Picturizing narrative innovation: a bird’s eye view of hypervisualized intertextuality in Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English

Introduction

Critics of the 2011 Booker finalist list voiced their disappointment in vociferous terms at both the 13-authored long list culled from 138 submissions (Flood, 2011: 10) as well as at the much anticipated, six-authored short list in the literary race to ‘the most prestigious award for fiction in the English-speaking world’ (Bosman, 2011: 3). For literary critic Zipp (2011: 1), ‘the lineup of finalists thoroughly puzzled if not infuriated many.’ Reiterating the opinion of many a critic, she argued that two other novels of 2011 by authors Hollinghurst and Ondaatje were ‘without question among the finest work they’ve done, and both easily trump finalists Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English and A.D. Miller’s Snowdrops’. Another reviewer remained eager to declare that Kelman’s child-oriented point of view felt ‘laboured and faux-naïf’ (Aspden, 2011: 39), further adding that Kelman’s authorial voice presented ‘too conscious a gulf between its subjects and its inevitable middle-class readers to be truly convincing’. For others, the debate seemed to pivot around a single explosive word: ‘readability’ (Flood, 2011: 10).

It is not ‘readability’, however, that really seemed to be the deal breaker, but narrative innovation. If literary prizes are meant for ‘novel undertakings’ (Danford, 2011: 124) in the Booker world, the judges were right to put Pigeon English on the shortlist. Far from being a ‘simplistic portrait of a kid’s life in the housing projects of London’ (Adams et al., 2011: 34), this 21st-century literary creation will likely go down as one of the more subtly complex exemplars of 21st-century narrative invention – confirming that, in our current, hypermedia world, ‘intertextuality can be a profitable source of ideas about arrangement, especially about narrative structure’ (D’Angelo, 2010: 44), and visual representation.

This article contends that Kelman’s creative genius lies in his careful synergization of 21st-century multimodality with textual variegation. Pigeon English presents a brilliant exegesis of blended hypervisuality and hypertextuality. If this novel convinces readers of anything, it is that Kelman is a masterful user of intertextuality as a narrative trope in and of itself. After all, he manages to employ new rules of literary ‘configuration and coherence’ (Turk, 2011: 296) in Pigeon English to prompt in readers an innovative ‘dialogic engagement’ (Chen, 2010: 485) with literary content, whilst simultaneously inducing in readers both a ‘seeing’ as well as a ‘reading’ of intended meaning. Via the use of ‘seeing’ strategies (pictographization) rather than mere ‘telling’ strategies (textualization), Kelman, in Pigeon English, successfully inscribes at the very same time as he exploits multimodality to create a dual trope of active and passive visuality – of both ‘seeing’, and of being ‘watched’. Eventually then, Kelman’s narrative devices render an innovative pastiche of visual and verbal strategy – ‘a dialogic text’ (Lenski, 1998) which reflects at the very same time as it sustains a duality of intertextual meaning.

Kelman’s intertextual strategies of narrative construction, while obviously simple and overt in their taxonomic variety, operating as a ‘typical typology of intertextual forms’ (Parkison, 2009: 137) including, for example, Adaptation, Retro, Appropriation, Parody, Pastiche and Simulation (D’Angelo, 2010), also function in subtly complex ways. We thus witness in the novel a covert, discoursed, hybridized, triumvirate of text–image conflations or ‘intertwinglings’ (Slattery, 2005: 123) which encompass multimodal-genre mixing, multisensory visual Englishization, and picturized meaning. These semiotextual strategies inevitably create a literary product which visually and textually renders a scathing indictment of a post-empire city of emigrated colonized subjects in the ‘flat-world’ [pun intended] of an oppressively policed, and CCTV-wired 21st-century London as visualized through the eyes of a ‘watched’ protagonist child. The young hero of the novel, like most in this century, ‘sees’ his world, near and far, in pictures viewed either through his own eyes, or through a pair of camouflage-colored binoculars whilst simultaneously recording its visuality in and through his own uniquely rendered text–image conflations to which we turn.

Revealing the Taxonomy of Intertextual Devices

What immediately strikes readers upon first encountering Pigeon English is its obvious use of intertextuality – a device ‘frequently used to refer to the manner in which the overall meaning of any text is shaped by its relationship to other texts and the sociocultural context in which it is embedded’ (Torr, 2007: 77). Perhaps the most relevant definition of intertextuality still comes from its originator, Julia Kristeva (1986: 60), who defines it as ‘the transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another’. Kelman’s intertextuality in Pigeon English is both multimodal and multigenre[d] with its most obvious intertextual palimpsest (Genette, 1997) being ‘intradiegetic’ (Turk, 2011: 299). Kelman engages in a ‘re-write’ (Turk, 2011: 297) so to speak of a true story. In effect, he manages to render a re-telling of a ‘real’ story. As Jones (2011: 1) reports, the seemingly fictitious plot that unfolds in Pigeon English is in fact adapted from non-fiction – from real, London life.

