The Blurring of Writing and Writing the Blurring 

Political and Social Dystopias?

Coe remembers that he read George Orwell’s Animal Farm at the age of eleven, which had a hold on him as he admired how “a political allegory was smuggled into a fable” (Guignery 36), a technique he tried to emulate in The Broken Mirror . WACU, in some ways, resembles Orwell’s fiction since it talks about a family that exerts a totalitarian influence over a countryand its subjects. It’s no surprise that Coe, in an interview with Shannon Roger, admits that Lanarkby Alasdair Gray is a political novel par excellence. There are similitudes between Coe and Alasdair since they show how society controls individuals’ destinies. This dystopian context resembles Coe’s fiction where individuals appear to be trapped. Coe says about Lanark: “il a pour sujet principal le rapport de l’individu à la société, sujet qu’il inscrit non seulement dans le récit mais aussi dans la forme même du roman, en mettant en abyme l’histoire de l’éducation de son héros dans un contexte dystopique à la Orwell” (Mellet 183).
The theme of frustration is recurrent in Coe’s work, with the characters who cannot fulfill their dreams and fall into failure. This theme recalls famous dystopias like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Owell’s 1984. At the end of WACU , Michael realizes that the Winshaws are part of his life. As Ryan Trimm comments: “Owen’s epiphany [at the end, when he realizes he is central, not peripheral] is not the happiest realization, for it suggests a larger collision, once concerning his failure to stop the Winshaws and the values they signify” (Moseley 44). Michael is also described as a retarded man who cannot fulfill his sexual impulses and spends his time drooling in front of videos. This idea of sexual frustration is also present in N11when Rachel and Jamie can’t satisfy each other and remain on the brink of orgasm. There are many passages that evoke this sexual interruption: “Then, just as Rachel was about to reach her second climax, Jamie’s mobile phone rang. To her amazement, he leaned over to answer it.” […] Furious, Rachel flopped back on to the bed, panting heavily, more with frustration than anything else. She had been on the very brink of orgasm” (330).
Even though WACU and N11do not deal with stories set in the future, the two novels resemble dystopias in many ways. The lattersare characterized by a form of dehumanization of politics that seem to control thelives of individuals in a totalitarian way. There have been many cultural references that portrayed Thatcher, the iron lady, as a dictator. The decline of society provoking social and environmental disasters, as aforementioned, is another specific feature of dystopias. The goal of dystopia also concurs with Coe’s aim to draw attention to real-world issues regarding society, politics, economics, and environment. In terms of politics, dystopian rulers are depicted as brutal and uncaring almost fanatical, which resemble the Winshaws who rule with an iron hand over the country, whose decisions result in negative consequences for individuals. In terms of economics, the main targets are extensive privatization, capitalism, free-market economy, thedeath of the welfare-system and characters that are at the mercy of its mechanisms. The idea that people are contaminated by this ideology is present and recalls Michael when he presents Fiona as a form of investment or when the Winshaws control the alimentation of individuals and their consciousness and the way they intend to dull their minds to undermine any form of protest.
Dystopias also tackle the fact that wealth is not equally distributed, this is something that is developed in WACU as well as in N11 where the ruling class is described as living in abundance. They own buildings that they do not even live in; materialism, consumption and excessiveness are themes of prime importance in N11.
Hedonism and the quest for pleasure are also conveyed through the rich trying to abuse the poor. There are examples of attempted rapes in both novels (the accountant tries to rape Rachel in N11and a Winshaw assaults Phoebe in WACU ). Both novels draw stark contrasts between the privileges of the ruling class and the shabby existence of the working class. This social stratification runs the novels. Like many dystopias, violence is also prevalent, in the form of austere reforms, insults, war or sexual assaults. Family is also a social institution that is shaken. The family of Michael is not that present when he is in trouble; the young author is overwhelmed with loneliness. The descriptions of characters alone are brimming in the novels and tend to confirm that family is an institution on the wane. Moreover, the end of N11is quite dystopian since it draws a futurist vision ofLondon colonized by the rich and anti-austerity protests on the way.
Another characteristic of N11, which makes it look dystopian, is when the participants of a TV reality show are sent on an idyllic and wild island, a place recalling William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. On this Island, the weak like Val ends up undervalued, there is a form of social hierarchywhere the strongest and the most beautiful are praised. The social system in which is set Val looks to emphasize animalistic behaviors. It looks as if the contestants had lost the meaning of civilization since they adopt an animal status. The violence of this social system is amplified by the harsh comments of people commenting the game onsocial networks. Still in N11, the novel suggests a decline of social and human values since they behave brutally, in an animalistic way. There is a scatological example that is symptomatic of this decline in humanity when Val is forced to take partin a humiliating game, consisting in eating an animal defecating in her mouth. This example represents the dulling of people’s minds: “And then Val thought, Oh my God, have I killed it?, but this thought only lasted for a second or two because then she felt something in her mouth, something liquid, and a taste – Christ – a taste fouler and more viler than anything else she had ever tasted or imagined tasting, and she realized that the stick insect was shitting in her mouth, literally shitting itself with fear” (104).
Still in N11, the way Coe presents the direction that the NHS is taking and thus the plot looks dystopian. The NHS will resemble a service where life is considered as a commodity and care extremely expensive like “cetuximab” for Rachel’s grandfather who suffers from cancer (282).Coe pushes the criticism to its paroxysm when the doctor explains Laura what are ICER and QALY: “An ICER […] is the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of a therapy. A QALY is a quality-adjusted life-year. A service like the NHS has to keep a very close eye on its costs. To put it bluntly, not every year of human is valued as highly as every other” (283).

