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Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction

ISSN: 0011-1619 (Print) 1939-9138 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vcrt20

“Getting History Wrong”: The Heritage/Enterprise Couplet in Julian Barnes’s England, England Jong-Seok Kim To cite this article: Jong-Seok Kim (2017): “Getting History Wrong”: The Heritage/Enterprise Couplet in Julian Barnes’s England, England, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2017.1347554 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2017.1347554

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Date: 08 August 2017, At: 01:48

CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2017.1347554

“Getting History Wrong”: The Heritage/Enterprise Couplet in Julian Barnes’s England, England Jong-Seok Kim

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Department of English Language and Literature, Inha University, Incheon, South Korea ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

Julian Barnes’s 1998 novel England, England is a tongue-in-cheek but pointed critique of the Thatcherite entrepreneurial heritage industry. Written in the context of the “anti-heritage animus” of late twentiethcentury Britain, the novel criticizes the heritage-enterprise couplet based on the commodification of the UK’s national past into fake artifacts and clichéd nostalgic images. Sir Jack Pitman is a satirical caricature of a Thatcherite entrepreneur. The very success of his heritage theme park seems intended as an endorsement of a close partnership between heritage and enterprise. The result of their combination, however, turns out to be potentially harmful and disturbing.

Julian Barnes; England, England; heritage industry; enterprise culture; heritage tourism

Much previous criticism of Julian Barnes’s 1998 novel, England, England, has tended to fall roughly into two broad categories. Some critics see the novel as a critical exploration of postmodern notions of history and reality. Frederick Holmes, for example, regards it as an examination of Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “hyperreality” where “a collection of simulacra […] have replaced the reality of England and its history entirely” (94). James Miracky argues, in a similar vein, that the novel is ultimately “positioned somewhere between homage and parody of the dominance of the ‘hyperreal’” in which “the model precedes (or at least overtakes) the real” (165). On the other hand, other critics read Barnes’s novel as dealing with the issue of “Englishness,” a topic that was a recurrent concern of late twentieth-century British fiction. Nick Bentley, for instance, points out that in the novel, England or Englishness “is constructed and exists in the collective imagination of not only its inhabitants, but also the rest of the world” (489). Vera Nünning takes a similar view that “England, England explores, parodies, and deconstructs those ‘invented traditions’ known as ‘Englishness’” (59). Among the critics mentioned above, Nünning is the first to make an interesting passing reference to what has been called the “heritage industry”: “The fictional heritage centre delineated in Barnes’s novel […] can be regarded as the epitome of the current ‘heritage-culture’” (73). Some subsequent critics have readily adopted the term “heritage industry” in their discussion of Barnes’s England, England, but the term and its implications remain less than fully developed. So in an attempt to make better sense of the novel’s relevance to the contemporary heritage industry, I will first propose the idea of heritage as a significant part of Thatcherite “enterprise culture,” showing the ways in which the twin themes of “heritage” and “enterprise” were closely interconnected in the specific social and political context of the 1980s and 1990s in Britain. In the latter part of the essay, I will go on to argue that England, England, written in the context of what David Lowenthal defines as the “antiheritage animus” (Heritage Crusade 100), is Barnes’s most poignant critique of the potentially disturbing effects of the Thatcherite entrepreneurial heritage industry.

CONTACT Jong-Seok Kim [email protected] Inha University, Department of English Language and Literature, 100 inharo, Nam-gu, Incheon, Incheon, 22212, South Korea. © 2017 Taylor & Francis

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Barnes’s England, England is far more context-specific than his previous works. On the surface, the major actions of Barnes’s 1998 novel occur in a not-too-distant future England, but the novel itself is actually a critique of Thatcherite enterprise culture and the emergence of the heritage industry. Barnes’s novel provides an ironic and retrospective commentary on the intimate connection between “heritage” and “enterprise,” or the “marriage of backward-looking heritage and forward-looking private enterprise” (Lyth), largely promoted by the successive Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s. What Barnes does in this book is to push the rise of the English “heritage industry” to a satirical extreme, by imagining a shrewd, ruthless entrepreneur who recreates England’s major cultural and heritage tourist attractions in a heritage theme park on the Isle of Wight. This miniature version of England, aptly named “England, England,” becomes such a fantastic success in the tourism industry that it takes the place of the real Old England, ultimately bringing about the general downfall of the original. Before proceeding to the analysis of Barnes’s text, however, it will first be useful to review the specific social context in which it was written, focusing on the heritage-enterprise couplet that appeared during the Thatcher era.1

Contextualizing Barnes’s England, England in Thatcherite Britain Although interest in the past has been around since the beginning of recorded history, the last two decades of the twentieth century in Britain were, in particular, characterized by several historians as obsessed with the past. Significantly, one of the keywords prevalent during this period turns out to be “heritage.” Heritage was, as Andrew Higson remarks, like a “cult” in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s (English Heritage 50–54). As historian David Lowenthal put it in 1998, heritage became “a quasireligious cult” (250), and the cult of heritage seemed “such an incubus” (xi) that Britain found it quite difficult to get rid of. “All at once,” Lowenthal writes, “heritage is everywhere—in the news, in the movies, in the marketplace—in everything from galaxies to genes” (Heritage Crusade xiii). Addressing the theme of heritage a decade earlier, cultural historian Robert Hewison voiced his concerns about the “museumification” of Britain: “every week or so, somewhere in Britain, a new museum opens. […] How long would it be before the United Kingdom became one vast museum?” (9). In 1985 Lowenthal, also noting the growth of museums in the UK, cited one commentator’s surmise that Britain would “soon be appointing a Curator instead of a Prime Minister” (Foreign Country 4). What Hewison calls the “heritage industry,” in fact, includes the marked growth in heritage centers, theme parks, and all forms of museums, along with the cult of the English country house. Patrick Wright and Robert Hewison associate the growth of Britain’s heritage industry during the 1980s with the Margaret Thatcher government’s heritage politics. According to this view, heritage was “Thatcherism in period dress” (Samuel 290). One of the Thatcher government’s objectives was to overcome the sense of powerlessness and decline widespread in Britain since the Suez crisis, or what Thatcher called “Suez syndrome.” “We developed what might be called the ‘Suez syndrome,’” she wrote in her memoirs; “having previously exaggerated our power, we now exaggerated our impotence” (qtd. in Latawski 231). The Thatcher government’s National Heritage Acts of 1980 and 1983, in particular, can be seen as a means of laying the Suez syndrome to rest and reinforcing Britain’s cultural national identity through its official promotion of the heritage industry.2 These Acts led to the creation of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and English Heritage, respectively. What should be noted here is that through these legislative changes “heritage opened itself up to Thatcherite entrepreneurialism” (Murray 127). These Acts, in Higson’s words, “reworked concepts of public access and use in terms of commodification, exhibition, and display, encouraging the forthright marketing of the past within a thoroughly market-oriented heritage industry” (“Representing” 112). Wright argues in a similar vein that, though their preservation efforts were “respectful” of the heritage, these Acts were “commercially minded” legislation that promoted a “reanimation” of history as “the way forward in this new world of theme parks and mass tourism” (150). In the aftermath of these two Acts, English Heritage was made to be more commercially minded than ever. In a 1987 report, the House of Commons Environment Committee urged English

