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“WHAT IS A MAN?”, OR THE REPRESENTATION
OF MASCULINITY IN HANIF KUREISHI’SSHORT FICTION
BETTINA SCHÖTZ
Abstract
Based on Butler’s concept of gender performativity and Connell’s
theory of the social construction of masculinity, this essay argues that
Kureishi’s “postethnic” short stories explore contemporary conceptu-
alizations of masculinity: Love in a Blue Time (1997) depicts the dis-
ruption of masculine gender practices in the postfeminist era; Mid-
night All Day (1999) portrays the concomitant transformations of
masculinity; The Body and Seven Stories (2002) emphasizes the per-
formativity of masculine identity; and New Stories (2010) transcends
traditional, patriarchal and hegemonic notions of masculinity, ima-
gining alternative forms of masculine gender practice, such as the bi-
sexual man or the “feminist house-husband”. Since (gender) identity
is as much a narrative artifice as literature, Kureishi’s stories offer a
specific savoir littéraire about the formation of masculine identity. Not
only do they contribute to a better understanding of contemporary
masculinities, but they also conceive of new forms of masculine identi-
ty.
Hanif Kureishi is considered one of the most eminent representatives
of contemporary black British Literature by academia and public
alike.1 Being the first widely acclaimed British-born writer of New
1 I would like to thank Stefan Horlacher for this opportunity of discussing Hanif Ku-
reishi’s short fiction from a masculinity studies perspective. The essay has profited
from the critical comments and constructive suggestions made by him and Ulrike
Kohn.
© , | ./_
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218 Bettina Schötz
Commonwealth descent, Kureishi’s particular, even “historic”2 im-
portance is commonly attributed to both his pioneering role in the
development of a specifically British Asian culture, and his articula-
tion of the need for an inclusive and pluralistic3 understanding of Brit-
ish identity.4
Although such an acknowledgement of his impact on contempo-
rary British culture appears to be highly justified, it is fraught with the
concomitant danger of placing “the burden of being ‘representative’”
onto his work,5 expecting Kureishi to comply with the duty of a “mi-
nority” writer and “confine [himself] to questions of ethnicity”.6 In
fact, it appears to be mainly due to this expectation that his middle and
recent works have been received less favorably than his early plays,
his film scripts as well as the by now canonical novels, The Buddha of
Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album (1995).
The short story collection introducing Kureishi’s middle works,
Love in a Blue Time (1997), has been taken to mark “something of a
watershed”.7 Not only does it bespeak an increased concern with the
short story form,8 but it also indicates a change in focus from the in-
herently political themes of ethnicity and class to the private difficul-
2 Bart Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2001, 190.
3 In his autobiographical essay “The Rainbow Sign” (1986), Kureishi famously calls
for “a new way of being British”, arguing that “being British isn’t what it was. Now it
is a more complex thing, involving new elements. So there must be a fresh way of
seeing Britain and the choices it faces” (Hanif Kureishi, “The Rainbow Sign”, in
Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics, London: Faber and
Faber, 2002, 55).
4 See Susie Thomas, Introduction, in Hanif Kureishi: A Reader’s Guide to Essential
Criticism, ed. Susie Thomas, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2.
5 Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies,
New York: Routledge, 1994, 236.
6 Thomas, Introduction, 4. Note Salman Rushdie’s famous discussion of this problem
in “Minority Literatures in a Multi-Cultural Society” (1987), which mentions Hanif
Kureishi favorably (Salman Rushdie, “Minority Literatures in a Multi-Cultural Socie-
ty”, in Displaced Persons, eds Kirsten Holst Peterson and Anna Rutherford, Aarhus:
Seklos, 1987).
7 Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, 152.
8 Even though Kureishi’s first collection of short stories was not published before
1997, Kureishi has been working in the genre since the mid-1980s (see Kenneth C.
Kaleta, Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller, Austin: University of Texas, 1998,
148; Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, 152). Once he saw an opportunity of publishing a
collection, he began to work in the form more seriously between 1995 and 1996 (see
Kaleta, Hanif Kureishi, 156).
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“What Is a Man?” 219
ties, worries and fears of predominantly white, middle-aged men.9
Since Kureishi’s “postethnic”10 middle works seem to render the post-
colonial approach preferably applied to his writings less suitable, they
have largely been ignored by critics.11 Additionally, the more Kureishi
has appeared to divert his attention from issues of race or ethnicity and
to refuse the burden of giving voice to the British Asian experience,
the more severe and openly hostile criticism of his work has
become.12 Jenny Turner’s deprecating remark in The Independent,
9 Ruvani Ranasinha is correct when she points out that this “shift from race to intimate
relationships is”, in fact, “not a new direction but a more explicit examination of
Kureishi’s latent preoccupations with diverse forms of masculinity and different kinds
of relationship” (Ruvani Ranasinha, Hanif Kureishi, Tavistock: Northcote House,
2002, 19). On Kureishi’s “private turn” see also ibid., 102-103; Moore-Gilbert, Hanif
Kureishi, 152; Thomas, Hanif Kureishi, 164; Laurenz Volkmann, “Explorationen des
Ichs: Hanif Kureishis post-ethnische Kurzgeschichten”, in Self-Reflexivity in Litera-
ture, eds Werner Huber et al., Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2005, 138,
143; Bradley Buchanan, Hanif Kureishi, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 69;
and Rehana Ahmed, “Occluding Race in Selected Short Fiction by Hanif Kureishi”,
Wasafiri, XXIV/2 (May 2009), 28, 31. In fact, Kureishi’s middle works in general and
his short stories in particular illustrate McLeod’s argument that contemporary black
British writing is no longer exclusively concerned with black Britain. While McLeod
therefore prefers the phrase “contemporary black writing of Britain” to Black British
writing (John McLeod, “Extra Dimensions, New Routines: Contemporary Black
Writing of Britain”, Wasafiri, XXV/4 [November 2010], 46), I intend to convey this
insight through not capitalizing “black” in “black British Literature”.