Present Versus Past

When the Past does not Pass…

Guignery posits that Coe refers to the past without any nostalgia, which is to be put in perspective (17). In some articles, Coe depicts Britain in the 1970s as “a dismal and stagnant place where the unions were perpetually involved in bitter and increasingly violent confrontations with the representatives of capital, a shabby country with a failing economy, obsessed with memories of its former Imperial glory, taking refuge in tradition and outdated ritual in an attempt to forget its contemporary problems” (18). Even though Coe’s own point of view on the past seems to lack clarity and consistency, this notion plays a major role in his fiction. In an interview, Coe describes the 1980s as “vibrant, energetic, ruthless, dynamic” (18). However, in WACU , when Michael refers to the past, the 1980s, his words turning into authorial comments are bitter: “The 1980s weren’t a good timefor me on the whole. I suppose they weren’t for a lot of people” (102). Indeed, in many passages of WACU , the past is haunting. For instance, the whole novel portrays Michael who is obsessed with the memory of the film What a Carve up!that his mother interrupted when he was nine yearsold. As evoked in the first quote of this subpart, the past tracks people but people also try to reach it as though it was a way to escape the present and to hide behind the “curtain” of denial.
The past actually promotes escapism from reality such as the act of writing or reading fiction, thus allowing a form of catharsis. This may be correlated with Coe’s saying that readers enjoy novels, in the 1970s, for their “good-old escapism” in a period when “Britain’s experiment with socialism descendedinto chaos, and the dampening realities of the Thatcher revolution started to sink in, the nation was beginning to take refuge in nostalgic fantasies of elegance and privilege” (Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements 1796).
The past is also tackled in N11, no wonder that a chapter is entitled The Comebackand deals with a “has-been” singer, Val. It is also a notion associated with obsession and political nostalgia as in WACU . Coe describes a past that no longer exists: “A long time before you were born. The culture was different back then. Very different” (176). In The Crystal Garden , Laura is worried about the idea that her son would get obsessed with the past like his deceased father. She hopes that her son will be obsessed with “something other than the past”; she says “like a lot of people, Roger was convinced – even if he never really admitted it, even to himself – that life was better, simpler, easier, in the past. When he was growing up. It wasn’t just a hankering for childhood. It was bigger than that. It was to do with what the country was like – or what he thought it had been like – in the sixties and seventies” (176).
This political nostalgia is much more developed a few lines later: “For Roger, it was about welfarism, and having a safety net, and aboveall…not being so weighed down by choiceall the time, I suppose. He hated choice […] a time when we trusted the people in power, and their side of the deal was treat us… not like children exactly, but like people who needed to be looked after now and again” (177). These lines directed towards the past, towards a political era that disempowered people, reinforce Coe’s distance with the political present and convey an atmosphere of disillusion and disenchantment. The refusal of choice concurs with Coe’s promotion of the alternative, a motif that shall be developed. Reading some passages of N11, Coe’s reference to the past is quite slippery since he may promote passivity and the idea that politics should not be the responsibility of people, even a form of oligarchy. He writes about Roger: “The whole thing that defined that situation, and the whole beauty of it, as far as he was concerned, was passivity. Other people where making choices for him. People he trusted. He loved that. He loved theidea of trusting people to make decisions on his behalf” (176). As in WACU , the past is also referred to as something haunting in N11: “This vision cannot have been anything but a memory, come back to haunt me, and that’s why I’ve decided to revisit that memory now, to see what I can learn from it, to understand the message it holds” (319). This personified past seems to merge into memory, which is different in terms of objectivity. The past and the memory – two different and independent notions – are blurred as if characters confused both. These reflections on the past concurwith Hutcheon who argues that postmodernist novels depict biased portraits of history (Hutcheon 146). WACU and N11 are therefore “historiographic metafictions” (146) that constantly offer partial and oriented discourses on the past, through memory and visions. For instance, Michael makes no secret about his often anti-conservative and pro-labor likings (273).
In N11, Rachel’s grandfather clearly shows his sympathy for conservative policies or for the Daily Telegraph, a right-wing newspaper (24).
Even though, some academics, and even Coe himself, portray the past as a matter of obsession, some characters would tend to glorify it and bring a nostalgic dimension to it. The reference to the past is thus more complex than it seems.