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Heritage to put more emphasis on tourism: “The most direct and effective way in which, in the present economic climate, English Heritage can promote the conservation of England’s historic buildings and ancient monuments is by promoting tourist interest in them. Ultimately, this would be far more effective than a lament at the shortage of public funds” (qtd. in Hewison 102). Thatcherism’s official promotion of the heritage industry was carried on by Thatcher’s successor John Major, who was Conservative Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997. The Department of National Heritage was established in 1992 to take over the functions of other departments and to have responsibility for “the arts, museums and galleries, libraries, the heritage, film, sport, tourism, broadcasting, the Press and the National Lottery” (Protherough and Pick 104). As in the case of English Heritage, this new government ministry was directed, among other things, to make full use of the economic potential of heritage. Not surprisingly, Virginia Bottomley, Secretary of State at the Department of National Heritage, insisted in 1996 that British filmmakers make the best of heritage assets in order to encourage tourism development in Britain. The film industry, she suggested, should take the lead in “promot[ing] our country, our cultural heritage and our tourist trade.” She went on to say: “part of my job is to encourage tourism and our great traditions … This is what films like Sense and Sensibility did as well as the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice. If we have got the country houses and the landscapes, they should be shown off on film […]” (Higson, English Heritage 54). As noted above, English Heritage and the Department of National Heritage had as their common mission the harnessing of the symbiotic relationship between heritage and the tourism industry. “Heritage and tourism are collaborative industries,” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett comments and adds, “heritage converting locations into destinations and tourism making them economically viable as exhibits of themselves” (151). As Higson notes, the heritage industry has developed “as a vital part of contemporary tourism and related service industries such as the leisure industry” (“Re-presenting” 112). As seen in its close connection with tourism, heritage was ruled by “the aggressively commercial principles associated with Thatcherite enterprise culture” (Krämer 365). What lay at the heart of Thatcherism, indeed, was “enterprise culture,” because Mrs. Thatcher believed Britain’s social and economic decline could be attributed to the absence of a robust enterprise culture.3 Thatcher’s government made considerable efforts to get Britain to break out of a “dependency culture” in which individuals supposedly relied on what Mrs. Thatcher called the “nanny state” for welfare and unemployment benefits. Instead, Thatcherism sought “to transform Britain into an ‘enterprise culture’” (Keat 1) that “enshrines the values of liberal economics, emphasizing […] the efficiency of markets, the liberty of individuals, and the noninterventionism of the state” (Alexander 445).4 Most interestingly, Thatcher’s Conservative government boosted the apparently contradictory partnership between heritage and enterprise, as part of an effort to reconcile “the party’s allegiance to tradition with the new imperatives of the modern market” (Ridgman 40). In the 1980s, both heritage and enterprise served as two major and interconnected elements underlying Britain’s economic and social reconstruction. “What has come to be called ‘the heritage industry,’” Corner and Harvey argue, “is itself a major component of economic redevelopment, an ‘enterprise,’ both in terms of large-scale civic programmes and the proliferation of private commercial activity around ‘the past’ in one commodified form or another” (46). Heritage emerged, in John Hill’s words, “as an important economic activity and a significant part of the new ‘enterprise’ culture” (British Cinema 73). However, despite the vital and positive role of heritage in the Thatcherite enterprise culture, the heritage industry is criticized for presenting the past to the public in a sanitized and commodified form and, as a result, for distorting the real past. According to this critique, although heritage has an implicit relationship with history, it is important to distinguish between the two. “In fact, heritage is not history at all,” Lowenthal points out; “heritage is not an inquiry into the past but a celebration of it, not an effort to know what actually happened but a profession of faith in a past tailored to present-day purposes” (Heritage Crusade x). In the heritage industry, as Hubbard and Lilley comment, “the past is treated as a commodity to be bought and sold as part of the contemporary tourist industry, with the conscious manipulation of history designed to create something which people will consider worth visiting and spending money on” (221). Frans

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Schouten also points out that “[h]eritage is history processed through mythology, ideology, nationalism, local pride, romantic ideas or just plain marketing, into a commodity” (21). Similarly, Raphael Samuel mentions that heritage is widely accused of turning the past into “tourist kitsch” and “presenting a ‘Disneyfied’ version of history in place of the real thing” (259). Hence, Hewison’s famous and often quoted statement: “Heritage, for all its seductive delights, is bogus history” (144). Such an anti-heritage critique resulted in the fact that “[h]eritage-baiting has become a favourite sport of the metropolitan intelligentsia, the literary end of it especially” (Samuel 260).5

