Darie Bianca Georgiana

CCB, anul I

DECONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY
IN
IAIN BANKS’ THE WASP FACTORY

According to The Free Dictionary by Farlex, deconstruction refers to ‘a philosophical

movement and theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumption about certainty,
identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate
how statements about any text subvert their own meanings.’ This concept was coined by the
French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, in the second half of the 20th
century, who focused on semiotics and the interplay between language and the construction of
meaning, also identifying the hierarchical dualisms, such as male/female, reality/appearance.
Deconstruction is present in Iain Banks’ novel, The Wasp Factory, even from the title.
According to The Free Dictionary by Farlex, WASP means also a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant,
‘a member of the privileged, established white upper middle class in the U.S.’ This novel deals
with the longstanding essentialist-constructionist debate whether man and woman are born or
made. The author deconstructs the traditional gender formations through Frank Cauldhame, one
of the central figures in the novel and also the narrator. The reader is exposed to a series of
grotesque events, bizarre and distorted, which create, however, an intimate atmosphere of
confessions. Most probable, Iain Banks choose to tell the story from the perspective of a
madman in order to foster sympathy. Frank is a person with a keen sense of inferiority. He was
abandoned by his mother and his only friend is a dwarf, Jamie. He spends most of his time taking
care of some weapons, building dams and making rituals. He created a mechanism from a clock
face and entitled it ‘the wasp factory’. Each hour led to a ritual of death for the wasp he captured
and entrapped in the machinery, this having a prophetic role for him. Undoubtedly, Frank can be
considered a psychopath also because in his childhood he killed three of his relatives. Frank
struggles with identity issues- born female, but masculinised due to the experiment of his father,
Angus, a renegade doctor of biochemistry who manipulated his son, keeping him in virtual
isolation. This experiment fails and Frank’s identity is deconstructed when he discovers the
truth- that s/he is not a male mutilated by a dog, but a female.
The ending of the novel is simplistic, however the reader finds himself in a state of
confusion and ambiguity when Frank changes his sex becoming Frances. It is problematic to
make classifications when it comes to submitting to social and cultural norms. Frank is both man
and woman in one body and his metamorphosis is highly metaphorical. Through this fusion of
binaries and deconstruction of identity, Iain Banks tries to demolish the preconceived idea that
the gender system dictates femininity and masculinity. However, when the gender of a person
moulds his reality, conformity seems to be the only solution.

DECONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY
IN
ANGELA CARTER’S WISE CHILDREN

Deconstruction has been seen as one of the most complex critical theories. Since
language is characterized by instability, extracting a singular, clear, univocal meaning from a text
is impossible. There is a multiplicity of meanings often competing together making any reader
undecidable. Exploding and deconstructing the binary showed how one term contains the other
or how the relationship between the two terms is not one of opposition, but of symbiosis.
Wise Children, an effervescent family saga, was written in the late years of the 20th
century and belongs to the Postmodern movement, which is not totally opposed to its
predecessor, but rather different in many aspects. While in Modernism there is a circular pattern
and a feeling of enclosure, Postmodernism is marked by fragmentation and multiple identities.
Also, there are multiple perspectives and many realities, which overlap, but without having a
clear distinction. If Modernism was characterized by an intimate duration and a reality which
was contracted or dilated, in Postmodernism time is relative, being a constant play between
present and past. Predictability diminishes and the instant is never present. Postmodernism has
fluid boundaries, being a mixture of subgenres, all with generic features. However, there is no
dominant genre, in other words it is everything and nothing, its generic mark being
deconstruction. In this period emerges the idea of multiple truths, because this notion is no
longer taken as being absolute, but rather relative.
 The essence in the literature of the mid to late 20th century is the description of the
metadouble- the impossibility to say something is equal to something else, the novels being
based on this perpetual inconsistency. There is a sort of degree of fragmentation and reiteration
of certain motifs, mechanisms and characters that confuses things in the text and makes identity
heterogeneous. In Angela Carter’s last novel, Wise Children, it is impossible to say who the
narrator is: Nora or Dora, this being troubling for the mind of the reader. They differ by the
nature of a sound, and because of this sign the reader can differ meaning. The identical twins
musical hall performers are the same and yet different. They have their periods at the same time,
but one lost virginity earlier than the other. Dora and Nora are not the only twins in the novel,
there are other five pairs. Identity is never identical and the notion of sameness disappears. The
character is no longer unique and unitary, but rather characterized by multi-phrenia, a term first
used by Kenneth Gergen in 1991. Subjectivity is in the plural and centrality disappears. The
character is the sum of multiple personalities that are dispersed throughout the literary text. The
postmodern individual does not have any restraints; he can change and be whoever he wants. He
does not have a core sense of self, due to social saturation, represented by the multiple social
experiences he is exposed to. There is no borderline between the inner and the public.
The text has neither chronological, nor hereditary linearity. All the stable positions are
interchangeable and all marks of identity are fluid. There is a chaos of social relations; hereditary
marks are like a game, Wise Children being marked by a general state of confusion caused by the
uncertain parentage. The pivotal place of the father is subverted- Melchior Hazard, the natural
father of the Nora and Dora refuses to acknowledge them. His twin brother, Peregrine Hazard,
raises the girls and is believed to be their legal father. One of the dominant themes in the novel is
illegitimacy, the twins Nora and Dora, who were “born out of the wedlock”, struggled with this
complex of inferiority. Angela Carter sheds light to this aspect, questioning whether it is a matter
of reality, or rather of perception, since characters who have a legitimate origin behave immoral,
like Saskia Hazard, the legal daughter of Melchior, who has an affair with Tristram, her half-
brother.
Perception deforms reality and reiterations always involve differences. A symbol does
not symbolize anymore, only stands itself as a sign, but without referential potential. In
Postmodernism nothing is stable. It is present the idea of the mirror which does not reflect, or the
idea of the river, analyzed by the critic Charles Caramello. We assume the fact of reflection, but
there is no reflection. Angela Carter focused on appearances and the reader encounters in her
novel numerous insignificant details (for example what the characters were wearing), this being a
manifesto of realism. The veil is mentioned multiple times- it conceals the identity of the body,
but it reveals because of the one wears it obscures and alludes at the same time. Make-up has the
same effect- to reveal and to hide at the same time, being seen as something theatrical, belonging
to a performance, but the actor is the prototype of identity.
The moral law which Immanuel Kant spoke about is totally absent in Wise Children. The
incest is transgressed, the characters having no regrets for doing abnormal things: sexual relation
between relatives- Saskia and Tristram-, the share of partners- the twins Melchior and Peregrine
who had affairs with Daisy Duck and Lady A, the other pair of twins, Dora and Nora, who slept
with Blond Tenor-. However, the characters are not grouse, but they are metaphors for
something. The postmodern authors de-formed the double in order to decentre cultural patterns,
this awareness of the ontological instability queering the rules of the world and the multiple
selves. The matter of the double is meant to reveal identity, because in Postmodernism meanings
are obscured and confused.
Bibliography:
deconstruction. (n.d.) American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition.
(2011). Retrieved December 29 2017 from https://www.thefreedictionary.com/deconstruction