Coe’s and the Immediacy: Current Society Issues

Coe acknowledges that his novels examine contemporary issues. He explains: “I realized at that point that I had been taking myself far too seriously. As for addressing contemporary politics in a novel – well, that’s always difficult, but no more so in Britain than in any other country. I wouldn’t have thought” (Moseley 43).
Florence Noiville praises Coe’s “fashion of anchoring his universal truths in the immediacy of contemporary society” (298). Guignery distinguishes “two trends in contemporary British fiction: one toward retro-Victorian fiction and pastiche, and another resolutely anchored in the present, dealing with topical issues, Coe belonging to the latter” (Guignery 15). I would say he belongs to both. In the 1980s and 1990s, the success of novels such as Rose Tremain’s Restoration(1989) and A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) led to the idea that the British novel had to deal with historical pastiche and disinterest for contemporary British life. There was a fixation almost obsession on the past that was epitomized by the 2001 Booker Prize longlist on which only three books were set in contemporary Britain. As a consequence, Coe decidedto write a book anchored in the present dealing with the Thatcher era “a large-scale panoramic representation of what Britain looked like at that particular moment” (Guignery 15). It is clear that Coe wants to anchor his work in the present. For Guignery, the result was WACU , a book revealing Coe’s skills to anchor “his universal truths in the immediacy of contemporary society”, to express “the great and the small, the destiny of nations and the heartbeats of beings” (Guignery 15).
For Guignery, “Coe’s work provides the reader withsnapshots of the present and the recent past without succumbing to a kind ofnostalgia” (17), something put into perspective above. For Richard Bradford, Coe tackles the issue of contemporaneity, “the questions of how the novelist is expected to deal with contemporaneity” (Guignery 17). For Tim Adams, “only a handful of significant English novels have responded directly to the monumental changes in the society of our times”. Coe is the second author, after Martin Amis’s Money in 1984, contrary to the authors of the 1990s who tend to focus on the past disconnecting their production from the here and now.
Coe’s work deals with current society issues and tries to capture a specific period and place: the Thatcher Era or the period ofausterity. Both novels were written in a contemporary framework. WACU and N11are set in contemporary Britain and evoke events in the past. WACU focuses on the 1980s and the 1990s, the Thatcher era, and relates events dating back to the 1940s, with the Second World War. N11is set in the 2010s and alludes to events dating back to 1999(from 1999 to 2015). Coe intends to connect the here and now with the past through repeated back and forth motions in time – prolepses, analepses. Time seems difficult to grasp and complicate the temporal structure of the novels and narration, creating a circular movement and an impression of blurring. Doing so Coe transports thereader and avoids developing his story. He deconstructs narration by skipping chronological steps. It is a whole revaluation of time and it gives the impression that the narrator and the author are struggling with time to tell their stories. Connecting the past and the present, Coe’s work shows that politics as his work is the result of continuity, the present being the result of the past. However, Coe’s novels deal with stories where there is no time continuity, time and historical periods becoming difficult to categorize. Indeed, N11’s plot is set in a very contemporary context sinceit deals with the latest means of communication and their profusion: “Nowadays, when it came to ways of keeping in touch, she […] and Rachel were spoiled for choice: they emailed and texted, and they talked on Facebook and WhatsApp. In the last few weeks, they’d even started using a newly launched app called Snapchat” (75). There are many themes that are issues belonging to nowadays such as foreign immigration, in N11, when immigrants from China are compared to “slaves”or with the story of Lu, the Chinese immigrant (60). Rachel, referring to TV, highlights their exploitation: “I saw this programme on the television the other night, I explained. Apparently there are slaves in England. Real slaves. Most of them come here from other countries and they have to work, like, twenty-four hours every day andif they try to run away they get beaten up or attacked by dogs” (60). Money and unemployment are also frequent issues at the core of the family: “Ok. Depressed about work, like everyone else” (75). Coe also lampoons the media’s hardness since they appear very judgmental, especially when they deal with Val’s presence in the TV reality show: “SHE’S A NONENTITY – GET HER OUT OF THERE was a typical headline […] Who the hell is Val Doubleday?” (98). To this violence is added the severity of people on social networks who seem to shirk their responsibility when they insult her – “ugly”, “shite”, “witch”, “cunt”, “bitch” (99).

