Assimilation After Empire: Marina Lewycka, Paul Gilroy, and the Ethnic Bildungsroman in Contemporary Britain

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Marina Lewycka's 2005 novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, was long-listed for Booker Prize, short-listed for Orange Prize, and quickly became a bestseller. Written by British-born daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, this comic novel tells story of a gold-digging Ukrainian migrant, Valentina, who tries to obtain citizenship by marrying Nikolai, an elderly Ukrainian who has resided in Britain since World War II. Nikolai's adult daughter, Nadezhda, narrates novel in first person and satirizes Valentina's absurd, aggressive consumerism and Nikolai's pathetic lustfulness. Short History's plot shows narrator gradually beginning to sympathize with Valentina while cheerfully engineering her deportation. The incongruity between these two directions comes to a climax at novel's end: Valentina is indeed deported but also figuratively included as a necessary part of assimilated family, which, in final scene, recognizes itself to be fully, normatively, happily British. The joy of its ending requires main characters to have accepted Valentina and welcomed her into family and nation, but novel cannot fully accept such a conclusion. Britain rejects Valentina and draws her into its folds at same time; it needs her and needs to expel her. Despite affective confusion this double gesture entails, novel is nonetheless compelled toward both of opposed endings of deportation and assimilation. In process, novel struggles between two opposed understandings of national subjectivity: is nation defined inclusively and flexibly, by a welcoming ethic of hospitality? Or is nation defined exclusively and rigidly, in a threatened, defensive version of what it means to be British? In Short History, neither version of Britishness wins; novel is stuck between them. In many ways, Short History is a thinly disguised memoir and work of an inexperienced author who is not always in control of her text.The incoherence of novel's ending is something another writer might have resolved stylistically or thematically, but its theoretical implications are not any less provocative or interesting because they may be unconscious. Short History's competing models of British identity resonate with, but also require us to rethink, what Paul Gilroy has recently theorized as divergence between and melancholic versions of British national culture in aftermath of empire. In convivial mode, British identity is grounded in practical, everyday encounters with diversity that characterize cosmopolitan life; such a version of Britishness is open and empathetic and embraces the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life (Gilroy xv). Gilroy's conviviality has identification at its heart: in convivial city, inhabitants can imagine themselves in each other's situations, no matter what cultural differences might stand in way. Short History's narrator develops by doing just that: by opening herself to and sympathizing with Valentina, that threatening other. The narrator's capacity for sympathy and identification gradually increases across novel and signals that she is in process of becoming a full realist character driven by interiority. With this developmental structure, Lewycka's novel follows formula of ethnic bildungsroman or assimilation narrative, in which an ethnic character grows along a trajectory that culminates in his or her assimilation to nation. As Lewycka's characters learn to identify with each other and gain self-conscious, realist subjectivities, they prepare themselves for assimilation to a nation defined by conviviality. Thus, Short History seems to be committed to a convivial version of national identity, as it moves toward sympathy, identification, and assimilation. But even though Nikolai and Nadezhda begin to make themselves British precisely by learning to sympathize with someone unlike them--Valentina--they finally assimilate only after she is deported. …