Image study and comparative imagology

In the age of interdisciplinarity, it is imagology-today potentially preceded by the attribute “literary”-which offers an answer to the question “what is European identity?” Imagology, or image studies, is not a new branch of comparative literature. However, we cannot call this field traditional because it is still in its formative stage, creating its own methodology receiving inspirations from sociology, psychology and cultural studies. Imagology investigates the reflection of a nation in another nation’s attitudes, something clearly delineable within the field of literature. The Ukrainian researcher Yulia Zaporozhchenko says that imagology consolidates the features of the national perception of other countries and vice versa. It reconstructs literary images of countries and explores the historical and traditional conditions of these images for the expansion of knowledge about “other” countries (Zaporozhchenko 2009: 34). To explore the concept of “Europe” it is necessary to take up each national conceptualization separately and then try to reconstruct it into one unique super-concept.

For a more profound result it is also important to consider the concept of “Europe” not only from the perspective of one national literature, but research into all its possible reflections, applying the same frame of methodology to a number of separate instances and after that compare all received knowledge in search of similarities and differences. That is why we have to enrich the methodology of image-studying with the approach of comparative studies. As a result we have what can be called comparative imagology, a study that researches into the literary images of foreign countries, societies and peoples.

When new geo-political borders are re-established, some literatures develop a new criterion–that of “Europeanness” which helps to reconstruct their self-identification with the illusion of being in contact with something beautiful and historically valuable. Imagology examines auto-images of nations and the attitude of these nations to other countries (hetero-images). Our research aims at trying to understand how separate countries perceive the image of Europe, a union of very different countries. We also study the way these national images of the concept influence their own culture. One could also analyze how the supra-governmental unit–the European Union–perceives each member state, but such an approach is not for literary scholars but a job for sociologists and political researchers. Another important question is whether an auto-image of Europe is feasible and this issue might become a task for future study.

Research questions

It is seemingly impossible to extract a single concept of “Europe” from literature. We can only compare these concepts within the limits of different national literatures, or even more within the limits of works of one writer. That means that the concept of “Europe” requires further features to be taken into consideration, such as national, historical, temporal and sometimes even personal contexts.

National literature often turns into an object of the other’s reception. That is why the label “traditions of the European novel” has arisen, when national achievements are compared with a “Western Canon”, as in Harold Bloom’s famous book (1994). I believe that each country has its own studies of national Europeanism and its own conceptions of a national tradition relating to the European novel.

3. The concept of “Europe”: variants of realization

We identify the concept of “Europe” with the idea of a single supra-cultural and supra-territorial abstract unit, though the boundaries are imaginary. For every writer and nation they are individuals who are exceptionally psychologically oriented. If we create a map how different writers understand the boundaries of Europe one vision would have to include conflict with the Other (other). We believe that the question of “Europeanness” should be examined in the context of different literatures. In that way we will be able to create a unified system of images. Such an approach would help us to understand the processes involved in the influence of the creation of different images. We should also step aside from stereotypes as well as anecdotic image-mirages during research.

3.1. A semantic analysis of “Europe”

The realization of the “European” concept can be divided into several groups:

1. Continental Europe or the “Old World”, which I call the West; countries in this block were among the founders of the European Union such as Germany, Italy and France.

2. Countries of Central Europe, to which Yuriy Andrukhovych adds one more toponimical attributive–“Central-Eastern” Europe. These include the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Romania and sometimes Germany. Ukrainian authors would like to see Ukraine in this group too.

3. Countries of Eastern Europe. These sometimes include the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Romania and, naturally, Ukraine and Belarus. Russia is sometimes added and sometimes omitted from this group.

4. The American view of Europe; this combines different views on Europe in different times of development discussed below.

5. A reflection of post-colonial literature.

6. A reflection of exile literature.

7. A reflection of other non-European countries

The concept of “European” in groups 1, 5, 6 and 7 has structures that are dependent on an individual writer’s experience, hence it is impossible to examine them as one cultural unit. Here the traditional nucleus of the concept is “My country”.

The concept of “European” within the second and the third group usually shares the following components:

1. “My country” with a special place for a small Motherland–a native city that took part in the forming of the author’s worldview–it is usually the nucleus.