10 A number of critics have argued that Kureishi’s middle works are “postethnic”,
borrowing the concept from the Berkeley historian David Hollinger (see Stein, Black
British Literature: Novels of Transformation, Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
2004; Mark Stein, “Posed Ethnicity and the Postethnic: Hanif Kureishi’s Novels”, in
English Literatures in International Contexts, eds Heinz Antor and Klaus Stierstorfer,
Heidelberg: Winter, 2000; Volkmann, “Explorationen des Ichs”; and Sara Upstone,
“Hanif Kureishi”, in British Asian Fiction: Twenty-first-century Voices, Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2010).
11 See Thomas, Hanif Kureishi, 5. The majority of academic criticism has focused on
Kureishi’s first two novels (see Buchanan, Hanif Kureishi, 147), which lend them-
selves most obviously to a postcolonial analysis and interpretation. With regard to
Kureishi’s short story œuvre it is noteworthy that Love in a Blue Time and, to a lesser
extent, his second collection of short stories, Midnight All Day (1999), have been
critically reviewed and have received some academic attention, while the short stories
contained in The Body and Seven Stories (2002) as well as the New Stories have
largely been ignored. All of the short stories mentioned are included in Kureishi’s
2010 edition of Collected Stories (Hanif Kureishi, Collected Stories, London: Faber
and Faber, 2010). If not indicated otherwise, references to any short story will be to
this collection.
12 See Buchanan, Hanif Kureishi, 147.
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220 Bettina Schötz
t fiction has
eli
e that literature may convey about the formation of (gender)
entity.
“There are few sights in the world less appealing than the sort of men
Kureishi writes about in this book [Love in a Blue Time]”,13
exemplifies the kind of evaluative response his shor
cited.
In what follows, I shall illustrate that Kureishi’s short story œuvre
may be fruitfully approached from a masculinity studies perspective.
While my analyses start from the premise that Kureishi’s short stories
are still concerned with questions of race, ethnicity and, ultimately,
community,14 they focus on the fact that a large proportion of the sto-
ries either implicitly or explicitly depict masculinities in crisis, or
more precisely, the reasons for, ways of dealing with and effects of
male characters’ mid-life crises. While early stories “are riddled with
instances of male depression, isolation and anxiety which are the con-
sequence of failed negotiations of the demand for new forms of mas-
culinity”,15 later stories tend to emphasize the constructedness of gen-
der identity and offer examples of new forms of masculinity, spanning
from men eager to adapt to the demands of a relationship of equal
power with their female partners to self-declared “feminist house-
husbands”.16 Before my discussion of Kureishi’s texts, I will make a
few preliminary remarks about the underlying notion of masculine
identity and the so-called “crisis of masculinity”, and the specific
knowledg
id
Masculine identity and the crisis of the patriarchal gender order
According to socio-psychological identity theory, identity may be
defined as “the process of the construction and revision of self-
concepts that is constantly undertaken by the individual at the inter-
section of social interaction and individual biography”.17 Rather than
an essentialist substance, identity is thus considered a deliberate con-
13 Jenny Turner, “All about the babe they lack”, The Independent, 13 April 1999:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/all-about-the-babe-
they-lack-737670.html.
14 See Bettina Schötz, “The Exploration of Community in Hanif Kureishi’s Short
Fiction”, Literary London Journal, X/2 (Autumn 2013): http://www.literarylondon.
org/london-journal/autumn2013/schotz.html.
15 Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, 157.
16 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 621.
17 Stefan Glomb, Erinnerung und Identität im britischen Gegenwartsdrama, Tübin-
gen: Gunter Narr, 1997, 27 (my translation).
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“What Is a Man?” 221
dividual, underlining its concomitant pro-
pe
n turn
ma
and gestures, articulated and enacted desires”21 that comply with the
struction which the individual is forced to work at daily without the
prospect of ever arriving at a final, fixed result. Although studies in
the field of identity have usually refrained from specifying their find-
ings with regard to gender, they have repeatedly emphasized the ex-
cessive demands the process of identity formation makes on the –
masculine and feminine – in
nsity for identity crises.18
Accordingly, cultural anthropological findings suggest that all over
the world masculine identity is conceived of as a problematic category
which pressurizes the individual into confirming that it meets the high
expectations the notion of masculinity raises and is, hence, worthy of
being subsumed under it. To cultural anthropologists, masculinity is
therefore inextricably linked with a fear of failure,19 which i
y cause the masculine individual to suffer from an identity crisis.
