Londonstani/The shocking twist

So what exactly happened to Malkani. He starts the book off leading the reader down a intricately drawn path with subtle hints and clues built into the pavement. His descriptions of Jas & co. are coherent and reasonable. Even though the story is a little bit out of the ordinary, we never really expect the ordinary, especially in contemporary fiction. As the story progresses, we see Jas and his friends in a painfully slow coming of age process. Through the first and second sections, the story is relatively consistent and the reader begins to become accustomed to the style of both the book and the characters in it.

For some reason, once the third section opens the fireworks start to fly. We suddenly see suicides, unexpected deaths, absurd relationships with post college age people, Jas breaking into his fathers warehouse, getting beat up, and burning it down, Jas becoming an outcast from his group of friends, and of course the "shocking twist," Jas is actually white. It seems as though Malkani either got tired and used this ridiculous type of storyline to speed up the book to finish it or because he was too lazy to continue with the intricate and detailed writing he just tried to throw in tons of action so he could cover up the lower quality of writing. In either case, while I felt that something drastic need to happen in the life of Jas, the ending to Londonstani not only exceeded my expectaitions but went so far past them that I find myself unable to take the book seriously.

Malkani ruined his book in the last section, as he threw away so many of the details and aspects of the book that made the first two sections so good...

Immigrant Son

Londonstani deals a lot with the seemingly irreconcilable differences between first and second-generation immigrants. My personal experience is nowhere near as extreme as that of the rudeboys, but I think some of that probably has to do with being part-white. My parents both immigrated to the States, and they brought with them pretty solid beliefs and ideas about how to live. Of course, anyone who immigrates to a new home has the desire to change and make things better, so they can't be all passive. That's what I think the desis don't understand about the first-generationers. They have an incompletely-inherited culture and a poorly-acquired one as well, but the two are always at odds because they can't comprehend that their parents came to London for a reason - the act of doing so should be grounds for understanding. The parents were probably pretty rebellious in their own way as well.
And then there's the whiteness thing. Jas makes himself the outsider because his identity is also fractured. He finds himself in the white minority, with no recognition of what the previous generation experienced. So he, lost in London society, identifies with the adolescent search for tough cool, and because white is the status quo, the favoured majority, he is able to "drop" to the ethnic level and put himself at the foot of the desi ladder instead. Worship the Bang-Bang youngblood ideal instead of the struggle-less white one.

The London Abroad Experience

Last fall, I studied abroad in London. I stayed at Edgeware Road and studied in Regents Park - near the Lebanese Quarter and Camden Town, and made it a point to spend time in a number of other districts. A student filming project I did with some NYU kids actually took me to a Bollywood-esque Arts neighbourhood near Brick Lane, where we borrowed a studio from an Asian (Indian) talk-show company and I received the Brick Lane Curry Tour after we finished filming. A number of our novels have taken us through the mythic town of London, but I felt a resonance with the feeling of alienation in Londonstani. In a city with such ancient history, it still feels like everyone's a stranger of sorts. The Bangla-town section (where the Bangladeshi Muslim Indians live) became so after having been the emigrant Jewish silver-smithing quarter. T.S. Eliot lived on the same block as I did, along with his American expats. Everyone's from somewhere else except for the English folks - but even there, things get fuzzy. London leaks out from the Loop, from its centre, and where exactly it ends or begins, what's a suburb and what's an unwanted neighbouring burrough can get hazy and extremely subjective. My London relatives actually live in Croydon and commute in to the city... and they've only been English citizenry for a couple of generations (Irish before that). I often felt kind of isolated in London, but other times I felt like we were all alone together... of sorts.

