica updates and problematizes the original. Representation, according to the Frenchman, is “an ironization and summation”
of the thing represented: “A monochrome world has become Technicolor, a single croaking speaker has become wraparound sound” (55).