In the field of gender studies, it is Judith Butler’s influential con-
cept of “gender performativity”20 that offers a significant insight into
feminine and masculine identity crises. According to Butler, gender is
performative, that is produced through a ritualized repetition of “acts
18 See Thomas Luckmann, “Persönliche Identität, soziale Rolle und Rollendistanz”, in
Identität, eds Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1979,
293-313; Gertrud Nunner-Winkler, “Identitätskrise ohne Lösung: Wiederholungskri-
sen, Dauerkrise”, in Identität: Entwicklungen psychologischer und soziologischer
Forschung, eds Hans-Peter Frey and Karl Haußer, Stuttgart: Enke, 1987, 165-78;
Lothar Krappmann, “Die Identitätsproblematik nach Erikson aus einer interaktionisti-
schen Sicht”, in Identitätsarbeit heute: Klassische und aktuelle Perspektiven der
Identitätsforschung, eds Heiner Keupp and Renate Höfer, Frankfurt am Main: Suhr-
kamp, 1997, 66-92; Jürgen Straub, “Personale und kollektive Identität: Zur Analyse
eines theoretischen Begriffs”, in Identitäten: Erinnerung, Geschichte, Identität 3, eds
Aleida Assmann and Heidrun Friese, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998, 73-104;
Heiner Keupp et al., Identitätskonstruktionen: Das Patchwork der Identitäten in der
Spätmoderne, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1999.
19 See Stefan Horlacher, “Überlegungen zur theoretischen Konzeption männlicher
Identität aus kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive: Ein Forschungsüberblick mit ex-
emplarischer Vertiefung”, in “Wann ist die Frau eine Frau?” – “Wann ist der Mann
ein Mann?”: Konstruktionen von Geschlechtlichkeit von der Antike bis ins 21. Jahr-
hundert, ed. Stefan Horlacher, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2010, 201-
203.
20 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, New York:
Routledge, 1993, x.
21 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New
York: Routledge, 1990, 136.
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222 Bettina Schötz
gender norms prevalent in a heterosexual matrix.22 Butler defines per-
formativity “as the reiterative and citational practice by which dis-
course produces the effects that it names”.23 Moreover, she emphasiz-
es that the notion of performativity applies to both “the effects of
gender” and “the materiality of sex”.24 Importantly, the citational
repetition of gender norms opens up the possibility of modifying what
is cited, and, thus, “proliferat[es] gender configurations outside the re-
stricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosex-
uality”. It ultimately implies that there is no “true or abiding masculin-
ity or femininity”:
If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows
or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no
preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured;
there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the
postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory
fiction.25
Consequently, Butler’s notion of performativity entails that the mas-
culine individual is, theoretically, free to perform its gender in an idio-
syncratic way, a freedom that may easily pose a serious, overtaxing
challenge and lead to a crisis of gender identity.
Within masculinity studies itself, Raewyn Connell’s sociological
analysis of masculinity proves extremely helpful in developing a thor-
ough understanding of masculine crises.26 Theorizing gender as “a
way of structuring social practice”,27 Connell defines masculinity as
“simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through
which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of
these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture”.28 She
stresses the processuality of masculinity, viewing the configuration of
22 See Butler, Bodies That Matter, x; Hannelore Bublitz, Judith Butler zur Einführung,
3rd edn, Hamburg: Junius, 2010, 71-75.
23 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 2.
24 Ibid., x. See Bublitz, Judith Butler zur Einführung, 71, and especially 72.
25 Butler, Gender Trouble, 141 (emphases added).
26 The following remarks refer to Chapter Three of Connell’s important study Mascu-
linities, “The Social Organization of Masculinity” (R.W. Connell, Masculinities,
Cambridge: Polity, 1995).
27 Ibid., 75.
28 Ibid., 71.
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“What Is a Man?” 223
masculine practice as a “gender project”,29 and points to its complex
internal structure.30 Connell argues that one particular form of mascu-
linity is “culturally exalted” at a specific time. This “hegemonic mas-
culinity” constitutes “the configuration of gender practice which em-
bodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy
of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the domi-
nant position of men and the subordination of women”.31 Importantly,
Connell understands masculinity as “a configuration of practice within
a system of gender relations”. Accordingly, she points out that the
term “crisis” cannot be applied to the category of masculinity, for: “As
a theoretical term ‘crisis’ presupposes a coherent system of some
kind.” Therefore – and here I follow Connell rigorously – it is more
accurate to “speak of the crisis of a gender order as a whole, and of its
tendencies towards crisis”,32 and apply the terms “disruption” or
“transformation” to the configuration of masculine practice. Hence, in
order to analyze the construction of contemporary masculinities, it is
necessary to examine the crisis tendencies of the prevalent gender
order by scrutinizing the three kinds of gender relations in which men
and women partake, that is power relations, production relations and
relations of cathexis or emotional attachment.
Refuting assertions about an approaching “end of masculinity”,33
the above remarks appear to underpin Walter Erhart’s argument that a
notion of masculinity has emerged
... that regards masculinity as always and inevitably in crisis, a crisis
which – according to Judith Butler – results from the continually per-
formative and iterative status of the category of gender on the one
hand, while it constitutes the symptom and effect of a rather coercive-
29 Ibid., 72.
30 Ibid., 73-74, 85.
31 Ibid., 77. Connell classifies “the main patterns of masculinity in the current Western
gender order” with regard to the relations among masculinities, distinguishing be-
tween a “hegemonic masculinity”, a masculinity “subordinated” to the former, a mas-
culinity “complicit” with the hegemonic one, and a pattern of “marginalized” mas-
culinity (77-81).
