Heritage and the Legacy of the Past in Contemporary Britain

362 Pages·2017·2.13 MB·English

by  Ryan Trimm

Heritage and the Legacy of the Past
in Contemporary Britain
Bringing together heritage studies and literary studies, this book
examines heritage as a ubiquitous trope in contemporary Britain, a
seemingly inescapable figure for relations to the past. Inheritance has
been an important metaphor for characterizing cultural and political
traditions since the 1970s, but one criticized for its conservatism and
apparent disinheritance of “new” Britons. Engaging with contemporary
literary and cinematic texts, the book interrogates metaphoric reso-
nances: that bestowing past, receiving present, and transmitted bounty
are all singular and unified; that transmission between past and present
is smooth, despite heritage depending on death; that the past enjoins the
present to conserve its legacy into the future. However, heritage offers
an alternative to modern market-driven relations, transactions stressing
connection only through a momentary exchange, for bequest resembles
gift-giving and connects past to present. Consequently, heritage con-
tains competing impulses, subtexts largely unexplored given the trope’s
lapse into cliché. The volume charts how these resonances developed, as
well as charting more contemporary aspects of heritage: as postmodern
image, tourist industry, historic environment, and metaculture. These
dimensions develop the trope, moving it from singular focus on conti-
nuity with the past to one more oriented around different lines of rela-
tion between past, present, and future. Heritage as a trope is explored
through a wide range of texts: core accounts of political theory (Locke
and Burke); seminal documents within historic conservation; pheno-
menology and poststructuralism; film and television (Merchant-Ivory,
Downton Abbey); and a broad range of contemporary fiction from
novelists including Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, Hilary Mantel, Sarah
Waters, Alan Hollinghurst, Peter Ackroyd, and Helen Oyeyemi.
Ryan Trimm is Professor of English and Film Media at the University of
Rhode Island, USA.
Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.
71 Hospitality in American Literature and Culture
Spaces, Bodies, Borders
Ana Mª Manzanas Calvo and Jesús Benito Sánchez
72 Transcultural Poetics and the Concept of the Poet
From Philip Sidney to T.S. Eliot
Ranjan Ghosh
73 Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities
Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories
Roger Whitson
74 Food and Foodways in African Narratives
Community, Culture, and Heritage
Jonathan Bishop Highfield
75 The Phenomenology of Autobiography
Making it Real
Arnaud Schmitt
76 The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism in Public Discourse,
Literature, and Film
Narrating Terror
Michael C. Frank
77 The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture
Edited by Alfred Bendixen and Olivia Carr Edenfield
78 Motherhood in Literature and Culture
Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Europe
Edited by Victoria Browne, Adalgisa Giorgio, Emily Jeremiah,
Abigal Lee Six, and Gill Rye
79 Heritage and the Legacy of the Past in Contemporary Britain
Ryan Trimm
Heritage and the Legacy
of the Past in Contemporary
Britain
Ryan Trimm
First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of Ryan Trimm to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Trimm, Ryan S. author. Heritage and the legacy of the past in
contemporary Britain / by Ryan Trimm.
pages cm.—(Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on
literature; 79) Includes bibliographical references and index.
Historical fiction, English—History and criticism. English
fiction—20th century—History and criticism. English fiction—
21st century—History and criticism. History in literature.
History on television—Great Britain. Cultural property—Great
Britain. Heritage preservation—Great Britain.
PR888.H5 T85 2017
823/.91409
2017017913
ISBN: 978-1-138-28559-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-19218-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
Contents
Preface vii
1 Introduction: “In a Wondrous Age” 1
2 Heritage’s Patina: Troping Polity and Preservation 32
3 Heritage as Givenness: The Legacy of Phenomenology 64
4 Icon and Image: Heritage as Postmodern Spectacle 94
5 Legacy Visions: The Image of Heritage Cinema
in Brideshead Revisited, The Remains of the Day
and Downton Abbey 125
6 Enterprising Heritage: Industry, Tourism,
and Metaculture 155
7 Fictions of Industry, Tales of Culture 187
8 From Heritage to Historic Environment: Diversity
and Spatialized Inheritance in the New Labour Years 223
9 Haunting the Environment: Roots and Specters
in Smith, Mantel, and Oyeyemi 259
10 Conclusion 297
Bibliography 321
Index 343
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Preface
I labored so long on this project I feel I’ve inherited it from someone
else. In many ways I have, as the spur for the project began in what
seems long ago and far away. I grew up outside Birmingham, Alabama
during the 1970s and 1980s in the aftermath of the Civil Rights era
and I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with appeals to tradi-
tion and, even more, heritage. What lurked behind these words was an
appeal to some mythical Gone with the Wind-style antebellum South, a
scenario in striking contrast to what I saw around me: the pastoral imag-
ery at odds with a steel-making city forced into de-industrialization; the
white-washed nostalgia colliding with what I saw at school, where we all
stumbled through a world slowly and incompletely being remade after
the heroic struggles of the decade before my birth. The proffered ante-
bellum image appeared completely severed from the world I knew, and
I found no appeal in talk of its tradition nor did I feel any claim to this
purported legacy. Indeed, invocations of heritage made me bristle: I did
not locate myself amongst those who had an inheritance—such bequests
belonged to other classes. I questioned whether such an inheritance was
for me and could scarce conceal annoyance at the piety expressed in at-
tributing great worth to this past. At a stroke, something about the past
was deemed valuable—and seemingly put beyond question. As I lurched
through conflicting attitudes toward that past, I could not help but won-
der: what if I did not attribute the same worth to this purported legacy?
If it was indeed handed down to me, what if I did not want it? Did it still
transmit itself to me or would it stay unclaimed? Accepting the worth
and “possession” of this limited vision of a particular past appeared
bound with some collective identity with those around me (and, suppos-
edly, those who came before). If I questioned the “heritage” of the past,