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Carrying the Narrative of Heritage and Enterprise to Extremes It was out of such an “antiheritage animus” (Lowenthal, Heritage Crusade 100) that Barnes’s England, England addressed and criticized the heritage enterprise that was based on the commodification of the UK’s national past into “transient pop images or depthless consumer clichés” (Malkin 115). Around the time of its writing and publication in 1998, many areas in Britain were designated according to their connection with popular and particular themes, such as “1066 country,” “Robin Hood Country,” “Constable Country,” “Brontë Country,” and so on. This “themeparkisation of British society” had already made Heritage and Tourism expert Priscilla Boniface come to the conclusion in the mid-1990s that “Britain is now a heritage theme park” (108, 104). It is this widespread perception of Britain as a heritage theme park that Barnes uses as a starting point for his satirical novel England, England. What is noteworthy here is that, in an interview, Barnes seems to echo the contemporary view of heritage as “bogus history”: England, England is more about the creation of false truths about a country, and these coarse icons that are made to stand in for real things. After I had written it, I came across a wonderful quotation from Renan: “Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.” It would have made a perfect epigraph for the book. Getting its history wrong is also part of creating a nation. (Guignery and Roberts 59)

Simply put, Barnes’s 1998 novel is intended as a critical commentary on the idea of heritage as a process of creating “false truths” about England and “getting its history wrong.” In an earlier essay titled “Fake!” (1990), Barnes also introduces what can be understood as a motif of the novel: “Picturesque fakery […] is embedded in many aspects of British life […] The British are good at tradition; they’re also good at the invention of tradition. And like any other nation, they aren’t too keen on having those invented traditions exposed as bogus” (Letters 27). Seen in this context, the novel’s protagonist, Sir Jack Pitman, can be regarded as a satirical caricature of a Thatcherite entrepreneur who creates “picturesque fakery” in the name of “tradition” or “heritage,” and his business venture can be regarded as a classic example of a heritage enterprise. Sir Jack, head of Pitco Group, is described as super-patriotic and megalomaniacal in his plan to recreate all that is quintessentially English as a huge theme park through his “ground-breaking enterprise.”6 His “mighty Project” (EE 47) originates from the recognition that the breakup of the British Empire has led to England’s decline as a world power and that the only thing England can sell to other nations is its past. Jerry Batson, known as “a consultant to the elect” (37), points out to Sir Jack the adverse image of Britain as “an emblem of decline”: “You have to face facts. This is the third millennium and your tits have dropped, baby. The days of sending a gunboat, not to mention Johnny Redcoat, are long gone. […] We are no longer mega.” He goes on to suggest that England’s biggest selling point should be its “accumulation of time” (40): You – we – England – my client – is – are – a nation of great age, great history, great accumulated wisdom. Social and cultural history – stacks of it, reams of it – eminently marketable, never more so than in the current climate. Shakespeare, Queen Victoria, Industrial Revolution, gardening, that sort of thing. If I may coin, no, copyright, a phrase, We are already what others may hope to become. This isn’t self-pity, this is the strength of

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our position, our glory, our product placement. We are the new pioneers. We must sell our past to other nations as their future! (EE 41)

Following up Jerry Batson’s expert advice, Sir Jack instructs his concept developer, Jeffrey, to conduct a worldwide survey to discover “Top fifty characteristics associated with the word England” (EE 60) among potential visitors to England from overseas. The survey results are made into a list of the “Fifty Quintessences of Englishness” (86) that includes, among other things, historical figures (Winston Churchill and Francis Drake), historical events (Battle of Britain and Magna Carta), landmarks (Big Ben and White Cliffs of Dover), and brand names (Manchester United Football Club and Marks & Spencer). Despite the variety of national characteristics found in it, however, the list represents nothing more than potential tourists’ stereotypical and conventional notions of Englishness. These national characteristics, though stereotypical and clichéd, are what Sir Jack wants, simply because his project is going to be thoroughly consumer-oriented. “If we’re giving people what they want,” Sir Jack says, “then we should at least have the humility to find out what that might be.” At this point, the idea of Englishness is supposed to be constructed by “[p]otential purchasers of Quality Leisure in twenty-five countries” (86). Soon, however, Sir Jack makes his own adjustments to the list by crossing off several negative items, such as Snobbery (no. 12 on the list), Hypocrisy (no. 31), and Perfidy (no. 33), in order to make it a sanitized, idealized version of Englishness. Declaring himself “a patriot at heart” (EE 32), Sir Jack is indignant about the fact that “non-English people” (111) decide what is quintessential Englishness and what is not: “This wasn’t a poll, it was bare-faced character assassination. Who the fuck did they think they were, going around saying things like that about England? His England. What did they know? Bloody tourists, thought Sir Jack” (89). What Sir Jack wants to do with the list, in short, is not only to enhance the project’s marketability, but also to create “His England” or his “patriotic” view of England.7 The relative and subjective nature of Sir Jack’s list of Englishness is further illustrated through the historical figure Francis Drake (no. 40 on the list). Another protagonist, Martha Cochrane, admired Francis Drake as “an English hero and a Sir and an Admiral and therefore a Gentleman,” whereas her Spanish friend, Cristina, looked down on him as “a pirate.” What is emphasized in this instance is the relativity and subjectivity of Englishness or history: “one person’s plundering privateer might be another person’s pirate” (7). Overall, the selection process for the list suggests that Englishness can be manipulated and constructed for a particular purpose, and thus that there may be alternative versions of Englishness, ultimately revealing the constructed nature of national identity. Despite his self-professed patriotism and his “one hundred percent British” blood (EE 34), there is something questionable about Sir Jack’s “Englishness” because of his doubtful origin. There is a rumor that a few decades earlier Sir Jack had deprived his own name of its “Mitteleuropäisch” (Central European) tinge, and there is also another rumor that his “upbringing, original passport, and occasional fluffed vowel” strongly indicate that he came from Eastern Europe (34). Thus his supposedly “Continental” origin makes his patriotic search for “[q]uintessences of Englishness” (86) sound very ironic and problematic from the beginning. Perhaps Sir Jack’s self-consciousness about his obscure European origins leads to his obsession with being “a [English] patriot in his private moments too.” Even in hiking, he insists on using walking equipment “[a]ll made in England” (43). More interestingly, his office at Pitman House is designed to feel like the lounge of “some countryhouse hotel” (50). It should be noted that for many people the country house “symbolizes the idea of the ‘heritage’ in Britain, or more specifically, England” (Walsh 75). Considering the country house’s status as a national icon, Sir Jack seems to have intended for his own office to be one of the proud and patriotic manifestations of his own Englishness.8 What is ironic, however, is that although claiming to be “a patriot at heart,” he turns out to be a vulgar, unscrupulous entrepreneur not reluctant to make “His England” (EE 89) go into “a state of free-fall” and become “an economic and moral waste-pit” (207), by constructing a replica of England on the Isle of Wight.