In class, we talked about whether Tipping the Velvet was more of a coming of age novel or a coming out novel. One thing that I thought was interesting about this question when it was posed was that it seemed to assume that the two were necessarily mutually exclusive for Nan, which I didn’t feel was the case. For Nan, I felt like her coming out and coming of age were inextricably bound together, and much of her journey toward discovering herself and growing up was tied to her becoming comfortable with and understanding her own sexuality. In the beginning of the novel, it almost didn’t seem like Nan thought of herself as a lesbian – she seemed to just think that she had fallen in love with Kitty. She didn’t love women, she just happened to love a person who happened to be a woman. Part of this, I’m sure, is due to the fact that Kitty seemed so vehemently against the idea that anyone might perceive them to be “toms”, but there still didn’t seem to be any sense from Nan that she understood herself to be a lesbian. However, as the novel progresses, through her interactions with Diana and Florence, I think we see Nan come to the realization that she is a lesbian, and start to embrace this. I think that along with Nan’s playing with gender representation, experimenting with her presentation of herself and somewhat blurring those gender lines, Nan’s entering into these relationships and sort of discovering that she is a lesbian are really the driving forces behind her development as a character and a person in the novel. Throughout the novel, we see her negotiate her ideas about her own gender presentation and sexuality, and I think that this is a big part of her growing up, and I think this is what forms the basis of her coming of age tale.

This is going a few weeks back, but I thought it was really interesting discussing the essay on queer narration in Tipping the Velvet. One thing that I found particularly interesting in this essay was the distinction between third person omniscient narratives as being inherently male, while first person narratives are supposedly inherently female. I can see, as we discussed in class, how some might think a third person omniscient narrator may seem more male because those types of narratives are somewhat “God-like”, which can carry with it connotations of maleness, while the first person narrative may seem like journal entries (which might be seen as gendered female). However, I don’t think that I have ever had these reactions to novels that I have read. I tend to associate the gender of the narrator (third person omniscient or not) with the gender of the main character of the novel. Talking about the gendered narrators, however, made me think about how the gender of the author plays into this. I took a gender studies class last year, and in it we talked about whether there is an inherently masculine or feminine way to write, and if you would be able to discern the gender of a writer based purely on his or her prose. For instance, in the case of novels with a third person omniscient narrator, does the gender of the writer color what gender we think of the narrator as being? Can male writers accurately depict a female voice, and vice versa? I’m not sure that I actively think about how the gender of the author affects how we view the narrator or the overall tone or voice of the novel, but I think it’s interesting regardless and I do wonder if these things subconsciously affect how we read novels.

Allusion in Tipping the Velvet

Through Diana and Florence, Sara Waters reveals differences in class through different preferences in literature. Diana is the rich and vicious widow bitch who rescues Nan from the streets. Diana keeps her collection of erotic pamphlets and novels hidden away in a trunk in her bedroom, which seems to be the approach of the wealthy. Not wanting to be associated with the 'Tom's' (Kitty's word for openly gay women), the wealthy hide their risque books and magazines. Admirably, the snobbish Diana helps produce a magazine on Suffrage, but considers Nan, the oyster-shop girl, too low class to gain anything from reading it.

Florence's taste in literature are quite different. Being the socialist activist who gives Nan a home after Diana throws her out, we come to understand her as being sensitive, intelligent and romantic through what she chooses to read. Florence spends much of her time working for Women’s Cooperative Guild and the union. Each night, Florence labored for the cause by writing, reading, comparing pages, and addressing envelopes. Through Florence, Nan discovers Elenanor Marx and Walt Whitman. For Florence, the intellectual writers were more of a source of stimulation than pornography. Sharing her preferences with Nan (they read out loud to each other) added the intimacy that solidified their relationship.

Lesbian Audiences

Something that struck me from the reading we did for Tipping the Velvet was the idea that Waters was quoted as targeting the book "primarily towards lesbians." It was a curious quote that came up during the Tipping presentation - the idea that a book can have a targeted aesthetic audience, as opposed to a target market audience. It seemed to me to be kind of a strange statement at first - why would the book need to "appeal" to lesbians more than any other demographic? Surely it could appeal to a rather broad spectrum of readers? But that got me thinking about the reasons one writes a novel. If one wants to make money, universal appeal (or as close as you can approximate) is certainly the way to go. But if one wants to talk about gender analysis and deconstruction, and has the focus of being read by a sympathetic or at least content-literate audience, then certain other ideas become easier to make work. Once you have the lesbian audience in mind, you can highlight certain elements of female or lesbian literature. That first-person vs. third-person argument, for instance. The movement of time and the structure of the plot, focusing on character development over external action. The attention to details associated with the feminine eye or perception. It's interesting to think about how the choice to appeal to lesbians influenced the style of Tipping the Velvet.