From Hanif Kureishi, 'Gabriel's Gift': Epigraphs 1.2 and 5.2 - Art, Imagination and Absence

Hanif Kureishi (born 1954) won international fame (and an Oscar nomination) as the author of the screenplay for the Stephen Frears film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), in which Londoners variously marginalized (by ethnicity, class, sexual orientation...) meet, clash, love and, for the most part, find mutual understanding--in Margaret Thatcher's England. I find the film as fresh and powerful (and funny) today as I did over 25 years ago.

Before Laundrette, Kureishi was already playwright-in-residence at the Royal Court Theatre, and his subsequent career has defied those who would pigeon-hole him as any one thing: novelist, short story writer, essayist, screenplay author or playwright. I drew two epigraphs for my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me from his fourth novel, Gabriel's Gift (2001; UK Kindle edition here, US paperback edition here). Like Laundrette and Kureishi's first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, Gift is a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of familial wrangling. Like Buddha, it features prominently a Bowie-like rock icon--in this fourth novel the father's former bandmate, who presents the 15-year-old Gabriel with a sketch that the boy, a budding artist, copies perfectly as the first step in a demonstration of the power of art to mend what's broken.

Accordingly, the two epigraphs we're talking about today resonate more optimistically in Gabriel's Gift itself than when they appear in the context (out of context) of A Kiss Before You Leave Me.

Epigraph 5.2: 'Art is what you do when other people leave the room' (from Gift, chapter 1). In Gabriel's Gift, this is the boy's recollection of a sentence heard on television the night before, now turned into a comforting accompaniment for the solitary creative process of an artist in the making. True, there have been traumatic departures from his household: his twin brother who died as a toddler, and his father, whom his mother has sent packing. But the emphasis in the sentence is on the rightness, the appropriateness of solitary artistic work, and in Kureishi's novel the power of art is, as we've said, fundamentally restorative.... In A Kiss Before You Leave Me, this epigraph introduces the section entitled 'Solo Show', which begins with an inventory of paintings done by Jack Emery in preparation for his first one-man show, but is also about departures affecting or involving him, dissolutions of ties, in both the past and the present, and, to some extent, about the reasons for those dissolutions: rightly or wrongly, art may seem to at least one character in A Kiss Before You Leave Me like what you can finally do when you've left the others behind.

Epigraph 1.2: '"What does an imagination do but see what isn't there?"' (from Gift, chapter 3). In Gabriel's Gift, rock icon Lester Jones is speaking to Gabriel, polymorphic icon to fledgeling artist, affirming the boy in his creative identity and reassuring him of the powerful value of his differentness. (It's a rare 'creative' who receives this message at the age of 15, but it's never too late to read this scene, in its entirety.) Where the question is inserted in A Kiss Before You Leave Me, however--as an epigraph to the first section, 'Seeing Someone'--the reader knows nothing of the 'art' plot and can associate the quotation only with the tortured power and play of the voyeuristic imagination as seen in the culmination of that section. (See the second half of my Sartre post of three days ago, and the earlier discussion of the lyrics of 'A Kiss to Build a Dream On'.)

Absence, separation and negativity come to the fore at these moments in A Kiss Before You Leave Me. They may well not be the dominant notes in the novel as a whole--but at these moments in particular the novel feels very different from Gabriel's Gift, which most readers would call Kureishi's sunniest work to date. It's all in the context.

In Context, Out of Context

It strikes me that we set great store by context. We believe we understand, in general and in specific cases, what (the) context is. Ignoring or forgetting or misunderstanding the context is always something other people do, not us. And one of our favorite ways of dismissing what is otherwise the most compelling evidence against us is to allege that it has been 'taken out of context'. Never mind that quotations by their very nature are detached from their original contexts. (We'll see something similar in the Kiss epigraph [2.1] from Burroughs: 'All pictures are faked.')

So you may well think less of me when I shine the spotlight, however briefly, on two sentences in my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me that run afoul of the conventions of context. I tweeted each of them recently, providing only the title of the novel and an ordering link--thus assuring that they would be read in a certain way, in a certain context, which is different from their original contexts in the novel.

Here are the two sentences, as they appear--in context--in Kiss.

'This wasn't a story about how things happened in the art world; it was a story, perhaps, about letting go' (chapter 9). The point of view is that of Mark, a journalist attempting to write honestly about changes in the life of an emerging painter who has cut his ties to certain parts of his previous life. Mark is justifying his failure to divulge his own role in the painter's early success (Mark provided the painter's introduction to the gallery that took him on); in fact, Mark's own detachment is compromised at best. (A more careful reading of the entire paragraph might focus on the words 'detachment', 'foreground' and 'background', and the problems they pose.)

'"My grandmother said it was really an American story"' (chapter 1). Jack Emery is explaining his need for someone to translate into English his grandmother's Paris diary, kept in French in the late 1920s; the imperative is one of the conditions posed by the grandmother herself before her death. Her family of origin was transplanted at least twice (from France to Quebec, from Quebec to the U.S.), as she subsequently was herself (to Paris and back); her words 'really an American story' may be puzzling until the reader knows much more about the eventual course of the grandmother's life and its possible significance for Jack.

You can see where this is going, especially if you've read the book. From the get-go, I wrote both sentences with the intent not only that they satisfy the immediate contextual needs of the passages in which they appear but also that they apply to the totality of the novel--that they suggest to the reader that A Kiss Before You Leave Me itself is more about 'letting go' than about 'how things happen in the art world'... and that it is 'really an American story'.

I've touched on some of the 'letting go' issues in a recent post about the title of the novel; readers may associate these issues with the final chapter and its playing off of 'letting go' against 'recovery'.

But it would be indiscreet to say much here about the Americanness of Kiss, except to predict that it may be clearer to international readers than to their American counterparts. In fact, this is how I sometimes explain my particular gratitude for international readers: among other things, they will be most able to read it as a novel 'about' the United States. They, precisely, may be the ones with the context in which to read it.