It is transparently based on the story of Damilola Taylor, a bright-eyed, grinning 10-year-old in a school uniform, recently arrived from Nigeria, who bled to death in a Peckham stairwell in November 2000, after being attacked by a pair of 12-year-olds.

This strategy of adaptation prompts in readers a myriad of ‘co-textual and intertextual expectations in addition to the intratextual expectations raised by the novel’ (Turk, 2011: 299). Since the story is adopted from ‘real’ reported events and serves as a kind of ‘historiographic metafiction’ (p. 307), its intertextuality impels in readers a ‘doubleness’ (Hutcheon, 1989: 5) of meaning. Consequently, the ‘reading’ of the fictional in Pigeon English, particularly for readers familiar with the original, conjures up the imagery of the real. After all, ‘intertextuality posits that no text can stand alone and have meaning’ (Parkison, 2009: 138). On a stylistic level then, Pigeon English encapsulates a polychromatic literary vision whose ‘cross-modality’ (Slattery, 2005: 124) is ultimately multisensory: visualized, auralized, and textualized.

Appropriation

One of Kelman’s most creative intertextual strategies is appropriation, which is argued by Sturken and Cartwright (2001: 350) to be ‘one of the primary forms of oppositional production and reading’. Consider, for example, Kelman’s use of capitalizations to visually render a boundary line when the novel opens. Simulating the visuality of an opening scene gradually unfolding in ‘filmically’ simulated real-time, readers confound the gruesome imagery of a murdered boy lying in his own congealed pool of blood. Harri tells readers:

You wanted to touch it but you couldn’t get close enough. There was a line in the way:

    POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS (p. 3)

The textographic use of both capitalizations and spatial centering to create visual ‘salience’ (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006: 201–203) in a bid to both construct as well as draw reader-attention to the presence of a visual boundary as ‘sighted’ by a child is particularly effective on the part of Kelman in these opening pages of the novel. After all, this textographic device also serves to foreshadow Kelman’s semantic focus on ‘seeing’ vs. ‘watchfulness’.

The literary trope of being ‘watched’, for example, is culled in and through an equally potent appropriation of multiple ‘sightings’ of prohibitive, state-sanctioned restrictions. These textual uses of capitalization meticulously centered on the page then serve to augment at the very same time as they simulate the visuality of prohibitive interruption. After all, if ‘appropriation is a systematic subversion of the notion of originality’ (Sartwell, 1998: 68) we see plenty of evidence of the manner in which Kelman exploits the visuality of textual capitalizations to ‘resituate, alter or change’ (D’Angelo: 2010: 37) his appropriation of meaning. Consider, for example, Kelman’s use of this strategy to encode the oppressively rule-bound society that Harri inhabits – a world in which visual prohibitions constantly bar, ban, forbid, and ultimately contain his actions at every turn. Harri recounts his first encounter with this visually proscribed world, and his peers’ meager attempts at defiance:

The shopping center doors open by magic. You don’t even have to touch them. There’s a big sign with all the rules written on it:

NO ALCOHOL

NO BICYCLES

NO DOGS

NO SKATEBOARDS

NO SMOKING

NO BALL GAMES

Underneath the real rules somebody has written a new rule in pen:

NO FUGLIES

A fugly is a girl who always wants a baby from you. Dean Griffin told me about them. (p. 29)

If Kelman uses the visuality of capital letters to encode institutionalized prohibition, he manages to use the strategy of listing – evoked via lower-case lettering – to encode the role that other state-sanctioned instruments of socialization such as schools (Bourdieu, 1986) eventually play in re-coding such obedience. Harri, in his role as ‘protagonist witness’ (Clark, 2011: 10), is careful to note the visibility of these ubiquitously ‘sighted’ prohibitive injunctions surrounding him at every spatial turn. It is no accident that the school rules are stated not in capital letters, but rather, in lower-case formats – a hyponym of sorts in the grand scheme of institutional injunctions spanning those seen at a mall to those glimpsed in a school playground:

Some rules I have learned from my new school

No running on the stairs.

No singing in class.

Always put your hand up before you ask a question. (p. 63)

The list continues for another page – a litany of ‘don’ts’, which, while encoding all the preoccupations of a mere child, also serve as a textualized commentary on the potent socializing force of schooling into the ‘habitus and dispositions’ (Bourdieu, 1986) of mainstream society. Soon, we witness Harri’s own slow ideological ‘buy-in’ – the evolution so to speak of his own ‘habitus’ into this bounded, sanctioned, visibly-contained, and rule-bound world with its overt visualization of embargo, prohibition, and consequence. Harri gallantly refuses to buy pirated films because in his words: ‘If you buy a pirate DVD the money goes to Osama Bin Laden’ and then he hastens to add, ‘We learned it at school’ (p. 251).

