The Wake of Dispossession: Patrick Neate’s Jerusalem

• Main Author: Jean-Michel Ganteau
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2015-12-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: Judith Butler; E. M. Forster; Guillaume Le Blanc; Patrick Neate; dispossession; empowerment
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/2718

Patrick Neate’s disrupted narrative brings the condition-of-England novel up to date by analysing the effects of the Digital revolution on the nation and on the invisible, inarticulate masses. It is a satire as much as an elegy, and the two generic components merge to build up a contemporary state-of-the-nation narrative. Jerusalem is a study in vulnerability and dispossession, and this is what the article aims to demonstrate. To do so, it focuses on the issues of inarticulacy and invisibility as modalities of dispossession. It then moves on to show how the condition-of-Britain theme is taken up by analysing the singularity of a situation and setting it within a global and historical context. Jerusalem thus appears as a trauma narrative. The last part of the demonstration concentrates on the narrative apparatus separating all the better to connect, which is another way of voicing the novel’s ethics, before concluding on the notion of empowerment.