2. Western Europe that does not want to accept my country.

3. Opposition-country (as a rule an imaginary enemy in the image of the aggressive East, which is trying to absorb “my country” with its unique but unprotected culture).

This kind of realization of the concept of “European” is represented in the works of Yuriy Andrukhovych, Milan Kundera, Andrzej Stasiuk, Manuela Gretkowska and others. These writers dwell on the motif of nostalgia (formerly having been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when it held its highest European status); it is nostalgia that has given birth to numerous millennial myths.

3.1.1. “Old Europe”

The concept of “Europe” in this group is both interesting and complicated, whereas these countries have never been in doubt on the subject of their Europeanness. Writers from old countries relatively seldom touch on this question because they feel that it is something innate. National feelings do not let British writers consider themselves to be a part of something else; for them Europe and being British are two completely different things. Lars Iyer, the British novelist and philosopher, equates Europe with Kafka:

Kafka was at least man of Europe, of old Europe. A Europe in crisis, but Europe nonetheless. And us? What does Europe mean to us? What could it ever mean? We’re lost in Europe, two apes, two fools, though one is more foolish than the other (Iyer 2011: 13).

Lars Iyer states that “Old Europe” is an oxymoron, because: “Europeans live in history as we do not” (ibidem: 13), so once again there is an emphasis that Britain is separate from Europe. Repeatedly, the motif of memory and museum appears in the context of Europe. To be European is to drink: “Morning to night he drinks like a European. Steadily. That’s the secret. You should watch the Poles, he says, they’re experts” (ibidem: 5). It is obvious that Europe is to be admired:

Suddenly, we are weary. Old Europe is immeasurably greater than us, we know that. Who hasn’t walked in these streets? What hasn’t happened here? European history flows through the city like a great river. And what of us, carried along like two turds in that river? […] and we dream for a moment, that we are real European intellectuals (ibidem: 14).

If Europe is Kafkaesque then Iyer’s concept of “Europe” is that of Central Europe.

The British novelist and literary researcher Malcolm Bradbury wrote about Central and Eastern Europe and sometimes even compared this space to “Western Europe.” His travelling experiences are reflected in Rates of Exchange, Why come to Slaka?, Doctor Criminale, To the Heritage and scripts for television series such as The Gravy Train Goes East and The Gravy Train Goes West. In Rates of Exchange he imagines an Eastern-European country, Slaka, which is nothing more than a collection of derisive and ethnocentric anecdotes and stereotypes about a Central European socialist country: spies, alcohol, danger, strong politics, the fear to speak freely, danger on every corner and a lack of traditional European (here you should read Western-European) culture. He even goes so far as to create a language for this imagined country in Why come to Slaka? Which contains a satirical mock-phrasebook with “useful expressions” dishing up crude humour such as “Pardon my mistake” as “pardi mi petti’pilloki”.

In Doctor Criminale, Europe is undergoing unification during the time directly following the fall of the Berlin wall; old Europe is building a new system, using all kinds of unfair tricks. Bradbury implements the idea of the duality of Eastern Europe, oscillating between the new market demands and national cultural tradition. Of course, there is a third side–of being post-colonial, post-socialistic, also reflected in the concept of “Europe under construction.” His heroes travel through different countries, Western as well as Eastern. He has not created a concept of a “united Europe” as much as emphasized uniting features traditionally associated with Western Europe such as culture, law, philosophy, literature and the attitude to freedom.

Central and Eastern Europe

In The Stolen West or The Tragedy of Central Europe (originally published in Czech as Únos západu aneb Tragédie střední Evropy in 1983) the Czecho-born novelist Milan Kundera who lives in exile in France has acknowledged that European history has been partly constructed by its Jewish minority making Jewry also a symbol of Europe before the Holocaust which swept the Jews off its map:

Indeed, no other part of the world has been so deeply marked by the influence of Jewish genius. Aliens everywhere and everywhere at home, lifted above national quarrels, the Jews in the twentieth century were the principal cosmopolitan, integrating element in Central Europe: they were its intellectual cement, a condensed version of its spirit, creators of its spiritual unity. That's why I love the Jewish heritage and cling to it with as much passion and nostalgia as though it were my own (Kundera translated into English in 1984:)

Kundera ponders whether Jerusalem constitutes the heart of Europe even though it is extremely distant from the continent. Certain of his motifs are connected with the freedom of expression, the Nazi Occupation and memory. Thus, Europe is once more considered a museum of memory which should be well secured because there is always someone who tries to destroy it or to steal it. In addition a European citizen for Kundera is someone who feels nostalgia for Europe because to remember means to exist. From his point of view the Austro-Hungarian Empire is a prototype of the European Union when all Europeans were integrated, small and big nations together. In contrast he sees the Russian Empire as the destroyer which wants to kill all his memories. For Central Europeans, “Europe” is not about geography, it is about being a spiritual concept synonymous to the “West”. They are ready to die for it, as long as they view it as of higher value than a single country.