The relentless and numerous injunctions banning behavior are encountered by the young Harri everywhere. Their visuality is carefully appropriated by Kelman in potent literary terms via a strategy of multimodal rendition. Harri tells readers: ‘There are warnings everywhere. They’re only there to help you. They’re very funny’ (p. 46). Readers are then treated to a meticulous pictographization of three of such signs which only add to ‘the interpretive possibilities’ (Turk, 2011: 298) embedded in the text. The first ‘sighting’ appropriates a child-generated lexical item, ‘hutious’, to describe a sign:

The big fence around the front of school has hutious spikes on top to stop the robbers climbing over. There’s a sign on the fence: (p. 46)

Readers ‘see’ what Harris sees (see Figure 1):

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Figure 1.

Illustration from Pigeon English (Kelman, 2011: 46).

Like Harri, we ‘see’ the irony embedded in these prohibitions – a failure of real protection in a police-state. Harri describes other signs he sees around him:

Asweh, it’s very funny. There are signs all over school telling you to turn off your mobile phone. (Kelman, 2011: 46)

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Figure 2.

Illustration from Pigeon English (Kelman, 2011: 46).

With the material pressure to acquire such tech-tools, the irony embedded in a school’s meager, prohibitive attempts is not lost on readers. These visual tokenizations, however, are not cited merely as literary devices meant to break the monotony of text in the novel but rather, serve to bear the burden of semiotic proof. They serve as copious visual evidence – further tokenizations – of the trope of constant, state-sanctioned surveillance – of being ‘watched’, being controlled, and being contained.

Parody via glyphization

The visual signs guiding and constraining Harri’s behavior soon take on an ironic twist – a parody of intertextuality in which ‘imitation characterized by ironic inversion’ (Hutcheon, 2006: 6) forms the main thrust of the narrative sequence. We see ‘an integrated structural modeling of the process of revising, replaying and ‘transcontextualizing’ (p. 11) the visuality of a child’s ‘sightings’ as contrasted with the ineffectual apparatus of state surveillance. The first parodying occurs in and through visualization. Harri remains perplexed by a sign which he spies. He tells readers:

There’s a sign next to the playground (Kelman, 2011: 98) (see Figure 3)

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Figure 3.

Illustration from Pigeon English (Kelman, 2011: 98).

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Figure 4.

Illustration from Pigeon English (Kelman, 2011: 47).

Harri is quick to comment:

It doesn’t even tell you what the question is. You just have to say no to whatever they ask you.

We see a further parodying of this injunction-oriented and rule-bound metropolitan world inhabited by Harri which contains a river brimming with pollutants. Harri tells readers:

The river is behind the trees. It’s only dark. It’s too small for swimming and the water is acid … You can just sit there and watch all the things in the river go past. It’s usually just sticks or cans or paper. (p. 47)

It is within this context that we are given the following visual ‘warning’. Again, the irony is not lost on readers. Harri tells readers: ‘We found another crazy sign by the river. We love that sign. It’s our new alltime favorite.

There is a similar use of inter-referentiality – ‘a discursive process through which intertextual chains are produced’ (Parkison, 2009: 136) to reiterate and re-code the redundant wastefulness of such state-inspired watchfulness. Inevitably, then, in Pigeon English, the visuality of seeing contrasts against watchfulness via a re-referencing of a previously ‘sighted’ sign. Channeling a hypermedia reconstitution or ‘glyphization’ (Hyman, 2006: 231; Lacefield, 2009) of semiotic signs already ‘sighted’ by readers, we re-reference, and re-‘see’ yet again, in visual terms, what really fences Harri in from real safety in a gripping scene in which he is being chased down by neighborhood thugs. Harri tells the readers: ‘I stopped at the sign’ (Kelman, 2011: 148), just as readers ‘see’ the sign. Again, the use of the visual permits for an immediacy – the possibility of reader presence in the unfolding scene. We feel as though we are right there ‘watching’ (see Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

Illustration from Pigeon English (Kelman, 2011: 148).

Harri continues in the narrative with: ‘I waited for Dizzy to catch up to me. I held the fence like I was a prisoner’ (pp. 148–149). This re-coding of an already ‘sighted’ pictographic image simulates the ‘personal branding’ (Delo, 2011: 68) so rampant in the ‘thoughtcasting’ (Croal, 2008: 56) of current hypermedia-culled discourse. Again, these visual signs, far from being child-like details included to break up the monotony of text, serve to augment Kelman’s ultimate thesis regarding the supreme presence of surreptitious, state-sanctioned surveillance, and its visual discovery on the part of its youngest of citizens.