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Seen in this way, entrepreneur Sir Jack Pitman is a good literary example of “how fine the line between enterprise and criminality can be” (Hill, “Allegorising” 167). Sometimes he is a successful businessman armed with the spirit of entrepreneurship and initiative, but most of the time he is a greedy, corrupt, and ruthless businessman trying every possible means to “get things done” or get “others to get things done” (EE 60). This explains why there are some “conflicting judgments” about him: he is either a “born leader and force of nature” or a “villain and bully”; he is either “an archetypal transnational entrepreneur” or “a brute and unreflecting junction between money, ego, and lack of conscience” (58–59). Therefore, it is not surprising at all that “top dollar and long yen” (94) becomes “almost a mantra” (Butt 240) for Sir Jack, underlining his insatiable greed for money. Whenever, in his relentless quest for money, he uses a “carrot and stick” (EE 89) approach to controlling people, Sir Jack has no scruples about taking full advantage of its “stick” side. At the early stage of the Island Project, for example, Sir Jack illegally relies on sexual blackmail to have the Island’s MP “in his pocket” by securing “the signed affidavits of three London rent-boys in a solicitor’s safe near Lincoln’s Inn Fields” (108). This is one of the reasons why he is reputed to be “a master of the gagging writ and the secrecy clause” (59). Being well aware that the Royal Family is “the country’s top cash crop” (147), Sir Jack even spreads the unfounded and misleading rumor that Buckingham Palace has agreed to relocate to the theme park on the Isle of Wight. He also orders his own newspapers to report “in mournfully extensive detail” (89) on public libels against the King and Queen in order to expedite their relocation to “England, England.” Moreover, Sir Jack mobilizes his secret negotiating team to cajole key Island councilors into being very enthusiastic about the Island’s independence from the mainland. Considering that England, England is a critical response to Thatcherite enterprise culture, Sir Jack’s “roguish, buccaneering style” (183) of doing business strongly indicates that he can be viewed as one of those who, in Green’s words, “seek to be enterprising in the ‘wrong way’ and turn to quick profits through crime” (54). In a preliminary attempt to see how much truthful information on English history should be provided and embodied in the “England, England” theme park, Sir Jack tells Dr. Max, the Project’s Official Historian, to make investigations into “how much [English] History people already know” (EE 74). Through his many interviews, Dr. Max finds out that even Englishmen who consider themselves “cultured, aware, intelligent, and well-informed” (86) know so little about “the origins and forging of [their own] nation” (85). What can be inferred from this is that “non-English people” (111), needless to say, know so little about the history of England. Ironically, the result of Dr. Max’s investigations enables Sir Jack and his men to take advantage of people’s ignorance of history. Thus the driving motivation behind the Island Project becomes, not to let potential customers learn about English history, but to make it much more accessible and entertaining for them. Of all the members of Sir Jack’s Coordinating Committee, however, Dr. Max turns out to be “the slowest to grasp the principles and demands of the Project” (EE 71), because he used to be a professor of history. This is why the Concept Developer clearly emphasizes to Dr. Max the necessity of forgetting about “scholarly” approaches to history as far as the project is concerned: “most people don’t want what you and your colleagues think of as history—the sort you get in books […] people won’t be shelling out to learn things. If they want that, they can go to a sodding library if they can find one open. They’ll come to us to enjoy what they already know” (73–74). What the Concept Developer means when he goes on to say, “the point of our history […] will be to make our guests […] feel better” (73; italics in original) is that the Official Historian is employed to consider the guests as consumers of the heritage project rather than as learners. Thus the Official Historian will be required to regard, not professional historical scholarship, but exciting, convenient, and accessible entertainment as a top priority in the project’s representations of English history and heritage. In this light, the Concept Developer’s practical advice to Dr. Max can be seen as an echo of the Thatcherite belief that “every academic in the country was expected to be able to show ‘enterprise’ in the exercise of his or her profession” (Evans 82). Put differently, the Concept Developer’s remarks underline the fact that academic professionalism is encouraged or pressured to avoid “scholarly isolationism” (EE 71), to adopt business principles, and to follow the logic of the market.