He divides Europe into Western, Central and Eastern (while historically it used to be divided into two parts, Catholic and Orthodox); he wants his country (the Czech Republic) to be associated with the Western part, but he is a little offended by the lack of desire to notice his country. Nevertheless, we should pay attention to the time most of his works were written. During those times he considers Ukraine as fully absorbed by the aggressive East. He also expresses fear about living between Russia (in its contemporary variant the USSR) and Germany. He states that when someone is trying to take away or substitute a nation’s identity, that identity searches to find its way into culture.

Ukrainian writer Yuriy Andruchovych (2005) is also interested in the Austro-Hungarian past as an object of nostalgia and melancholia. He refuses to call his country “Eastern Europe” in favor of a more specific identification–“Central-Eastern Europe”. He wants to fence off his country from the East even with the help of toponomy. Speaking about the difference between Western and Central Eastern Europeans, he considers himself a real European. He adds to that the experience of an occupied European comparable to Kundera’s case. Europe is where you feel in Europe. The historical irony of Central Europe is that it is destined to stand “between” Russia and Germany. Andruchovych thanks God that if something goes wrong there is always America. Western Europe is often well-maintained; everything is glossy but sterile at the same time. Eastern Europe is the palimpsest of ruins, a territory of postmodernism filled with memory and hopes. This is a mobile territory that extends East to his last territory (Andrukhovych 2005: 28).

Polish authors have their own nostalgic attitude and sense of being offended regarding Europe. For example, Czesław Miłoz (2007: 7) was not pleased with the Western European’s division into two Europes after the Second World War because in the process his country was thrown to “outside Darkness.” He wants to show his Eastern otherness to those for whom even Vienna was exotic. He plays with being an Easterner under an impressive cover of stereotypes. Andrzej Stasiuk (2007) considers Europe to be a map of his journeys as well as a fetishist repository. His Europe is a buffer between two great empires which causes identity problems. He believes that Europe has not been registered because literature does not write but destroys. Real Europe does not understand his country because it was a periphery nobody was interested in. There is much to learn from Poland such as patience and the possibility of understanding the Other. His Europe is a circle on the map, a map that contains history that we should all be conversant with (Stasiuk 2007). In a similar discourse of unintelligibility, Manuela Gretkowska (2004) holds the conviction that only an Eastern European can understand an Eastern European.

The American attitude

The American attitude to Europe is highly dependent on epoch and personal experience. For example, in the 19^th century when Americans worked hard to build their own country and create their identity they continued to be under the influence of Europe who they viewed as their motherland. They felt nostalgia for the continental past since every respectable American had to embark on a trip to Europe. These notions are salient in the works of Mark Twain and Henry James but gradually everything changed. Steinbeck (2002) once said that European nations have much in common with Paris before the Second World War. This capital contained a model of national identity: historical territory and memory, myths, symbols, traditions, citizenship, culture, freedom and creativity. He spoke about a special aristocratic spirit of Paris where it was better to be an artist than a merchant. In fact, Baudrillard (1989) considers America the perfect Europe because the latter has never really been itself.

The American writer William T. Vollmann depicted the Second World War in his seminal novel Europe Central. In this work there is a haunting feeling that Europe can be liquidated at anytime. Once more we are presented with a fragile intellectual and civilizing concept that can be easily destroyed:

now’s the time to enjoy Europe Central’s café umbrellas like anemones, her old grime-darkened roofs like kelp, her hoofbeats clattering up and bellnotes rising, her shadows of people so far below in the narrow streets, because tomorrow everything will be utterly smashed (Vollmann 2005: 4).