32 Ibid., 84.
33 See John MacInnes, “The Crisis of Masculinity and the Politics of Identity”, in The
End of Masculinity: The Confusion of Sexual Genesis and Sexual Difference in Mod-
ern Society, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998.
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224 Bettina Schötz
ly and permanently imposed hegemonic masculinity that men find dif-
ficult to live up to on the other.34
The significance of a specific savoir littéraire for masculine identity
formation
Since literature has the particular privilege not only to depict or criti-
cize the existing extra-literary world, but also to create and explore
new “realities”,35 it may be argued that Kureishi’s short fiction goes
beyond a mere representation of the crisis tendencies inherent in the
contemporary British gender order, and their implications for a mascu-
line configuration of gender practice. In fact, the stories additionally
imagine new forms of masculinity in response to these crisis tenden-
cies. In so doing, they offer a specific savoir littéraire36 in two re-
spects: firstly, they contribute to a better understanding of masculine
identity formation in the postfeminist era, and secondly, they conceive
of and experiment with alternative forms of masculinity.
The unique potential of literature to provide such a thorough in-
sight into the formation of gender identity results from the inextricable
nexus between narration, identity and literature.37 Various recent stud-
ies emphasize that (gender) identity is produced through the act of
narrating one’s past with regard to one’s prospective future – often in
accordance with the narrative models a particular society provides at a
certain historical moment, such as the “self-made man”.38 Therefore,
34 Quoted in Horlacher, “Überlegungen zur theoretischen Konzeption männlicher
Identität”, 196-97 (my translation).
35 See Horlacher, “Literatur und die Überwindung der Dichotomien: Zum Verhältnis
von Lebenswelt, Men’s Studies, Gender Studies und savoir littéraire”, in Literarische
Gendertheorie: Eros und Gesellschaft bei Proust und Colette, eds Ursula Link-Heer
et al., 2006, 46. See also Horlacher, Masculinities: Konzeptionen von Männlichkeit im
Werk von Thomas Hardy und D.H. Lawrence, Tübingen: Narr, 2006, 117-18.
36 A detailed discussion of savoir littéraire is provided in Horlacher, Masculinities,
109-19; and Horlacher, “Literatur und die Überwindung der Dichotomien”.
37 For an in-depth analysis of the connection between narration, identity formation and
literature, see Horlacher, “Literatur und die Überwindung der Dichotomien”, 48-51.
38 See Norbert Meuter, Narrative Identität: Das Problem der personalen Identität im
Anschluß an Ernst Tugendhat, Niklas Luhmann und Paul Ricoeur, Stuttgart: M und P
Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1995; Glomb, Erinnerung und Identität, 23-
25; Straub, “Personale und kollektive Identität”, 93; Keupp et al., Identitätskonstruk-
tionen, 56-59, 101-105, 269-70; Marion Gymnich, “Individuelle Identität und Erinne-
rung aus Sicht von Identitätstheorie und Gedächtnisforschung sowie als Gegenstand
literarischer Inszenierung”, in Literatur – Erinnerung – Identität: Theoriekonzeptio-
nen und Fallstudien, eds Astrid Erll, Marion Gymnich and Ansgar Nünning, Trier:
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“What Is a Man?” 225
gender identity may be considered a linguistic construct, whose con-
sistency and coherence result from the metaphorical act of writing that
produces it. Gender identity is a narrative artifice and as such a cultu-
ral product similar to literature.39 Since literary texts not only create a
fictional world, but also reflect on their contextualization and the lin-
guistic constructedness of the illusions they produce, they are uniquely
suited to reveal the rhetorical nature of (gender) identity.40 According
to Stefan Horlacher, “the literary text is the place where an effect such
as ‘essentiality’ or the illusion of a ‘genuine femininity or masculini-
ty,’ a ‘true personality core’ and an ‘authentic identity’ is created”,
while it simultaneously depicts the production of these effects and
illusions.41
In her essay “Beyond ‘The Subject’: Individuality in the Discursive
Condition”, the cultural theorist Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth addresses
this interrelatedness between language, identity formation and litera-
ture, emphasizing the way in which literature may transcend the de-
piction of the extra-literary world and imagine new forms of being.42
In accordance with postmodernity’s “turn toward language”, Ermarth
points out that “all systems operate like language” and are, hence,
based on differential relationships.43 Therefore, she applies the Saus-
surean model of language as a differential system to the conceptual-
ization of identity and concludes that personal identity may be under-
stood metaphorically as an act of parole within the larger context of a
langue.
Since “subjectivity always operates simultaneously in several dis-
cursive systems, whether their grammars and elements are verbal lan-
guages or other sign systems composed of gender relations, or fashion,
or politics”,44 Ermarth conceives of identity as “a kinetic subjectivity-
in-multicoded-process”.45 This non-essentialist, mutable subjectivity
Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2003, 38-39; and Dan P. MacAdams, “Narrative
Identity”, in Handbook of Identity Theory and Research, eds Seth J. Schwartz, Koen
Luyckx and Vivian L. Vignoles, New York: Springer, 2011, I, 99-115.