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Despite the Concept Developer’s advice, it is far from easy for Dr. Max, a former professor of history, to give up his scholarly way of thinking. During a conversation with another member of the Coordinating Committee, Dr. Max expresses his opinion freely on the heritage project in question: the project is “[v]ulgar, yes, certainly, in that it is based on a coarsening simplification of pretty well everything. Staggeringly commercial in a way that a poor little country mouse like myself can scarcely credit. Horrible in many of its incidental manifestations. Manipulative in its central philosophy” (EE 134). Interestingly, the charges of “vulgarity,” “commercialization,” “horribleness,” and “manipulation” are recurrent leitmotifs of the “heritage industry” critique. Paradoxically, however, Dr. Max voices his support for the Island Project, saying, “I wouldn’t say that [the Project is bogus] […] Bogus implies, to my mind, an authenticity which is being betrayed. [But] there is no authentic moment of beginning, or purity […] What we are looking at is almost always a replica […] of something earlier” (134–35). Furthermore, as a historian he acknowledges national identity as an artificial construct by pointing out that everything in this mini-England is “constructed” (136). All Sir Jack Pitman and his Coordinating Committee care about is not what really happened in the past, but how, in Hewison’s words, the past can be “shaped and moulded to the needs of the present” (99). In the “England, England” theme park, all the major historical figures, events, and sites are supposed to go through the process of what Mark, Sir Jack’s Project Manager, calls “makeover and upgrade” (EE 79) to create a profitable and lucrative business. For the convenience of tourists, for instance, a “sort of fast-forward version of England” (168) is created on the Island: replicas of all the major tourist attractions of Old England—Big Ben, Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, the White Cliffs of Dover, Stonehenge, and Sherwood Forest—are located within easy reach of one another so that they are able to visit all these sites in one day without much hassle. A famous historical figure like Nell Gwynn also undergoes another “makeover and upgrade.” According to Dr. Max, Nell Gwynn is not an appropriate character for the theme park, not only because her career as Charles II’s mistress started “at a relatively tender age,” but also because she called herself a “Protestant whore” and enjoyed “three-in-a-bed stuff.” But Sir Jack argues all she needs is “a little massaging, to bring her into line with third millennium family values” (97). Indeed, in an effort to construct a socially acceptable and family-friendly image of Nell Gwynn, the Committee decides to “make her older […] lose the children, lose the other mistresses, and lose the social and religious background.” As a result, her story is transformed and sanitized into “a very democratic story” where “a nice middle-class girl […] ends up marrying the King” (97–98). Because of “her failure to make Jeff’s list of Top Fifty Quintessences,” however, her role in the theme park is eventually reduced to that of “a nice, unambitious girl who [runs] a juicer stall” near the Palace (190). The Robin Hood myth—“a primal English myth” (EE 150)—is also “repositioned” for modern times. What Sir Jack’s Coordinating Committee uses as a means of presenting the Hood myth to tourists is a reenactment show, in which a team of employed actors performs “Robin Hood and the Sheriff.”9 In order to tailor the myth for a modern, politically correct audience, however, the Committee decides to turn “Robin Hood and his Merrie Men” into a group of marginalized men, such as “ethnic minorities” (156), “the differently-abled,” and “homosexuals” (230). Furthermore, some elements in the scenario, such as “old-fashioned attitudes to wildlife [and] over-consumption of red meat,” are “expunged or attenuated” (228) so as to appeal to an eco-conscious and healthconscious audience. What the Committee does through all this “massaging” (97) or “repositioning” (152) of English history is to construct its own interpretations of the past for the sole purpose of maximizing profits for Pitco Group, thereby implicitly undermining the neutrality and objectivity of historical representation. Dr. Max allows such a subjective and arbitrary reconstruction of the past on the grounds that “neutral non-interpretation” (155) of history is impossible to make. As Keith Jenkins, the postmodern historian, puts it, “history remains inevitably a personal construct” (14) so far as this heritage project is concerned. The battle reenactment between Robin Hood’s band and the Sheriff’s army borders on the absurd when, later on, Martha Cochrane becomes the new CEO of Pitco. In a bid to develop leisure theory about “interfacing other non-synchronous episodes of the nation’s history” (EE 234), she makes a

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radical decision to replace the Sheriff’s army with an SAS team, whose original job in the theme park is to restage the Iranian Embassy Siege of 1980 twice a week. Accordingly, the SAS squad is made to fight a staged battle against Robin Hood’s band in the show “the Raid on Robin’s Cave” promoted as “a one-off cross-epoch extravaganza” (234) for premier visitors. The SAS might be “heroes down at the Iranian Embassy,” but in this fantastical reenactment, “they were a snatch squad ordered in by the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham” (238). Most disastrously, however, the contemporary, high-tech SAS squad ends up being defeated by the mythical, primitive “Hoodites” (228). At this point, it is worth recalling Chris Rojek’s claim that all theme parks build their attractions around two paramount “meta-themes”: velocity and time-space compression (161). By “time-space compression” he refers to the way in which the boundaries of time and space are blurred or dissolved in a variety of theme-park spectacles. Surely such a “cross-epoch extravaganza” as “the Raid on Robin’s Cave” is meant to be a concrete example of the idea of time-space compression, which refers to “a common phenomenon at the Disney theme parks—the juxtaposition and mixing of diverse epochs and cultures” (Bryman 128). What is most characteristic of this battle reenactment is that it removes temporal and spatial barriers by bringing together two apparently incompatible elements, namely, Robin Hood and the Special Air Service. Put another way, the two “non-synchronous episodes” of English history—the Robin Hood of the medieval period and the SAS of the twentieth century—are taken out of their historical and cultural context and mixed together in one confused whole for entertainment purposes only. This ridiculously contrived show, however, proves such a popular success that Martha realizes “cross-epoch conflict clearly ha[s] strong Visitor Resonance”: “The whistling and clapping was now modulating into a rhythmical stamping which threatened the bleachers” (EE 238). Such an enthusiastic response from the premier visitors clearly indicates that, as far as they are able to have an exciting, live-action entertainment experience, it does not really matter to them whether, or in what degree, the show is historically authentic and convincing. Stephen Fjellman makes a relevant comment in his insightful discussion of Disney World: “The Disney strategy is to juxtapose the real and the fantastic, surrounding us with this mix until it becomes difficult to tell which is which. A kind of euphoric disorientation is supposed to set in as we progressively accept the Disney definition of things” (254). Regardless of the historical inauthenticity of “the Raid on Robin’s Cave,” the mainly foreign tourist audience enjoys “a kind of euphoric disorientation” deriving from watching the “cross-epoch conflict” between the “mythical” Hoodites and the “real” SAS. Seen in this way, the “England, England” theme park is just like the Disney theme parks that convert history into Disney’s version of history, or “Distory” (Fjellman 63), where tourists consume a commodified and misleading version of history, not much caring about the distinction between the real and the fantastic. What is particularly ironic about this entire farcical “cross-epoch” event is the fact that, contrary to Sir Jack’s strong pride in Englishness, the quintessential Englishness of the Robin Hood myth has become tainted with “Disneyfication” and “Americanization,” implying that there is no such thing as “pure Englishness.” Moreover, contrary to the Project Manager’s assertion that Englishness is essentially “about keeping reality and illusion separate” (EE 114), the English heritage theme park turns out to be a surreal mixture of both. As mentioned above, another recurring meta-theme in theme park attractions is “velocity,” which refers to the “thrill factor” provided by fast rides, such as roller coasters, free-fall rides, and water slides (Rojek 162). This idea of velocity is embodied and summarized in the “Heavens-to-Betsy Bungee Experience” (EE 126), reinvented out of the island’s local legend about how a Victorian woman, carrying a basket of eggs to the market, was blown off the edge of a cliff by a sudden gust of wind. The local legend has it that she landed safely on the beach, thanks to her umbrella and crinoline acting as two parachutes. Although he thinks the story sounds unbelievable, Sir Jack loves it because of his personal belief that it is able to provide some magical qualities his theme-park project needs most: “What we want […] is magic. […] We want our Visitors to feel that they have passed through a mirror, that they have left their own worlds and entered a new one, different yet strangely familiar, where things are not done as in other parts of the inhabited planet, but as if in a rare