Politics and Humor

Coe, the Humorous Satirist for All?

Coe has always been referred to as a satirist taking as models Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and Henry Fielding. Coe wrote about Gulliver’s Travelsin an essay in 2007 and adapted it as a children’s book in 2011 under the title The Story of Gulliver. Coe is an admirer of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels for its “concentrated and calculated intensification of satiric outrage” (Guignery 24), a satirical novel written “to vex the world, rather than to divert it” (24). According to Guignery, satire is different from humor since the former is “endowed with a moral purpose” (24), promoting a better world. The characteristic of Coe’s satire is that it is “more ethical than moralizing because it appeals the reader’s empathy” (24). For Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism , “two things are essential to satire; one is wit of humor founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, the other is an object of attack” (224).
In Coe’s fiction and especially in WACU , which according to Coe, is “the only genuinely satirical book” he has ever written, “allkinds of domains of contemporary life are subjected to the irreverent gaze of satire, be it the world of advertisement, new technology, educational reforms, the academic microcosm, the press, television, private enterprise, Thatcherism, New Labor, investment banking, the National Health Service or food production” (25). Yet, pondering on WACU , Coe finds the novel “preachy” (Guignery 25), something that he tries toavoid now and developed in his Phd thesis on Fielding’s Tom Jones. Coe notes that the problem of contemporary satire is that it only aims at “preach[ing] the converted” (25). He also rues a quite contradictory phenomenon, the profusion of political satire alongside the lack of political opposition in modern Britain (25). This is not only political evils that Coe depicts in his novels but also their normalizationsin the British psyche and political landscape that he emphasizes. To quote Paul Gilroy, “Coe’s refined sense of the absurdity of contemporary political culture is attuned to the possibility that in Britain greed and selfishness have been normalized to such an extent that satire becomes effectively impossible” (198). Thus, satire becomesineffective, having no impact on people.
A central characteristic of Coe’s work is his commitment to humor and satire, and combining each other. Coe aims at being a bringer of laughter. Coe notes that “the need for laughter is universal and absolute” (Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements 3422) and that laughter, recalling his childhood, is “something that drew people together…something shared. It forged bonds of sympathy between people, among friends and among families” (3422). He remembers that his first ambition was “to become a television comedian” and then “a writer whose words would make people laugh”. Becoming aware that different types of laughter exist: “melancholy laughter, mad laughter, despairing laughter, angry laughter”, he realized that “laughter itself could be a weapon in the battle against injustice” (3434). Michael, in a metafictional remark that encapsulates Coe’s novel and typical of his combination of laughter and outrage, declares: “We stand badly in need of novels, after all, which show an understanding of the ideological hijack which has taken place so recently in this country, which can see its consequence in human terms and show that appropriate response lies not merely in sorrow and anger but inmad, incredulous laughter” (277). Indeed, Coe excels in burlesque dialogues and situations making one of the best representative of British humor in line with EvelynWaugh, Wilde, Lodge, Sharpe… Among the most comical scenes in WACU , one can recall the meeting with Findlay, the spontaneous erection in the tube against an oaf while he is dreaming about Katleen Turner, in a black humor even sarcastic theseries of problems and resolutions of Dorothy or the interview for Hilary’s maternity.In fact, his plots oscillate between the Boulevard comedy and the B movie. Coe has always made efforts to reconcile high and low culture so as to make his work the most popular possible, hence the use and combination of different forms of art. Coe posits that the satirical British sitcom Yes Minister (BBC Television, 1980-84) was “a source of inspiration” (Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements 3192) for WACU alongside the satirical puppet show Spitting Image(ITV, 1984 – 96) and the early 1960s comedy stage revue Beyond the Fringeregarded as seminal to the rise of satirical comedy in Britain. Writing WACU , Coe wanted to represent the atmosphere of the 1980s by “tap[ping] into the energy and unpretentiousness of British popular culture” (Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements 3192). In WACU and N11, the presence of television that he considers as the main source of information, is hardly arbitrary. In WACU , a TV producer praises the role and impact of television stating it “is one the fibers that hold the country together. It collapses class distinctions and helps create a sense of national identity” (68). This quote will be ironically taken up by Hilary Winshaw, adding “And that’s definitely a tradition I hope to encourage and foster” (70). For Guignery, Coe questions “the supposedly egalitarian and humanist ambition of television” (Guignery 72). What is interesting to point out is that Coe has also tried to avoid irony “that baneful, ubiquitous, superior mindset which has gripped so many people in the post-Thatcher era” (Guignery 24). This intention shows that some tones may have a social value and tend to classify people. Seen like that, irony appears to be a tone dividing people.