39 See Horlacher, “Literatur und die Überwindung der Dichotomien”, 50.
40 See ibid., 47-48.
41 Ibid., 48 (my translation).
42 See Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, “Beyond ‘The Subject’: Individuality in the Discur-
sive Condition”, New Literary History, XXXI/3 (Summer 2000), 405-19.
43 Ibid., 409.
44 Ibid., 410.
45 Ibid., 412.
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226 Bettina Schötz
is characterized by its sequence and its palimpsestuousness. The sub-
ject’s singularity results from “the unique and unrepeatable sequence”
of specifications made with regard to the multiple codes available in
the discursive condition at any one moment.46 According to Ermarth,
identity and gender identity are therefore not merely produced through
the Butlerian citational performance of pre-existing, culture-specific
narrative models or through the inverted reiteration of these models.47
Rather, gender identity is a sequence of metaphorical acts of parole.
Consequently, “The arena of subjectivity and freedom lies in th[e] gap
between the potential capacities of a differential code [langue] and
any particular specification of it [parole]”.48
Ermarth underpins the specific significance of literature when she
argues: “If ... languages are above all systems, then literary texts are
the most highly achieved specifications of those systems.” Since lite-
rary language has the “particular power to turn convention aside, to
reform the act of attention, to ground and limit the very formulation
that is prior to any discussion at all”,49 literary texts not only empha-
size the freedom that results from the difference between langue and
parole, but they may also illustrate new ways of using language and,
hence, constructing realities such as gender identity. Accordingly, the
diverse representations of masculinity in Kureishi’s short fiction ap-
pear to “ope[n] new powers in our collective discursive potentials, in
our power to revise social codes rather than merely to repeat the same
old exclusions and emphases, the same, same, old stories over and
over again”.50
The disruption of masculinity in Love in a Blue Time (1997)
The male characters in Kureishi’s first collection of short stories may
roughly be divided into three groups: first and foremost, we encounter
middle-aged men who are unhappily married, struggle to come to
terms with their (impending) role as fathers and are either dissatisfied
46 Ibid., 411-12.
47 See Horlacher, “Literatur und die Überwindung der Dichotomien”, 50-51.
48 Ermarth, “Beyond ‘The Subject’”, 411.
49 Ibid., 406.
50 Ibid., 415. With regard to the formation of a specific masculine identity, Peter F.
Murphy accordingly argues that literature has played a significant role “in reinforcing
the assumptions about masculinity and, at times, [in] helping to establish the norm of
manhood” through offering “other images, other roles, other options for men and
masculinity” (quoted in Stefan Horlacher’s introductory article to this volume, p. 4).
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“What Is a Man?” 227
with their moderate professional success or suffer from the realization
that they have pursued the wrong career. They question the life of
commitments they have been leading so far. Second, there are a num-
ber of youngish and middle-aged protagonists or minor characters
who have been living independent, antibourgeois vagabond lives but
have come to crave settling down, founding a family and embarking
on a career. Third, there is one instance of a previously married mid-
dle-aged man whose attempt to solve his mid-life crisis through di-
vorcing his ex-wife has proved futile, exacerbating his sense of fail-
ure.
Following Connell, these stories may be taken to portray the dis-
ruptions of the configurations of masculine practice which result from
the crisis tendencies inherent in the postfeminist gender order. Moore-
Gilbert aptly remarks, albeit with regard to both Love in a Blue Time
and Midnight All Day, that these short stories “testify to the pain and
confusion entailed by the changing nature of gender relations in the
contemporary period”.51
Concerning the first group of stories,52 this becomes especially ap-
parent in “D’accord, Baby”. In the heterodiegetic story, Billy’s mas-
culine identity appears to be severely unsettled by his wife Nicola,
who may be argued to personify all the three kinds of change Connell
has discerned in post-war gender relations.
In being employed at “a late-night TV discussion programme”,53
Nicola epitomizes, first of all, women’s increasing share in the work-
force, rendering the traditional, patriarchal notion of the male bread-
winner obsolete.54 She derives obvious satisfaction from her job, con-
scientiously preparing her interview of the ex-Maoist turned Catholic
reactionary Vincent Ertel for two years and travelling back and forth
between France and England. In the narrative, her professional suc-
cess stands in stark contrast to Billy’s mediocre career. Although he
has won renown for directing commercials, he has failed to establish
himself as a screenwriter.
51 Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, 156.
52 Other male protagonists who belong into this group are: Eshan in “Blue, Blue Pic-
tures of You”, Roy in “In a Blue Time” and Parvez in “My Son the Fanatic”. A slight-
ly different case is Baxter in the surreal story “The Flies”, for his sense of masculine
identity is similarly disrupted but he is still “youngish” (Kureishi, Collected Stories,
182).
53 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 51.
54 See Connell, Masculinities, 85.
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228 Bettina Schötz
The protagonist’s position of inferiority is aggravated by his wife’s
infidelity, which demonstrates both a reversal of power relations and a
change in relations of cathexis.55 Not only does Nicola follow her own
sexual desires self-assuredly in an extramarital affair with Vincent, but
she also refuses to offer her distressed husband an explanation for her
absence when she eventually comes home. To his enquiries into how
she has spent the night, she simply retorts: “What d’you think?”56 As
if conceding his wife’s position of power within their marriage, Billy
feels humiliated by Nicola but directs his aggression against his male
rival Vincent. His acknowledgement of his wife’s hegemonic position
might also account for the striking void that the narrative focalized
through Billy leaves in terms of the fatherhood of Nicola`s unborn
child.