Novel-Izing Media: Textualizing Logography

Whilst being thematic, Kelman’s intertextuality is also textual – a multimodal intertwining of multiple 21st-century media forms (film, television, and hypermedia-devices). These intertextual synergizations eventually create a ‘hybrid genre that is a hyperstylistic’ (Muller, 2007: 1), and which in the course of the novel’s narrative structure, traverse multimodal, genre-forms which the young Harri, like most of today’s youth, seems incessantly exposed to.

We see the use of 21st-century logography both for literary setting and for literary intention – what Sharma and Philip (2010: 112) describe as ‘incorporating hypersignifiers to formulate and present a constructed reality’. Kelman inevitably employs a careful use of known logography as a ‘referent system’ (p. 114) to present this world of ‘seeing’ and ‘watchfulness’. Allusions to a plethora of visually-prominent, 21st-century logographic forms permeate the novel. We are told by the 11-year-old protagonist that ‘the dead boy’s coffin was just normal except it had the badge of Chelsea on it’ (p. 34) – that the dead boy ‘had a proper shirt with Samsung on it, even the away kit’ (p. 17). Harri is eager to tell readers about his favorite ‘superheroes’ – recognizable icons: ‘Spiderman because he can stick like a spider and Storm because she can make a storm and Wolverine because he fights like a wolverine’ (p. 123).

Like all present-day tweens, Harri’s obsession ultimately is with the visual, with brand-name shoes in particular. Early in the novel, Harri presents a hierarchy of choices – a rating system – reminiscent of all visually-prominent, hypermedia-culled, ‘top-ten’-type listings, and cataloged in verbally ‘ascending’ terms in Pigeon English. This genre form re-codes itself in pictographic form at several points in the novel.

The number one best trainers are Nike Air Max. Everybody agrees …

Adidas is number two …

Reebok’s number three and Puma’s four. (p. 73)

For brand-name shoes that all can ‘see’, Harri will go to any length – even if it entails ‘drawing’ fake logos. Harri informs readers: ‘I drew them on to make my trainers look like Adidas. I did it with the marker pen’ (p. 115). However, this substitution of the vividly fake for the visually real is detected by his classmate-peers who subject him to the worst kind of verbal ridicule. Harri tells readers that they ‘wouldn’t stop laughing’ (p. 116), a public humiliation which only reaffirms his desire to visually fit in. He tells readers: ‘I wanted Adidas’ (p. 144). He prods his mother to go to a second-hand store to get replacements. Harri is rewarded. He can’t believe his luck. His new shoes are even better. He takes great verbal care to visualize their logo:

The Diadoras were the best. They were the only ones that fit me. It was a dope-fine piece of luck. They’re white all over and the diadora sign is blue. The diadora sign looks like an arrow or something from space. (p. 144)

Being part of this visually-rich, icon-saturated world is important to Harri. He is most eager to tell readers that his love, Poppy, and him ‘both love diadoras and Michael Jackson’ (p. 145) – two universal visual icons.

Sloganizations of Childhood

That the characters in this novel are ultimately visually-oriented comes in their final goodbyes on the last day of school. No more evidence of an intentional deployment of intertextuality exists in the novel than in these hypermedia-culled slogans of parting that the graduating seniors in Harri’s school codify. These visual textualizations re-render and re-code Kelman’s central thematic preoccupation – a contrast of innocence against cynicism. This juxtaposition is visually rendered in the form of a two-page poster-board of pithy, spotlighted, texto-graphizations which these teens write out on each others’ shirts on the last day of school (see Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

Illustration from Pigeon English (Kelman, 2011: 256–257).

The focalization via capitalization once again captures this world of hyperbolized visuality at the very same time as it offers commentary on a ghettoized, child-inhabited world of constant surveillance in which internalizations of witnessed violence ultimately invoke further acts of verbal violence which these young adults eagerly and textually mete out to each other.

Consider, for example, Harri’s descriptions of the quandary facing runaway Auntie Sonia from the grips of an abusive godfather. The violence underpinning this scene is presented in visually-rich, filmic overtones:

Auntie Sonia will have to hide in the boat. If they find her, they’ll throw her over the side to sharks. That’s what happens: first they cut you so the sharks can smell your blood, then they throw you in the sea to get eaten. A feeding frenzy is when all the sharks come together and fight over you. When they’re finished all that’s left is your bones and a blood slick. (Kelman, 2011: 232)

Retrofitting Reminiscence: Iterating Childhood

Kelman’s novel ultimately presents a world of fictionalized invention presented in and through the eyes of a child. With such a point-of-view, Kelman employs one of the most potent strategies of intertextuality, namely retro, realized in the novel as a nostalgia for the loss of innocence. Here, we witness the use of pre-adolescent discoursal reminiscings in a bid to create a narrative world replete with childhood-like discourse. Pigeon English makes adept uses of ‘textual traces’ (Grainge, 2002: 55) of child-orientated multimodality. It is the careful and meticulous use and re-use of this device which makes ‘Pigeon English a one-sitting read, primarily because once the narrator’s voice is in your ear you don’t want to stop listening’ (Danford, 2011: 125). However, it is not apparent simplicity alone that Kelman accomplishes with such a device but, rather, a duality of semiotic intent. In the course of the novel, then, like the slogans above, we witness a Janus-like duality of semantic encoding – both adult and child-oriented.