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dream” (123). The Committee decides to use the “Heavens-to-Betsy Bungee Experience” for “the Island Breakfast Experience” in which, with the help of the “controlled unravelling of a camouflaged cable,” a visitor is able to “descend [from the cliff] to the beach with a clip-on Betsy Basket”: “Then he or she would be led by a mob-capped waitress to Betsy’s All-Day Breakfast Bar, where the eggs would be taken from the Basket and fried, boiled, scrambled, or poached, according to choice, before the jumper’s very eyes. With the bill would come an engraved Certificate of Descent stamped with Sir Jack’s signature and the date” (126). The local legend of the Isle of Wight has become commodified and packaged not only into another icon of Englishness, i.e., the English breakfast (no. 44 on the list of the “Fifty Quintessences of Englishness”), but also into a thrill ride similar to Disney theme-park rides. Most significant is the fact that tourist visitors here would be presented with “experiences for sale”—the “Heavens-to-Betsy Bungee Experience” and the “Island Breakfast Experience.” This whole marketing planning process provides a perfect example of how a “commercial heritage industry is commodifying pasts into heritage products and experiences for sale as part of a modern consumption of entertainment” (Graham, Ashworth, and Tunbridge 1). Shortly after being dismissed from the position of CEO, Martha reflects on what has been done to the original local legend: “Later the moment had been appropriated, reinvented, copied, coarsened […] Part of you might suspect that the magical event had never occurred […] But you must also celebrate the image and the moment […]” (EE 245). As Lowenthal succinctly puts it, “heritage is not an inquiry into the past but a celebration of it” (Heritage Crusade x). Sir Jack’s Pitco Group, a transnational corporation, is naturally concerned not with the study and understanding of the past, but with the appropriation and exploitation of the past for commercial purposes. At the initial stage of the Island Project, Sir Jack’s Project Manager succeeds in winning key Island councilors over to Pitco’s side by promising the transnational corporation’s massive investment, through the construction of a heritage theme park, in the economically troubled Isle of Wight: “In the modern world, stability and longterm economic prosperity are provided more effectively by the transnational corporation than by the old-style nation state” (EE 131). The Project Manager is equally successful in persuading them to believe that it is high time to declare the Island’s political and economic independence from the English mainland, “given the formidable amount of investment proposed by Pitco, the jobs already created, and the jobs to come, and given the assurance of longterm prosperity” (128). Specifically, what the Project Manager impresses on local leaders is that the positive aspect of the heritage project, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes, aims to “give dying economies and dead sites a second life as exhibitions of themselves” (7). Two years after its independence, the Island works incredibly well not only as a leisure business but also as a “miniature state,” as promised by the Project Manager. Most of all, Pitco seems to have succeeded in reviving the “dying economies” of the Island. However, according to a Wall Street Journal reporter who later on covers the story of the “England, England” theme park, it turns out that in order to claim the achievement of “full employment,” Pitco resorted to inhumane and unethical methods of shipping “the old, the longterm sick, and the socially dependent off to the mainland” (EE 187). The project’s rulebook, in particular, is infamous for its extreme inflexibility in dealing with Pitco employees. According to the rulebook, there are only two kinds of employees: “Either you worked or you were sick. If you were sick, you were transferred to Dieppe Hospital” in France (223). Even more ironically, Pitco’s heritage project proves to care little about the preservation of the Island’s built heritage: the project has wiped out what could be heritage buildings— bungalows. Almost the entire housing stock of the original Isle of Wight—“dinky interwar and midcentury bungalows” noted for “their extraordinary authenticity and time-capsule fittings”—has been completely destroyed and replaced with “a perfectly re-created street of typical pre-Island housing” (183–84) for the enjoyment of tourist visitors. A much more fundamental problem with this heritage theme park is that once “the Island ha[s] achieved its own dynamic” (EE 198), nobody needs the professional help and advice of the Project Historian, Dr. Max, anymore, simply because “[n]o-one wants to know any of Dr Max’s old history” (208).

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Anyone, Pitmanite or Visitor, could call his office for guidance on any historical matter. His presence and purpose were advertised in every hotel-room briefing pack. A bored client on the cheapest weekend break could confront Dr Max and argue Saxon strategy at the Battle of Hastings for as long as he liked, entirely free of charge. The trouble was, nobody ever did. […] [T]he interchange between Visitors and Experiences needed fine-tuning on a pragmatic rather than theoretical basis; and so the role of the Project Historian had simply become … historical. (198–99)