When “Britain is in Danger of Sinking Giggling intothe Sea”

First and foremost, as aforementioned, humor plays a seminal role in Coe’s fiction. Coe, himself, said that he is “not interested in non-comic writing” (Moseley 47). Mellet, quoting Northorp Frye, recalls the central place of humor in any literary satire: “Deux éléments, donc, sont essentiels à la satire: l’esprit ou l’humour qui repose sur l’imagination et le sens du grotesque ou de l’absurde, et une cible à attaquer. L’attaque sans l’humour, ou une pure dénonciation, constitue l’une des frontières de la satire” (33). Mellet also recalls the Latin etymon of satire , which is satira meaning mixture and thus echoing the idea of blurring developed all along this dissertation. This first meaning goes back to the Latin satire consisting in a mixture of genres and forms. As Moseley so rightly points out, Coe excels at combining comedy and rage (6). Indeed, humor and thus laughter is a means for Coe to deliver a message, to lampoon society but also to question the role and the consequences of laughter itself.
Coe, a great admirer of David Nobbs, found at the age of 15 years old was struck by the collision of “high seriousness and low comedy” (Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements 1655). In his thesis dissertation, Coe already posits that satire has become innocuous and self-defeating as it might lead to a “confortable feeling (laughter)” (Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements 3458). In 2013, Coe determined “a growing disillusionment with the role played by laughter in the national political discourse” and put forward that “Britain’s much-vaunted tradition of political satire was itself an obstruction to real social change, since it diverted everyone’s contrarian impulses into harmless laughter” (1586). Coe even argues that “laughter is just ineffectual as a form of protest but…it actually replaces protest” and turned into a “substitute for thought rather than its conduit” (3587). Coe, referring to Peter Cook, argues that “Britain is sinking giggling into sea” (3527) and that laughterdoes not reverse the established order but preserve it since it is a “unifying, not a dividing force”, “bring[ing] us comfort, and draw[ing] us into a circle of closeness with our fellow human beings” (346). Satire, therefore, slays action and promotescompliance even a form of political and social paralysis. For Coe, satire is “one of the most powerful weapons we have for preserving the status quo” (3456). “Satire, therefore, “suppresses political anger rather than stoking it up. Political energies whichmight otherwise be translated into action are instead channeled into comedy and released – dissipated – in form of laughter”. According to Guignery, this disappointment accounts for the fact that Coe, after WACU , turned into a “more gentle form of humor … tingedwith melancholy”.