Apart from his growing dissatisfaction with his chosen career and
his wife’s betrayal, his terror of becoming a father seems to disrupt
Billy’s sense of masculinity. Significantly, he appears to be aware of
the specific savoir littéraire. He decides “not only to study the great
books ... but to underline parts of and even to memorize certain pas-
sages”, for they “surely represented the highest point to which man’s
thought had flown; they had to include guidance”.57 In addition, the
study of world literature provides him with the opportunity to prove
himself as intellectually capable as his French rival, who threatens to
force him into what Connell calls a relation of subordination.58 The
middle-aged protagonist also intends to demonstrate his comparable
virility by sleeping with Vincent’s daughter Celestine. He is more than
pleased to notice other men’s lascivious stares at Celestine, for they
suggest that he is even outdoing Vincent in this respect. He reflects:
“This would not have happened with Nicola; only Vincent Ertel had
taken an interest in her.”
The short story takes a surprising and meaningful twist when
young Celestine refuses to be used as a mere instrument of male re-
venge and an object of male desire. Not only does she transform an
55 According to Connell, “Power relations show the most visible evidence of crisis
tendencies” owing to “a historic collapse of the legitimacy of patriarchal power, and a
global movement for the emancipation of women” (ibid., 84). On relations of cathexis
see ibid., 74.
56 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 53.
57 Ibid., 52.
58 See Connell, Masculinities, 78-79.
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“What Is a Man?” 229
of gender equality.
evening of simple “gratification”59 into a romantic rendezvous involv-
ing a candlelight dinner and waltzing to Chopin, but she also illus-
trates that Billy really is an “Old man”,60 who has not quite caught up
with the changes the gender order has been undergoing.
Celestine rather than Billy decides about the course of their even-
ing together, she is the one who leads their dance and their bed scene
culminates in Celestine’s seduction of Billy, being “on him vigorous-
ly”61 and making him do “everything she ask[s], for as long as she
want[s]”, including hitting her.62 She walks around her flat naked,
while he freezes so much that he refuses to take off his scarf. She
“looks into his eyes” domineeringly, when he only “glance[s] up”63
or, at the end, attempts to leave “Without looking back”.64 Finally,
Celestine informs Billy that she hardly ever sees her father, thus
rendering his attempt at revenge futile. The character of Celestine
functions in the narrative to indicate vividly what Billy finds hard to
accept with regard to his wife: the gender order has changed
irrevocably and men are forced to adapt their notions of masculinity to
the requirements
Having had his patriarchal world view seriously challenged, the
protagonist concludes “that life could not be grasped but only lived”.65
Nevertheless, this final emphasis on the activity of living one’s life
suggests that Billy will find a way out of his personal and professional
dilemma. He will overcome the disruption of his configuration of
masculine practice by fulfilling his “more ‘internal’” dreams, such as
“travel[ing] overland to Burma while reading Proust”.66
An integral part of the quandary in which the characters of the first
group find themselves is their fear that they have taken on too many
commitments too early – notably, to women who are actively revers-
ing the traditional gender order – and are therefore “missing out on”,
59 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 54.
60 Ibid., 59. Kureishi only added the phrase “old man” in the course of his revisions of
the story draft, having “Middle age, not sexual revenge, ... becom[e] the story’s
theme” (Kaleta, Hanif Kureishi, 166).
61 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 57.
62 Ibid., 58.
63 Ibid., 57.
64 Ibid., 58.
65 Ibid., 59.
66 Ibid., 56.
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230 Bettina Schötz
what Billy terms, “life’s meaner pleasures”.67 The youngish and mid-
dle-aged characters belonging to the second group find themselves in
the reverse situation. Late-twenties Brian’s reflection in “Blue, Blue
Pictures of You” summarizes their condition succinctly: “for a long
time he had been part of everything new, living not for the present but
for the next thing. He was beginning to see how little it had left him,
and he was afraid.”68 Like the autodiegetic narrator in the surreal story
“The Tale of the Turd”, these characters usually “dream ... of marriage
and of putting the children to bed”.69 However, they are frequently
unable to transform their configurations of masculine practice in a
way that enables them to enter a meaningful and lasting relationship
of equal power with a woman. Their struggles to adapt to the contem-
porary gender order often fail due to their persisting immaturity and
their concomitant difficulties in fulfilling “one’s adult obligations”.70
The protagonist in “Nightlight” represents the third category of
male characters in Love in a Blue Time. The unnamed man in his late
forties has recently entered an “inexplicable liaison”71 with a consid-
erably younger woman, whom he only meets on Wednesday nights to
have sex with in his barely lit basement (note the metaphorical allu-
sion to the Freudian Id). Although the focalizer of the heterodiegetic
narrative falls deeply in love with the anonymous woman, he finds
himself incapable of starting a conversation with her, for “he doesn’t
trust her, or any woman, not to let him down”72 and “he can’t take any
more disappointment”.73
67 Ibid., 54.
68 Ibid., 106. In addition to Brian, the group comprises the unnamed narrator-focalizer
in “The Tale of the Turd”, young Rocco in “Lately”, middle-aged Jimmy in “In a Blue
Time”, as well as Howard in “With Your Tongue down My Throat”.