Dr. Max’s function was originally to lend apparent historical authority and legitimacy to the Island Project. Once the heritage theme park is in full operation, however, Dr. Max has been reduced to such a mere employee nobody wants around anymore that Martha eventually comes to see him, so to speak, as “something vulnerable, innocent, decorticated” (242). For the Project Historian, this whole situation might be a poignant reminder of the Concept Developer’s earlier advice: “most people don’t want what you and your colleagues think of as history—the sort you get in books” (73). The reader’s last glimpse of the Project Historian is of an employee “elaborate[ing] a plausible family tree” for his boss, Sir Jack, who recently got the title of “the first Baron Pitman of Fortuibus” shortly after his comeback as Pitco’s CEO (256–57). Considering Sir Jack’s own obscure and lowly origin, it is more than likely that the Project Historian is forced to bow to pressure from Sir Jack to falsely embellish his employer’s family history.10 Viewed in this way, the Project Historian ends up having a hand in the creation of questionable or false truths about the genealogical past of “a great man” (209) who has made a name as an “innovator and ideas man” (257) in the world. What it all comes down to is this: on the Island “[t]here was no history except Pitco history” (207) and Pitman history. The third and final part of the novel reveals that, ever since the Island’s independence, the English mainland, now renamed “Anglia,” has regressed to a pre-industrial country suffering from depopulation, poverty, and isolation, in marked contrast with the Island Project’s tremendous success. But Anglia’s way of dealing with the past, it turns out, is not so different in essence from the Island’s. The first prime example can be found in the character of Jez Harris, who used to be a “junior legal expert with an American electronics firm” before choosing to settle down in Anglia as a village farrier when his company was obliged to leave the country (EE 251). What is most ironic is that Jez Harris, though a Milwaukee-born American, has transformed himself into an Englishman, as it were, by adopting an English persona: he loves to “play the [English] yokel” and to tell “invented folklore” to “some anthropologist, travel writer, or linguistic theoretician [who] would turn up inadequately disguised as a tourist” (251–52). What he invents are mostly sensational and fantastic stories, such as “tales of witchcraft and superstition, of sexual rites beneath a glowing moon and the tranced slaughter of livestock, all not so very long in the past” (252). Harris’s “fabulation” makes Martha think to herself, “his inventions seemed so obviously fraudulent” (270). Occasionally, Mr. Mullin the schoolmaster reproaches Harris for inventing tales: “Oh, come off it, Jez. […] I just mean don’t get carried away with all the guff you give them. If you want some local legends I’ve got lots of books I can lend you. Folk collections, that sort of thing” (252). Insisting on his own “fabulation,” however, Harris answers back, “I’ve tried ’em on that stuff and it don’t go down so well. They prefer Jez’s stories, that’s the truth” (252). Harris goes so far as to take advantage of “invented folklore” as a means of having a “monetary exchange or barter” (252) with anthropologists, travel writers, or linguistic theoreticians “disguised as tourists.” Just as in “England, England,” in which a theme-park version of English history is much more popular with tourists than “Dr Max’s old history” (208), so in Anglia “invented folklore” (252) is much more popular with “false” tourists than the original folklore found in books. A second example of Anglia’s use of the past is found in “the dressing-up competition” at the village fête in which, just like the actors on Sir Jack’s Island, some of the villagers dress up as Queen Victoria, Lord Nelson, Snow White, Robin Hood, Boadicea, and Edna Halley (273), thus alluding to the fact that the distinction between reality and fiction, truth and myth, is blurred or lost here as well.11

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Conclusion In his satirical novel England, England, Barnes treats contemporary Britain as a nation eagerly promoting the controversial partnership between heritage and enterprise. If Sir Jack Pitman can be seen as an archetypal entrepreneur, then the Isle of Wight’s dramatic transformation into a gigantic heritage theme park can be seen as an illustrative example of his own entrepreneurial spirit. However, his willingness to resort to illegal and unethical means to “get things done” or get “others to get things done” (EE 60) brings the dark and seedy side of his entrepreneurship to the foreground. The unprecedented success of the English heritage theme park seems, on the surface, to celebrate the happy combination of heritage and enterprise. The result of their combination, however, turns out to be potentially harmful and disturbing. In Sir Jack’s theme park, various versions of Englishness are commodified and reduced to a highly sanitized and distorted version of Englishness whose truth and validity no one questions or challenges, as is reflected in the fact that, soon after the theme park’s full operation, “[n]o-one wants to know any of Dr Max’s old history” (EE 208). At its inception, the Island Project had been planned to offer a quintessential representation of English history; some time after its completion, however, on the Island “[t]here was no history except Pitco history” (207). The “England, England” theme park offers its tourists Pitco’s version of English history, which is essentially similar to what Stephen Fjellman calls “Distory.” In “England, England,” people refuse to be “burdened by […] history”: “Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the downland with the breeze in your face. Travel light: it was true for nations as well as for hikers” (208). What is most troubling about “Pitco history,” however, lies in undermining the distinction between history (fact, reality, truth) and heritage (myth, illusion, falsehood) by placing it at the mercy of the heritage industry. Another related problem is that due to the theme park’s growing popularity, Old England has been, so to speak, bereft of its “authentic” heritage attractions and, as a result of the collapse of its “tourist-based economy” (259), debased into “a place of yokeldom and willed antiquarianism” (262). Anglia’s relative economic and political vulnerability to competitive pressure from the heritage theme park is intended not only to warn against contemporary England’s heavy reliance on the heritage enterprise, but also to voice Barnes’s underlying disquiet about its ability to cope effectively with present and future challenges. By splitting contemporary Britain’s image into two antithetical fictional spaces—the “declining” Anglia and the “flourishing” heritage theme park—Barnes’s novel provides a playful and satirical answer to a simple hypothetical question: What would happen to England (and Britain) if it were not for the so-called heritage industry?

Notes 1. I borrowed the phrase “heritage/enterprise couplet” from John Corner and Sylvia Harvey’s 1991 article title, “Mediating Tradition and Modernity: The Heritage/Enterprise Couplet.” These two writers were among the first to argue that the two key words—heritage and enterprise—form “a key mythic couplet” (46), defining the political and cultural climate of Thatcherite Britain. 2. The rise of the heritage industry was seen not so much as a positive sign for Britain, but as a telling sign of Britain’s decline as a world power. Patrick Wright’s On Living in an Old Country (1985), for example, sees a connection between British national decline and the contemporary obsession with heritage: “This sense of history as entropic decline gathers momentum in the sharpening of the British crisis. National Heritage is the backward glance which is taken from the edge of a vividly imagined abyss, and it accompanies a sense that history is foreclosed” (70). As the full title of his book The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (1987) indicates, Hewison also regards the heritage boom in Britain as a response to its economic and political decline: “this country is gripped by the perception that it is in decline. The heritage industry is an attempt to dispel this climate of decline by exploiting the economic potential of our culture […]” (9). From Hewison’s perspective, Britain had been permeated by a feeling of decline from the post–World War II period into the 1980s, going through a succession of major national crises, such as the dissolution of the British Empire, the Suez crisis (1956), increased immigration, the oil crisis (1973), rising inflation, increasing unemployment, the