The “Coesian” Position…

The In-between, the Lack of Political Positioning and Indeterminacy

Henry Sutton, in 2003, regretted the lack of “gritty, politically engaged novels”, putting the emphasis that “just two novelsreally stand out as having much of value to say about Britain in the 1980s and early 1990s” (13) referring to Martin Amis’s Money and Coe’s WACU . He stated that WACU “was probably more overtly political in its wicked dissection of the Thatcher-inspired me, me, me generation and a group of toffs long past their sell-by-date” (16).
If one reads Linda Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism , Coe’s oeuvre, which is considered as postmodern, is therefore political. She writes in The Politics of Postmodernism: “L’art postmoderne ne peut qu’être politique, du moins en ce que ses représentations, ses images et ses histoires, ne sont jamais neutres, quand bien même elles paraissent “esthétisées” dans une autoréflexivité parodique” (3). Therefore, by suggesting biased representations, postmodern esthetics is political, despite being esthetic.
Regarding political commitment, Coe seems to be confident. He explained: “I began to work on the novel in 1990, at the far end of Thatcher years, when I was 29 years old and flushed with political and literary certainties. The most fixed of these certainties was my anti-Thatcherism…I wanted to express this pervasive sense of unease and betrayal, while somehow writing a novel that consisted of more than just liberal hand-wringing. One way of doing this. I thought, might be to try to tap into the energy and unpretentiousness of British popular culture – comedy in particular” (Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements3180). However, reading Coe, one may wonder where to assess the political degree of his novels and where to put the slider on a political ladder. His work raises the question of how a novel should be political.
Guignery develops the fact that Coe’s novels do not only talk about contemporary Britain but also “firmly engages with the political, social and economic failings of the contemporary world” (18). In his essay “Outside the Whale” (1984), Salman Rushdie emphasizes the political dimension of any work of art: “works of art, even works of entertainment, do not come into being in a social and political vacuum…the way they operate in a society cannot be separated from politics” (92).
He also insists on “a genuine need for political fiction”: “it becomes necessary and even exhilarating, to grapple with the special problems created by the incorporation of political material” (100).
As for Coe, his novels are political as he asserts“all story telling is political, being an attempt to control and influence the imaginative life of another person for a period of time” (Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements 2631). In his PhD thesis on Henry Fielding, he compares Tom Jones (1749) as a “political novel” as Fielding “seizes on the form’s potential for enacting change in narrative terms and for provoking it in the reader” (235). Guignery argues that Coe is interested in analyzing “one of the smallest political units” (19), that isto say – the family – and the political dynamic between parents and children. His writing is thus politically engaged with the society it intends to dissect and its relationship to individuals. In Coe’s words, “the theme is always the relationship between individuals and larger social movements” (in Murphy) and the main goal of what hecalls political novels is “to show people trying to get on with small, blameless lives without being flattened by the juggernaut of historical events over which theyhave no control” (in Murphy).

Table des matières
Introduction 
I. Satire, Engagement and Humor in Coe’s Novels
1. Coe as a Political Satirist
a. Coe’s Background and Influence
b. WACU : an Acrid Criticism of Thatcherism
c. N11: A Dark Portrait of Blairism and Cameronism in theSame Vein as WACU ?
2. Present Versus Past
a. When the Past does not Pass
b. Coe’s and the Immediacy: Current Society Issues
3. Politics and Humor
a. Coe, the Humorous Satirist for All?
b. When “Britain is in Danger of Sinking Giggling into the Sea”
4. The “Coesian” Position
a. The In-between, the Lack of Political Positioning and Indeterminacy
b. A Real Protest to Overturn the Status Quo or a Bowdlerized Satire?
II. Postmodernist Aesthetics and the Issue of Label
1. The Usual Recipe of Postmodernism with Post-Postmod ern Sprinkles
a. The Continuous Intermingling of Genres
b. The Collage and Patchwork
c. Post-Postmodernist Sprinkles ?
2. The Parody of the Parody of Parody?
a. The Gothic Novel and its Parody
b. From a Parody of a Detective Novel to an Academic Detective Novel
3. An Antagonistic Whirl of Magic, Realism and Tragedy
a. The Condition of England Novel and the Dickensian Dimension
b. A Tragic Story?
c. A Fantasy Novel Tinged with Magical Realism
d. A Swerve to Dirty Realism?
III. The Blurring of Writing and Writing the Blurring 
1. The Blurring of History and Story
a. Macro-Narration Versus Micro-Narration
b. The Autobiographical: Coe himself in the Novel
c. The Artist or Would-be Artist: Authorial Self-Reflexivity
2. The Blurring of Arts
a. The Picture, the Instant and the Freeze-Frame
b. An Almodavarian Writing and Aesthetic
c. The Mirror and the Dream: Coctalian Devices to Image Coe’s Imagination
3. An “Eye” for an “I” and a “Voice” for a “character” ?
a. The Blurring of Narrative Voice(s)
b. The Eye(s) and the Spectator(s)
Conclusion
BIBLIOGRAPHY

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