69 Ibid., 131.
70 Buchanan, Hanif Kureishi, 91. Buchanan argues more generally that the heroes of
Love in a Blue Time, Midnight All Day and Intimacy are struggling to escape “from
the torments of adulthood”: “These books are sad, angry, despairing testaments to the
difficulties that attend one’s adult obligations, whether one accepts them fully or not.”
While this observation is certainly true for much of Kureishi’s short fiction, it disre-
gards that the male characters’ fight with maturity is frequently interlinked with their
struggle to come to terms with the changes that gender relations have been undergo-
ing.
71 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 135.
72 Ibid., 136.
73 Ibid., 137.
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“What Is a Man?” 231
He still suffers severely from the break-up of his marriage five
years before, which apparently resulted from his inability to please his
“liberated”, successful wife without losing himself, his notion of mas-
culine identity. Not without irony, the protagonist reflects:
For a while he did try to be the sort of man she might countenance. He
wept at every opportunity, and communicated with animals wherever
he found them. He tried not to raise his voice, though for her it was
‘liberating’ to get wild. Soon he didn’t know who he was supposed to
be. They both got lost. He dreaded going home.74
The fact that the woman for whose sake he eventually left his wife and
children separated from the protagonist in turn “without explana-
tion”75 suggests that the middle-aged character has been unable to
transform his masculine identity to meet the needs of a self-assured
female partner. While the protagonist holds women responsible for his
unhappiness, the narrative therefore reveals that he is struggling with
the requirements of a postfeminist gender order. However, his obser-
vation that London has become “A city of love vampires, turning from
person to person, hunting the one who will make the difference”,76
signifies that the struggle to adapt to the demands of gender equality is
a general rather than an individual phenomenon.
The protagonist’s predicament is exacerbated by the impending in-
solvency of his business and the fact that his divorce has left him with
nothing more than “a small flat, an old car and a shabby feeling”.
Having become the exact opposite of the “hegemonic man” he used to
be “en route to somewhere called Success”,77 his masculine identity is
being reduced to the mere fact of his insatiable sexual drive. Striking-
ly, his enigmatic lover appears to share such an understanding of mas-
culinity that equates masculine identity with virility, for she never
addresses her sex partner by name and simply “calls him, when neces-
sary, ‘man’”.78
74 Ibid., 136-37.
75 Ibid., 135.
76 Ibid., 138.
77 See Connell, Masculinities, 77.
78 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 135.
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232 Bettina Schötz
However, the narrative ends on a positive note: to the extremely
lonely79 protagonist, who is scared of “losing his hold”80 and who
harbors suicidal thoughts, the equally “wounded” and “hopeless”81
anonymous woman in her early thirties comes to personify his new
and “only hope”, his metaphorical nightly light. She has him recog-
nize that life is “worthwhile”82 and “helps [him] kill the terrible fear
he constantly bears that his romantic self has been crushed”.83 In por-
traying a male character who has striven to solve the disruption of his
masculine identity by divorcing his wife, that is actively changing his
life, this short story fittingly leads on to the main concerns in Midnight
All Day.
The transformation of masculinity in Midnight All Day (1999)
The majority of the stories collected in Midnight All Day focus on
male protagonists who have sought to overcome the disruption of their
masculine gender practices by leaving their wives and families, and
entering relationships with, for the most part, younger women. They
tend to consider this new start their last opportunity of achieving hap-
piness – “the ordeal of their life”84 – and are acutely aware of their
need to change their notions of masculinity. They contemplate “what
men, and fathers, could become, having been released, as women were
two decades earlier, from some of their conventional expectations”.85
Applying Connell’s terminology, these characters intend to effect a
transformation of their masculinity in accordance with the post-war
changes in gender relations of power, production and emotional at-
tachment. The insight that women are adopting stronger, more power-
ful positions within the gender order is also reflected on the level of
79 The protagonist of “Nightlight” finds his loneliness all the more difficult to over-
come since his ex-wife’s recently developed depression makes him fear that he has a
“toxic” effect on women (135, 136); however, this very thought grants him the satis-
faction of believing that he, at least, possesses some power over women.
80 Ibid., 134.
81 Ibid., 137.
82 Ibid., 140.
83 Ibid., 139. Since “Nightlight” ends on a positive note, Liggins, Maunder and Rob-
bins’ statement that “the narrative is typical of Kureishi’s portraits of the desires of
middle-aged men, tired of their families but dissatisfied by what else remains”, needs
to be qualified (Emma Liggins, Andrew Maunder and Ruth Robbins, The British
Short Story, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 252).
84 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 327.