Europe is associated with church towers, cafés, literature and music. On the other hand, Central Europe is like a “good docile girl” between two Empires, Germany and Russia which comes close to the Ukrainian, Polish and Czech conceptualizations.

Conclusion

In this chapter we have argued that there is not one supra-concept for “Europe” that is common to all interpretations because its image differs from country to country, from author to author and from book to book. However, an underlying characteristic is recognisable, namely the position of being “between” and “half way”. Here we can feel nostalgia and there melancholia. It is the territory where a palimpsestic memory that has been erased and re-written over and over again holds sway. It is a place of fear for one’s language and culture, a fear that one’s children might grow up speaking another language. It is a land that has no definite boundaries. Chaos, multiculturalism and history rule on each corner, on each street (Adelheim 2004: 281–301). Here culture is palpable but considerable offence is also shared between one another; egoism and narcissism reign. It does not matter whether Europe is composed of a Western or Eastern part, the main thing is to have “Europe” in the equation, since Europe is larger than everything and worth giving up one’s life for: dying for Europe is like dying for the notions of culture and civilization.

References

Andelheim, Iryna. 2004. Under the Wet Sky of Mitteleurope. Moscow: Indric.

Andrukhovich, Yuriy. 2005. Central-Eastern Revision. Ivano-Frankivsk: Lileya-NV.

Bloom, Harold. 1994. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1989. America. London: Verso.

Gretkowska, Manuela. 2004. We are immigrants here. Moscow: AST.

Iyer, Lars. 2011. Spirituous. New York: Melville House.

Kundera, Milan. 1984. “The Tragedy of Central Europe.” New York Review of Books. 31(7). (Translated from the French by Edmund White) available online at: x xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.ises.hu/webimages/files/Kundera_tragedy_of_Central_Europe.pdf (accessed 16 February 2015)

Miłoz, Czesław. 2007. Family Europe. Kyiv: Lito.

Ribeiro, Raquel, 2008. “Maria Gabriela Llansol Meets George Steiner: How Steiner’s Idea of Europe Could Be a Llansolian Edenic Space.” Ellipsis, 10. 33–47.

Spiering, Menno 1992. Englishness: Foreigners and Images of National Identity in Postwar Literature (Studia Imagologica: Comparative Literature and European Diversity Series) Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Stasiuk, Andrzej. 2007. Jadąc do Babadag. Kyiv: Krytyka.

Steinbeck, John. 2002. America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction. New York: Viking.

Steiner, George. 2004. The Idea of Europe. Tillburg: Nexus Institute.

Tarnashynska, Lidia. 2008. Presumption of advisability. The view on contemporary literary conceptology. Kyevo-Mohylyanska Academia.

Vollmann, William T. 2005. Europe Central. London: Penguin Books.

Zaporozhchenko, Ulia. 2009. The concept of Europe in the creative activity of D. Goyova, U. Andrukhovych, A. Stasiuk: comparative discourse. (Unprinted dissertation).

Tarnashynska, Lidia. 2008. Presumption of advisability. The view on contemporary literary conceptology. Kyiv: Kyevo-Mohylyanska Academia.

Chapter Five

Revisitations of the Suburb

in the Context of Identity Construction Via Use and Abuse

of Space

Alexandra Roxana Mărginean

Introduction

This paper connects two conceptual grids used in the reading of reality, namely space and identity within the mechanism and interpretation of use and abuse of the former, particularly the suburb, as a strategy to render the latter. After defining the concepts in the first part we proceed to the actual analysis of the phenomenon in novels written in the first half of the 1980s. We highlight the reasons why the suburb is chosen as a retreat by Graham Swift’s characters and the specific features it acquires in the context of each novel, as well as their relevance for the subject at hand. The last section here deals with further interpretation of the space of the suburb against the theoretical background of writings on space, delineating the critical content assignable to it as well as its salience to the topic highlighted here. The conclusions draw on the suburb as a third or middle space which prefigures the position(ings) of the characters in relation to various aspects of their own identities, to their own social roles.