Consider the intricate manner in which Kelman renders one of the most beguiling features of childhood – the egocentric focus on creative perfection – realized predictably on Harri’s part in visual terms. He tells readers of his proudest invention – the design of scars (scarification rites being common in the culture he comes from) (see Figure 7).

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Figure 7.

Illustration from Pigeon English (Kelman, 2011: 84).

Immediately apparent in the novel is the use of a strategy of peritextual signification (Pandey, 2011). It is through this multimodal strategy that Kelman augments both his narrotological as well as thematic signification of ticking time. In terms of narrative genre, Pigeon English is a simple, whodunit-type of suspense story, employing what one critic describes to be a ‘pacy plot’ (Jones, 2011: 1), and another, ‘a murder-mystery of sorts’ (Aspden, 2011: 39). Kelman adopts a narrative structure which is episodic – what Turk (2011: 304) defines as a ‘reportorial style which creates the illusion that events are being narrated in an unselective way’ when in reality they are being chronologically rendered. How does Kelman achieve this, one might ask? He does it via visual means – through pictographizations that result in what Lambert (2009: 4) calls a ‘cliffhanger continuity’. Via the use of visual ‘meme-like’ picturizations (Hyman, 2006) complete with their own hypertextualized labeling, readers soon realize that the school-term which forms the time tapestry on which the action unfolds in the novel, is ultimately drawing to an end. Kelman achieves narrative suspense via a visual forefronting of month-long installments of time carefully coded and visually spotlighted in the narrative, albeit as innocuous ‘sightings’ by the reader.

These visual ‘markers’ of time in the novel (see Figure 8), then become a way to chronologically connect Harri’s seemingly ‘disconnected’ musings. For readers, it becomes clear that the novel encompasses a time-frame – a spring term at school gushing into the impending sea of summer ‘holidaying’. The novel ends on the last day of school, immediately before the summer vacation. The young Harri’s giddying sense of excitement (in itself a thematic allusion to the trope of innocence) is brutally cut short – right before he gets to experience this much anticipated holiday. Immediately apparent are the multimodal signpostings of time rendered through child-like pictographizations (see Figure 8) labeled via ‘textual teasers’ (Lambert, 2009: 10) of chronoscopic time – the passing of the months of March, April, May, June and, finally, July.

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Figure 8.

Illustrations from Pigeon English (Kelman, 2011: 2, 49, 106, 151 and 218, respectively).

Like everything in the text, however, these drawings, while reminiscent of childhood, are not intended to portray child-like content. An analysis of the significations soon reveals that the image of a fingerprint, or even the silhouette of a CCTV camera are adult in semantic import. Eventually, then, all five of the images – the plane, the fingerprint, the camera, the view of the sea, and finally the pigeon (the moniker of the novel) – conjure up, at the very same time as they corroborate, a trope of aerial watchfulness, a ‘seeing’ from above. This narrative link is constructed via an innovative use of ‘text and genre chains which induce thematic intertextuality’ (Shegar and Weninger, 2010: 437). Inevitably, then, Kelman’s ‘intertextings are co-thematic’ (Torr, 2007: 87). These ‘peritextualizations’ (Sipe, 2008: 134) impel in readers a renewed attention on the ‘focal text’ (Torr, 2007: 78) which both precedes and succeeds each of these visual significations, only adding to the overall suspense of the unfolding plot. The semiotic effect is potent. As one critic notes: ‘As this charming boy gets closer to a solution, readers will feel their adrenaline start pumping hoping Harri will succeed and remain safe’ (Kempf, 2011: 85) – a literary effect primarily achieved via intertextual picturizations.

The same use of multimodality to signify the passage of time comes in the ‘aerial’ use of footprints which recall the larger metaphor of ‘footprints in the sands of time’. This nuance of meaning is made ever more permanent by Harri’s pressing both his feet and his sibling’s into wet cement (see Figure 9).

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Figure 9.

Illustration from Pigeon English (Kelman, 2011: 209).

I sat down next to the ramp and wrote both our names underneath the footprints. I had to push my finger quite hard to get the letters to come out. I could still read it … The cement on my finger looked like tea bread dough but it smelled like puke … We washed off our shoes in a puddle. (Kelman, 2011: 209)

The irony and, ultimately, tragedy of this visual birthday present to his sister hits readers only when they reach the end of the novel. Again, the subtle rendition of wasted childhood is illustrated in and through a potent ‘aerial’ image accompanied via an equally compelling multisensory textualization which is primarily ocular and prominently synesthetic. Kelman’s authorial ‘aeriality’ of vision – his forefronting of literary thesis is not lost on readers. These victims of state-induced neglectful crime are but mere children, he seems to be reminding us.