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IMF crisis (1976), the miners’ strike (1984), and the contraction of the manufacturing industry. Roy Strong explained what the word “heritage” implied in times of crisis and change in British society: It is in times of danger, either from without or from within, that we become deeply conscious of our heritage… . within this word there mingle varied and passionate streams of ancient pride and patriotism, of a heroism in times past, of a nostalgia too for what we think of as a happier world which we have lost. […] The heritage represents some form of security, a point of reference, a refuge perhaps, something visible and tangible which, within a topsy and turvy world, seems stable and unchanged. (qtd. in Hewison 46–47) One of Thatcher’s main concerns was about the forces threatening enterprise culture: “I used to have a nightmare […] that the British sense of enterprise and initiative would have been killed by socialism… . My agony was: had it been killed? By prices and income policies, by high taxation, by nationalisation, by central planning?” (qtd. in Corner and Harvey 59). The idea of “enterprise culture” during the Thatcherite 1980s was so strongly encouraged at every level of society that it continued to persist well into the 1990s. The heritage debate in Britain was not confined to a narrow section of academics and professionals; during the late 1980s and early 1990s it became the subject of popular interest nationwide through such television programs as “The Heritage Business,” “Past for Sale?” and “Fantasy Island” on BBC 2 and “Theme Park Britons” on Channel 4 (Mellor 247n). Julian Barnes, England, England (New York: Vintage, 1998), 182. All subsequent references to the text will be abbreviated to EE followed by the page number. Accordingly, the “Gastronomic Sub-Committee” insists on serving “patriotic menus” in the theme park, such as “Yorkshire pudding, Lancashire hotpot, Sussex pond pudding, Coventry godcakes,” and so on. But the “SubCommittee banned porridge for its Scottish associations […] Welsh rarebit, Scotch eggs, and Irish stew were not even discussed” (93–94). Later on, one of the dining options in the “England, England” theme park is “Country House Weekend Banquet” (113). “Reenactment” forms an important component of the heritage industry. According to Hewison, the heritage industry offers “more costume drama and re-enactment than critical discourse” (135). In the heritage industry, Walsh points out, a “form of empathetic re-creation is the mock battle, or historical re-enactment” (102). A rumor has it that “little Jacky was in fact the result of a garage liaison between the shire-bred English wife of a Hungarian glass manufacturer and a visiting chauffeur from Loughborough” (34). “Edna Halley” is a fictional character invented by Jez Harris.

Funding This work was supported by Inha University Research Grant.

Notes on Contributor Jong-Seok Kim is Professor of English Language and Literature at Inha University in South Korea, where he teaches courses in literature and film, short fiction, and British literature. He has published essays on Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, and Julian Barnes.

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Fjellman, Stephen M. Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America. Boulder: Westview, 1992. Graham, Brian, G. J. Ashworth, and J. E. Tunbridge. A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy. London: Arnold, 2000. Green, Stuart D. Making Sense of Construction Improvement. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Guignery, Vanessa, and Ryan Roberts, eds. Conversations with Julian Barnes. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2009. Hewison, Robert. The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen, 1987. Higson, Andrew. English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. _____. “Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film.” British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires were started. Ed. Lester Friedman. London: U College London P, 1993. 109–29. Hill, John. “Allegorising the Nation: British Gangster Films of the 1980s.” British Crime Cinema. Ed. Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy. London: Routledge, 1999. 165–76. _____. British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Holmes, Frederick M. Julian Barnes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Hubbard, Phil, and Keith Lilley. “Selling the Past: Heritage-tourism and Place Identity in Stratford-upon-Avon.” Geography 85.3 (2000): 221–32. Jenkins, Keith. Re-thinking History. London: Routledge, 1991. Keat, Russell. “Introduction: Starship Britain or Universal Enterprise?” Enterprise Culture. Ed. Russell Keat and Nicholas Abercrombie. London: Routledge, 1991. 1–17. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Krämer, Lucia. “Oscar Wilde as an Object of the English Heritage Industry.” Irish Studies Review 13.3 (2005): 359–67. Latawski, Paul. “Invoking Munich, Expiating Suez: British Leadership, Historical Analogy and the Falklands Crisis.” The Falklands Conflict Twenty Years On: Lessons for the Future. London: Frank Cass, 2005. 226–38. Lowenthal, David. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. _____. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. Lyth, Peter. “Selling History in an Age of Industrial Decline: Heritage Tourism in Robin Hood County.” Proceedings of the XIV International Economic History Congress, Helsinki, 21–25 Aug. 2006. 24 Jan. 2012. . Malkin, Jeanette R. Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999. Mellor, Adrian. “Enterprise and Heritage in the Dock.” Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture. Ed. John Corner and Sylvia Harvey. London: Routledge, 1991. 93–115. Miracky, James J. “Replicating a Dinosaur: Authenticity Run Amok in the ‘Theme Parking’ of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Julian Barnes’s England, England. ” Critique 45.2 (2004): 163–71. Murray, Alex. “The Heritage Industry and Historiographic Metafiction: Historical Representation in the 1980s.” The 1980s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. Emily Horton, Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 125–49. Nünning, Vera. “The Invention of Cultural Traditions: The Construction and Destruction of Englishness and Authenticity in Julian Barnes’ England, England. ” Anglia 119.1 (2001): 58–76. Protherough, Robert, and John Pick. Managing Britannia: Culture and Management in Modern Britain. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2002. Ridgman, Jeremy. “From River Bank to South Bank: The Wind in the Willows and the Staging of National Identity.” Turning the Page: Children’s Literature in Performance and the Media. Ed. Fiona M. Collins and Jeremy Ridgman. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. 39–60. Rojek, Chris. Ways of Escape: Modern Transformations in Leisure and Travel. London: Macmillan, 1993. Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso, 1994. Schouten, Frans F. J. “Heritage as Historical Reality.” Heritage, Tourism and Society. Ed. David T. Herbert. London: Pinter, 1995. 21–31. Walsh, Kevin. The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-modern World. London: Routledge, 1992. Wright, Patrick. On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain. London: Verso, 1985.