2. The “Suburb” and the “(Ab)use of Space” for characters

For the sake of terminological propriety, let us clarify the meaning of the concept of “suburb” in this discussion, since in general it has quite a variety of uses. It is meant here to refer not only to the regions outside and around the city of London, but also to all areas in Greater London or the South, with the exception of Central London and the historical City. The latter will be generically referred to as “the city” and bears the connotations of power, centrality and the insignia of authority of the state. The remaining areas will be referred to as “the suburb” bearing the connotations of peripherality (including subversiveness). By the city I mean either a great metropolis or the nexus of official power and dominating discourses. By the suburb I mean all other areas which, even if and when they geographically pertain to the city, they are not in this nexus; it is their marginal quality that counts. It is important to notice that Swift’s characters do not place themselves and their homes within the perimeter of Central London, but prefer marginality, which is a statement in itself, pointing to their subversive intentions.

In contemporary times,

the common image of the countryside is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city an image of the future. That leaves, if we isolate them, an undefined present (Williams 1993: 297).

For the most part, Swift’s characters are both worried about coping with the future, which they do not know how to handle and for which they are constantly seeking solutions. They have one foot trapped in a past that haunts them, in the nostalgia for lost values and ideals, for the lost possibility of stability and certainty and a clear sense of the self. They generally do not feel like they belong to any of the two temporal dimensions. This situation is connected with and relevant to their choice of the suburb as a place to live. The suburb is a space that reunites the past and future. It is, as a space, a compromise between a simple existence deprived of any technology and close to nature (as in rural areas in the past), and the extreme sophistication of the future space of the city. The suburb is a combination of the town and countryside, i.e. of two ways of living–one, more primitive and associated with nature (the countryside), and the other–civilization, life in modern technologized times, associated with the city and the future.

The city is associated with the mind and with rationality, whereas the countryside is associated with feeling, as Raymond Williams also notes (ibidem: 268). The profile of Swift’s characters seems to elude either of these inclinations as defining for their personalities. They are both sufficiently lyrical to become emotional, and cold-headed enough to be lucid about their situations and to become subversive. This attitude of combined contrasts is preferred by them in all contexts. The suburb as a choice of location makes sense in this respect, too. This space represents the “penetration, transformation and subjugation of ‘the country’ by ‘the city’” (ibidem: 286), i.e. of nature, feelings and liberty by rationality and authority, while at the same time being neither. It is thus illustrative of its inhabitants’ double nature. They are both disempowered, faithless victims, and shrewd actors playing with the use and abuse of spaces.

By this use and abuse we mean here the metonymical identification with such a space, in the sense of never considering it fully representative for one’s personality. Characters dislike totalities and closed interpretations, either because they consider them confining, or because they do not trust the impersonation and assumption of given realities without testing and analyzing these for themselves first. Besides being at best reductive, a priori constructions are also deceptive and faulty. The characters allow partial identification with a “space”, but usually simultaneously debunks the characteristic features originally accepted to introduce them, or show the opposite to be true as well, and it is in this paradox that the use and abuse lies.

The suburb offers the possibility for a more or less appropriate space or place or position, to use and abuse it with the ultimate purpose of expressing an identity, something which is not possible in the city because it is heterogeneous. The landscape of the city is the crowd, undifferentiated in its democratic ways. City claustrophobia and agoraphobia, the “bodily closeness and lack of space”, disallow not only the appropriation of space, but also inter-human relations which remain functional and impersonal (Simmel qtd. in Bridge and Watson 2002: 16). The city is the chaotic image of the state of authority in contemporary times. It undermines, because of its disorder and atomism, the idea of totality and centre, and questions institutionalised order and truth(s). It also pinpoints the crisis faced by the contemporary individual.

The difference between the city and the suburb is that between a “sociofugal” space and a “sociopetal” one (Hall 2004: 62). The latter is “conducive to communication between people” (ibidem: 62). Although the suburb does not efface the feelings of alienation, it does force a closer, more genuine interaction than the impersonal city. In the suburb it is easier to relate to spaces and to appropriate them (by use and abuse), because spaces and social roles are more clearly differentiated as the community is smaller.