Auralizing Discourse: Visualizing Words

Spotlighted visual English is increasingly being employed in current film (Pandey, 2011, 2010). We see a similar strategy in Pigeon English. Kelman forefronts the visuality of solo-spotlighted lexemes (Pandey, 2010) to further emphasize his overarching trope of ‘seeing’. Consider, the spotlighting of the orality of ‘voice’ to render a child’s point of view regarding a newly discovered world – to ‘tell’ of what he ‘sees’. Harri says: ‘I went around looking for things and whenever I found them I just told it’ (Kelman, 2011: 78). Readers once again ‘see’ as they hear the details of a scene in which Harri first enters his 9th-floor flat – the place where he eventually gets murdered. In Harri’s words, ‘Asweh, there were so many new things it even made my eyes go blurry. I never suspected to see so many new things just in one day’ (pp. 78–79). Like the lens of a reality-based TV-camera filming him as he excitedly discovers the contents of his new flat – we as readers ‘see’ the immediacy of the unfolding action:

Me: ‘Got a sofa!’

Me: ‘Got a table!’

Me: ‘Got a bed!’

Me: ‘Got another bed!’

Me: ‘Got a fridge!’

Me: ‘Got a stove!’

Harri gets his first introduction to his emigrated world via visual words which he spies in odd places – a textual photographing of salience on the part of Kelman. The violence inherent in his newly peregrinated world is rudely foreshadowed in texto-visual terms. Amid Harri’s excited encounter of his new, 9th-floor dwelling he finds the following:

I lifted up the carpet to look for money. Somebody wrote a greeting on the floor:

Fuck you

I don’t think the greeting was for me. Nobody even knew I was coming. (p. 79)

The shock of the greeting hits readers with the same force as it meets Harri’s eyes – a dysphemic invective meant for new resident eyes. The same ‘seeing’ of the pervasive violence reported on in the text sees visual reoccurrence when Kelman intratextualizes a single lexeme in boldface to augment the shock of its encounter for both protagonist and reader alike:

Auntie Sonia: ‘Have you seen what they did to your door?’

We all looked where Auntie Sonia was looking. It was there in big letters scratched into the wood:

     DEAD

Harri’s visual encounter of the word is described in textual terms, His verbalization ‘shows’ readers what these visually forefronted words really ‘looked’ and felt like.

The letters were all sharp and skinny where they were written by a knife instead of a pen … I followed the word with my fingers to feel for a clue … I got a splinter from the A but it didn’t hurt. (pp. 233–234)

This multisensory visualization coupled with the tactility of touch yet again encodes Kelman’s dually embedded trope of visuality – of both ‘seeing’ and of being ‘watched’.

For a novel keen on reproducing the sights and sounds of a world inhabited by children, Kelman uses textual multimodality to encode auralized ‘sound’. We eventually hear what we see in this concocted world – a visual-aurality accomplished via a clever use of boldfacing and increased font size. This graphic-novel culled strategy (Pandey, 2011) is re-coded with consistency throughout the narrative. We first encounter the strategy when Harri explains the ritual that the neighborhood boys engage in when they are near the garbage bins:

We have to greet it every time for luck, it’s a tradition. Just stick your head in and shout:

Me and Jordon: ‘Bollocks!”

and it makes a dope-fine echo. (p. 44)

We hear at the same time as we ‘see’ the following choral command whose visual-aurality takes the description from the unidimensional realm of text to the multidimensionality of screen-scripted sound.

Connor Green always blames his trainers when he spoons the ball. It’s never his fault, it’s always his trainers.

Everybody: ‘Spoon!’

Connor Green: ‘I can’t help it man! It’s my trainers! (p. 73)

It is encounters such as this which move the unfolding action in Pigeon English from read text to ‘watched’ action. With manipulations in font size, Kelman encodes the shift in decibels of uttered speech in a dyad in which Harri and his peptic sister, two rival siblings, engage in a shouting match:

 Me: ‘Can we go now?…

 Lydia: ‘In a minute!’

 Me: ‘Don’t roar at me!’ (p. 76)

This sibling rivalry is kept up when Harri refuses to let his sister quell the optimism he feels on the last day of school which is auralized in the following visual terms:

Everybody was smiling from ear to ear. We had to shout along with them. We couldn’t hold it in.

Me and Dean: ‘It’s the last day! We’re nearly free!’

Lydia: ‘Ow! Don’t shout right in my ear!’