was I no longer fully part of that group? Mulling over these quandaries,
I developed a sense of revulsion for the very word “heritage,” a charge
that has never fully dissipated.
In graduate school, contemporary Britain appealed for it seemed to
rhyme with the world in which I had grown up: a place that thought
itself historic and as possessing a wealth of traditions, and yet such talk
of the past contrasted with a present far more urban, industrialized,
viii Preface
and racially different than the proffered historical image. Here, too, the
clichéd image of the past was clashed with the actuality of the present—
and the word that still rang harshly in my ears held even more sway in
this new realm. Consequently, this entire project might be viewed as
a peculiar covert autobiography, an impersonal attempt to map out a
very personal reaction to a word or, rather, clichéd metaphor—and to
endeavor to think anew other ways of conceiving this figure. In what
follows, I work to manifest my suspicions of “heritage” and work to
repurpose the word, to complicate and fracture resonances within it.
However, as I dwelt far too long on the projects and articles that never
quite became this book, I grudgingly admitted the word I felt such dis-
taste for might be heard in a manner my teenage ears could not register.
I acknowledged the emotional tug of an implicit contract: remember and
honor the past, and perhaps in your turn you too will be recalled fondly.
And yet I could also see that not all inheritances are desired, that legacies
might sometimes be painful things.
This background frames and informs Heritage and the Legacy of
the Past. Invoking heritage manifests dissatisfaction with the present
and the active selection of a particular past as counterbalance. The
past several years, as I’ve completed and revised the book, have pro-
vided numerous reminders such legacies can undoubtedly possess ugly
racial resonances, that heritage can offer conservative stances both
culturally and politically. This stress on preserving what is already
established is further accentuated by the apparent temporal relation
suggested by heritage: what is purported to be inherited gestures to-
ward the past, positioned as antecedent, before the legatee. Moreover,
because heritage is an immense and unearned bounty, it appears as
a gift or bestowal. Heritage hints at the providential, a benefaction
whose immensity and value could only come from something almost
divine. Indeed, heritage in its contemporary British parlance encom-
passes the land, the coast, the flora and fauna populating them, as
well as built structures, cultural texts, objects, rituals, and practices;
when all these disparate items are enumerated as heritage, only an
immensity before and beyond time could seemingly allot them to the
present. Further, such a great gift forever puts the receiving present in
debt, one that must be repaid through careful stewardship and an eye
to the future. Heritage as givenness stresses the alterity of origin and
destination through its invocation of stewardship: as the gift or legacy
does not originate with us, it is never truly ours save in passing it along
ourselves. Givenness—and heritage—thus fully manifests a “keeping
while giving” logic: what is passed along is forever marked by the res-
onance of the original donor or benefactor who retains some residual
claim. This given legacy is likewise shaped by its destination to fu-
ture inheritors, prospective recipients whose coming reception likewise
guides the legacy or donation.
Preface ix
And yet such inheritances can also be seen to resonate with something
progressive. Even questions of entail hint not just at the past’s mort-
main but a radically fissured sense of time: the temporal fracturing of
an entail takes this inheritance—and the inheritor—out of the present
moment, for the given legacy is never fully contemporary with itself but
points backward and forward. Consequently, its temporality—and that
of the inheritor—is unsettled and multiform. Heritage renders the pres-
ent divided, transforms it into an uncertain passage between past and fu-
ture. Perhaps more importantly, heritage, like tradition, is a thoroughly
modern word in many ways: it presumes and presupposes a present of
transformation and upheaval against which it wishes to counterpose
something anchoring and stabilizing. Given a world increasingly struc-
tured and related by market and exchange mechanisms, heritage explic-
itly invokes alternative forms of acquisition and connection. Moreover,
if exchange relations envision the absolute possession of private prop-
erty, heritage offers us instead stewardship, trusts and bequests, a realm
of relations with objects and lands where we cannot view ourselves as
having absolute disposition of the legacy, for others too have a claim (or
a greater claim) to what is temporarily in our hands. Against the ab-
solute presentism of exchange, heritage offers relations where past and
future are prominent stakeholders: if exchange involves only temporary
relations of a moment, an emphasis on the now, heritage involves an irre-
versible and inescapable relation with the past. Heritage might be seen as
possessing different points of emphasis: seen from the perspective of the
past connecting to the present, the past appears to direct and control the
scene; it is the active agent, passing down something it wishes to leave
and selecting (and thus excluding all others) those whom it wishes to fig-
ure as legatees. However, seen from the present, a heritage is something
claimed, an action locating agency with the present, not only toward
the past but also in the way it seizes hold of that legacy and in how the
present views itself in this claiming. From the perspective of the legator,
heritage is keeping-while-giving. From the point of view of the legatee,
it is having without fully possessing, an exappropriation (as Jacques
Derrida terms it), a double movement to take over something accom-
panied by the failure to do so fully. And perspectives of the future and
inheritors-to-come might be projected, a temporal conjuring simultane-
ously allowing continuity beyond death and a sense of our own passing.
Heritage is a ubiquitous cliché, particularly in Britain, and yet I am
not aware of any sustained interrogation of what work is done by this
trope when the present describes vestiges from the past as something
inherited. Quite obviously, the past contains multitudes and nowhere did
it join together to decide to leave something to the present: there are no
instruments, legal or otherwise, left by the past to the present concerning
the disposition of all the natural and cultural items labeled as heritage.
Rather, the present projects this intention onto what it constructs as a