Swift’s heroes evidence complex personalities. They perform a type of appropriation situated in-between wandering (“appropriation par l’errance”) and the classical case of uprootedness i.e. “par enracinement” (Moles and Rohmer 1978: 58). The first type of appropriation refers to nomad identities. Certain characters are like nomads: the orphan Mandy Black, Vince, because of his passion for cars, and Ray, who likes to travel in his minivan (in Last Orders). Most are nomads figuratively. Such a person is also called a “snail man”; they like caravanning, camping, and transition homes and, according to Moles and Rohmer (1978: 54), are like a wanderer, a Touareg, a bohemian who does not appropriate space but utilises it, extracts its virtues and then discards it without making either an anchorage or place to hold onto. Few characters are stable enough in certain places and positions, and sufficiently attached to them as to get closer to the second type of appropriation. An example would be Willy Chapman, in The Sweet-Shop Owner. However, it is improper to say that he possesses space; more likely, space possesses him, as he never feels fulfilled or in control of his life and identity.

It is in the suburb that characters can become closer to obtaining a centred space, or an imprinted one (ibidem: 10). The inhabitant of the suburb uses people as a reference point from which the world is mapped and made sense of, where the world is established on the basis of one’s home but not vice versa (ibidem: 16). In the suburb, subjectivity is allowed to come to the fore. The characters becomes active, but at the same time still laments their passivity–never, of course, quitting ambivalence, or the status of a victim. The suburb, one of the various possible shells or “coquilles” (ibidem: 73) of a human being–or spaces to be inhabited–has been compared to a neighbourhood. It is a “charismatic place” of “spontaneity” (ibidem: 83), of “face-to-face” (ibidem: 84) encounters and of few events. Its quietness normally holds no surprises nor dangers where the individual is secure from indiscrete gazes and possesses “social control” (ibidem: 84). The suburb offers coziness and protection (ibidem: 84). However, if one does not observe the rules of conformity and etiquette, one may acquire visibility in a negative sense, and be judged by the community for misbehaviour and abnormality.

The reduced dimensions of the suburb amplify the attitudes of the characters. What they do here may actually be described in reference to de Certeau’s concept of “tactics” (which he explains in opposition to that of strategies). With strategies, which are more fixed or rigid, the subject is less creative and more cooperative in reinforcing a priori positions (de Certeau 1984: XIX). By opposition, tactics are unpredictable, contingent and following no pattern: “A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety”; as “it does not have a place”, it depends on “opportunities that must be seized” (ibidem: XIX). If the suburb is preferred as a space, it does not mean that it is fully appropriated or identified with. However, since the characters do resort to the ethical solution of performing their duty, there is also strategy in the way they behave. Nevertheless, they carefully hide this ethical choice, up to the point where it is not really certain if they have just found it as a (re)solution, as a result of a revelation, or if they have had it in mind all along before starting their interactions. This is the type of ambivalence that they keep in every context and which prevents us from telling whether they act according to strategies or tactics.

An Analysis

3.1. The Sweet-Shop Owner

Let us analyse the particular materialisations of the general ideas above, with regard to the space of the suburb in each novel written in the first half of the decade of the eighties. In The Sweet-Shop Owner, the suburb of South London functions for Will Chapman as a protective space, shielding him from the real world of “action” i.e. war (Swift1993: 56). He willingly gives up on his manliness, the proof of which would have been going to the front, in favour of conforming to everything that is expected of him in the roles assigned by others. He prefers to be disparaged rather than risk exposure to danger. He obtains a symbolical cocoon, at the expense of self-effacement. Unfitting as those received, ersatz identities and positions may be, the character prefers them rather than being part of something that shocks common sense.

3.2 Shuttlecock

In Shuttlecock the name of the suburb is not mentioned, but we can infer peripherality, as Prentis, the main character, commutes to work by tube. The suburb functions as a refuge from the oppressive, terrifying and harsh realities of the city–including Prentis’s workplace. It offers him the possibility to imagine that he can appropriate space and attempt to be in control of it which is not possible anywhere else. However, the character can only be imperfect in his endeavour, which nevertheless facilitates the construction of his personality. In the city he feels encroached upon by authority and plays only a submissive clerk. In opposition, in nature he manages to be the ideal version of himself. But the space of the suburb, where his home is, contains all these facets and offers him the “playground” to exercise and express them. It is in the suburb that these all join together and we obtain the most complex view of his personality. In his home he exercises by use and abuse most of the positions and roles offered to him: husband, father, son, confessor for his boss, the victim and then empowered employee who gets promoted as well as being a playmate for his children. Therefore, the suburb imposes itself once more as the space bearing the most numerous opportunities for relating and thus constructing one’s identity.

3.3. Waterland

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