Me: ‘Aaarrghhhhhh!’ (That was me doing a big shout in Lydia’s ear). (p. 254)

From a linguistic standpoint, we ‘watch’ with rapt attention the unabandoned excitement Harri experiences on his maiden, tube-train ride – a wondrous delight captured in multimodal terms:

I wanted to run through the tunnel but there were too many people in the way. I just made an echo instead. I made the loudest echo I could …

Me: ‘We are in the tuuuuuuuuuuuube!’ (p. 89)

In keeping with the meticulous delineation of state-sanctioned authority, and child-created rules, Kelman distinguishes via visuality – via textual prominence (capitalizations as opposed to lower case lettering) – the power accorded an adult teacher when contrasted with a disruptive student. Harri, as a visual onlooker, tells us what happens:

 Connor Green: ‘Have you got happiness, sir?’

 Mr. Tomlin: ‘Right, get out. Connor? Get out now, please.’

 Connor Green: ‘But sir, I only asked if you’ve got happiness.’

 Mr. Tomlin: ‘OUT!’ (p. 220)

A Pastiche of Pastness: Bricolization in a Booker Contender

Immediately apparent in Pigeon English is the astute use of the ‘paratextual’ device (Wales, 1989: 339) of literary pastiche – ‘a pasting together, a patchwork or medley of borrowed styles’. Kelman’s use of multigenre discourse strategies, far from being accidental, represents an ‘open intentional imitation or copy of the style of an original object or text’ (Murfin and Ray, 2003: 160). Consider, for example, the astute manner in which Kelman (2011) uses the ‘survey format’ to signal a budding, first love between Harri and Poppy. This hypervisualization is rendered in the most rudimentary of textual forms. Harri tells readers of a letter he receives, and what he is required to do.

I just have to tick the box. I have to give the letter back to Poppy after the holiday. I don’t know what will happen when I give it back. Asweh, I hope it was the right answer! (p. 103)

The prompt that Harri gets is simple – visualized love distilled to its most basic of textographic forms (see Figure 10).

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Figure 10.

Illustration from Pigeon English (Kelman, 2011: 103).

Harri’s decision is signified in visio-textual terms. He tells readers: ‘Poppy is my girlfriend now. It was easy. I didn’t even have to ask her, I only had to tick the box’ (p. 136). This use of multimodality renders a literary pastiche with ‘double coding’ (Jencks, 1987: 12). We see here an astute ‘combination of contemporary textual genres’, in this case, the survey format, to render a choice involved in a timeless, ageless, quandary: requited versus unrequited love.

Harri’s world is ultimately visual. He sees all its colors, and is quick to picturize its details. The ‘noetics’ (Slattery, 2005: 122) of visuality inscribe themselves in several other ways on the part of Kelman (2011). Readers soon discover that Harri’s world exists in Technicolor. He tells readers how he uses ‘Colour Theory’ to draw at school:

Mine is made of green, yellow and red. The yellow is sunshine and Poppy Morgan’s hair. The green is for the time Agnes was crawling on the grass in children’s park and she saw a cricket and tried to catch him …

The red is the dead boy’s blood. I just couldn’t get it dark enough so I mixed some black with it, just a little bit at a time. (p. 45)

The synesthesia (Slattery, 2005: 122) of his visually-rich world is ‘noticed’ and textually cataloged by Harri at every point. He tells readers: ‘Poppy wrote her number on my hand. Her pen was purple and tickly. It felt lovely like the best good luck message’ (p. 259). Later, he tells readers, “She painted one fingernail pink and the next fingernail green, and then the next one pink again in a pattern … I used Poppy’s hair for my yellow’ (p. 45).

While the device of ‘photomontage’ (D’Angelo, 2010: 40) is often the preferred multimodal means to include pastiche in many aesthetic creations such as motion pictures, Kelman adopts a kind of textual-montaging in Pigeon English. Consider for example, another innovative strategy of bricolage which Kelman employs. We see the use of hybridized lists which dually forefront the strategies of listing and check-marking (see Figure 11).

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Figure 11.

Illustration from Pigeon English (Kelman, 2011: 181).

In Pigeon English, narrative innovation proceeds via another ‘co-constructed narrative strategy’ (Turk, 2011: 296) – an acronymic formulization of meaning rendered in multimodal form. Harri tells of a message that Poppy writes to him – one, which he is quick to add, makes his friends’ eyes go ‘all dark’ (Kelman, 2011: 163) with envy.

 P.M. + H.O.

 I.D.S.T.

In a world surrounded by the visual, Harri’s use of alphabet chains prompts in readers an equally compelling desire to decipher what they so obviously ‘see’. Harri provides a translation:

It means me and Poppy belong together. That’s what the top letter stands for: P.M. is for Poppy Morgan and H.O. is for Harrison Opoku. When you put + between them it means those two people go together like a sum. That’s what Poppy told me.

  Poppy: ‘I.D.S.T. stands for If Destroyed Still True.’ (p. 163)

When Harri gets a chance in Pigeon English to permanently paint his love via white etchings of Tippex on a dark wooden desk, he asserts both his boyishness and his beguiling innocence. Harri never questions, but merely reverses the order of his own love – perhaps in a bid to visually render its symmetricity of feeling. This simple formulaic message with its multimodal mix of verbal and visual detail, potently reifies the magnificence of budding love. We ‘see’ as we ‘read’ the following:

My message was the same as hers except I put H.O. before P.M. I put my letters first because the message was from me. Everything else was the same. Now everybody who sits at my desk will know me and Poppy belong to each other. (p. 164)

Readers then ‘see’ what this looks like:

 H.O. + P.M.

 I.D.S.T. (p. 164)

The visual spotlighting (Pandey, 2010) of these letters impels a deeper focus on the part of readers on the theme of young, untainted love and its eventual desecration, and ultimate destruction, by a negligent adult world.

Narrative Timing: Why is Kelman’s Intertextuality Important?

The last words out of the dying Harri’s mouth in Pigeon English are visual – he ‘sees’ an image as he lies bleeding to death. While a seemingly simplistic overgeneralization – ‘All babies look the same’ (Kelman, 2011: 263), this textually-rendered declarative is predictably Kelman’s ultimate indictment as to the cruelty of a cosmopolitan London unwilling to recognize such sameness – that all babies are, in fact, the same. Kelman’s, intertextuality in Pigeon English is intentionally stylistic – a means to add ‘new resonance’ (Sârghie, 2010: 106) to his writing. In literary construction, far from being accidental, or even ad hoc, intertextuality is deliberate – with ‘intertextual references’ (Shegar and Weninger, 2010: 431) as well as adaptations forming a new ‘third space’ (Levy, 2008) in which to invent. Kelman, it is argued, engages in a masterful, almost Andy Warholesque use of intertextuality to further effectuate his meaning. His creative delineation of the duality of active watchfulness with its passive, more sinister state-sanctioned equivalent: ‘watchedness’, is inscribed in this novel via the tripartite strategies of co-thematic intertexting, co-orienting intertexting and co-generic intertexting’ (Lemke, 1992: 259). This novel in effect impels in readers a co-construction of textographic rendering of ‘seeing’ versus being ‘watched’ in a hyper-CCTV-wired cosmopolitan metropolis of 21st-century migration.

The analysis thus far points to an interpretation in which ‘intertextuality is not merely a decorative addition to a text, but sometimes a crucial factor in its conception and composition’ (Lodge, 1992: 102), and one might add, in its reception. Intertextuality in Pigeon English only enhances what Torr (2007: 89) argues to be the most potent outcome of reading, namely, ‘the pleasure of recognition’ – an obvious and spontaneously elicited reader link ‘between some aspect of the images or written text and [readers’] own lives’. A further reminder: one of the pre-packaged discussion questions that comes with the novel prods readers to ‘Discuss Harri and his friends’ attitude to violence’ (Question 9). After all, the novel has been marketed astutely the world over, and in its debut weeks alone saw ‘sales in seven countries world-wide’ (Danford, 2011: 124).

Conclusion

So, far from being a platitudinous, even idiosyncratic synthesis of visual and verbal detailing, Stephen Kelman delivers a novel worthy of plaudits. Pigeon English triumphs as an intentional, stylistic ‘picto-texting’ of meaning. We experience in this novel uniquely devised uses of ‘semiotic intertexting’ (Torr, 2007: 86) to render a literary-scape in which textuality and visuality both incarnate and thematicize the twin acts of ‘seeing’ and being watched.

The recent resolution of the real-life, racially-motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence by a British gang is a case in point. The subsequent inability of the British police to convict the obvious murderers (even exculpating the original criminals at one point) in an ‘investigation’ which took over 18 years to solve (Muir, 2011: 1) makes Pigeon English a relevant and particularly timely novel. More importantly, its focal emphasis on individuated ‘seeing’ or sightedness as contrasted with the institutionalized voyeurism of wasted, state-sanctioned surveillance – blindness – is forefronted by Kelman via a plethora of novel, intertextual, and pictographic means. We see here a range of strategic uses of forefronted capitalization, ticked lists, re-coded surveys, even labeled pictographizations, all semiotextual strategies whose text–image conflations are co-thematically recoded with consistency in the novel. Pigeon English is a timely, 21st-century novel, not just thematically, but also stylistically.

Eventually, then, the novel employs a modern, hypermediated, texto-visual narrative lens to both film and photograph a cosmopolitan city’s blind-spots in a bid to deliver its own scathing indictment of a 21st-century, multicultural metropolis of post-empire emigration in which ‘looking at’ citizens trumps ‘looking out’ for its young – a society in which ubiquitously occurring, aerially-mounted CCTV cameras fail to spot what even ground-level placed children so clearly ‘see’.