85 Ibid., 265.
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“What Is a Man?” 233
the discourse: in “Girl” and “Sucking Stones”, we encounter the first
two female protagonists in Kureishi’s short fiction.86
Middle-aged Ian in the title story “Midnight All Day” may be tak-
en to exemplify the depiction of masculinity in this collection.87 After
six years of marriage, he has eventually left his wife Jane and their
daughter for the sake of Marina, a woman in her late twenties who has
made him “believe in romantic love”88 and for whom he has yearned
“for days and months and years”.89 His decision to leave his family
has been an extremely difficult one, one he has struggled with and
continues to struggle with for some time. After their break-up, he
finds himself unable to work in his film production company, taking
tranquillizers, walking around London drunkenly and “talking only to
the mad and derelict, people who did not know him”.90 He suffers
from the assumption that he will no longer be “the father he had want-
ed to be”, that is, “Close, encouraging, generous, available”. Thus, “he
had failed without wanting to”.91
Ian is saved by his friend Anthony, who persuades him to spend
some time with his pregnant girlfriend in Anthony’s Parisian flat in
order to find out whether they are actually able to live together. Here,
in the City of Love, Ian resolves to make a conscious attempt at
“be[ing] transformed from a man who could not do this with Jane, to a
man who could do it with Marina”, knowing that “the transformation
had to be rapid, before he lost her”. “If he could not get along with
this woman”, the protagonist reflects, “he couldn’t get along with any
of them and he was done for”.92 Then, “not only had he broken up his
86 While “With Your Tongue down My Throat” in Love in a Blue Time appears to be
narrated by Nina, the story hinges on the final revelation that Howard has been pre-
tending to speak with Nina’s voice.
87 He is therefore representative of a group of characters comprising Morgan in “A
Meeting, At Last”, John in “Four Blue Chairs”, Majid in “Girl”, Alan in “Morning in
the Bowl of Night”, Marcia’s unnamed husband in “Sucking Stones”, Nick in “That
Was Then”, and, arguably, Archie in “Strangers When We Meet”, who has not left his
wife but realizes that he will lose her if he fails to “follow her” renewed, more self-
assured personality (Kureishi, Collected Stories, 244).
88 Ibid., 336.
89 Ibid., 322.
90 Ibid., 324.
91 Ibid., 326.
92 Ibid., 330.
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234 Bettina Schötz
family for nothing, but he was left with nothing – nothing but him-
self”.93
The heterodiegetic narrative reveals that Ian’s marriage with Jane
has apparently failed because both partners used to demand an equally
strong position in their relationship. Neither was ready to make any
concessions to the other but fought to preserve their individual identi-
ty: “they had had to keep themselves apart, for fear of turning into
someone they both disliked. He did not want to use her words; she did
not want his opinions inside her.”94 That Ian used to be “afraid of
her”95 suggests that his strong and self-confident wife even tended to
overpower him. After they have separated, Jane reaffirms her self-
assured, powerful position by stating that Ian “didn’t try hard enough”
to make their marriage work.96 In so doing, she challenges the tradi-
tional patriarchal view of women as “angels in the house”, who are
responsible for pleasing their husbands and providing them with a
tidy, comfortable as well as peaceful home. Instead, she emphasizes
that men are equally responsible for establishing a harmonious and
lasting relationship.
Ian has to adapt his notion of masculinity quickly to these require-
ments of a relationship of equal power, rights and status because the
story suggests that Marina is as strong a woman as Jane. She self-
confidently proclaims: “I’ve always supported myself”,97 and knows
that “she could get by without him”. Marina even considers “returning
to London, finding a small flat, getting a job, and bringing up the child
alone”. The protagonist contemplates: “Many women did that now; it
seemed almost a matter of pride.”98
However, Ian doubts that he will be able to transform his gender
identity. He remembers that his mother used to regard him as too
noisy and energetic: “His being alive at all seemed to alarm her.” At
the same time, he is aware of how deeply he has hurt Jane, who at-
tempted to commit suicide after their marriage broke apart. Hence, Ian
is worried that he might scare off Marina by “his own furies, ... his
power, and ... the damage he believed that being a man might do”.99
93 Ibid., 327.
94 Ibid., 328.
95 Ibid., 333.
96 Ibid., 336.
97 Ibid., 323.
98 Ibid., 325.
99 Ibid., 331.
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“What Is a Man?” 235
ar.
While Marina herself is anxious that Ian might be persuaded by
others to end their relationship and return to his suicidal wife, the pro-
tagonist eventually finds motivation to try and “push against the
world”100 in art. When the couple visits the Musée d’Orsay, Ian is
enthralled by a sculpture: “And yet, looking at Rodin’s idea of Balzac
now, he thought: rather a beast than a castrated angel.” Ian takes the
“forceful figure” of the French writer as an example and male role
model, reflecting: “this was a man: someone who had taken action.”101
He decides to start anew and disregard the widely held expectation
that a husband must stay with his wife in any circumstances.102 Long-
ing “to be at home, in a house he liked, with a woman and children he
liked”, Ian seizes the opportunity to try and be happily “settled” for
good.103 Thus, crucially, the protagonist is encouraged to transform
his masculinity by means of the specific cultural knowledge offered
by art in general and the visual arts in particul 104
Emphasizing the constructedness and performativity of masculini-
ty in The Body and Seven Stories (2002)
The seven short stories collected alongside the novella “The Body”
appear to combine the respective concerns of the two previous collec-
tions: not only do they portray what Connell calls the “disruption” of a
male character’s gender identity, but they also depict that this disrup-
tion may be overcome either by reaffirming the patriarchal notion of
masculine identity or by transforming it.105
In these stories, the disruption of the middle-aged protagonists’
configurations of masculine practice results from various factors:
while in “Face to Face with You” Ed questions the relationship with
his girlfriend Ann, Harry (“Goodbye, Mother”), the unnamed father in
100 Ibid., 332.
101 Ibid., 331.
102 In response to the hostile reception of Intimacy, Kureishi has argued that the por-
trayal of “a man walking out on his partner” is still “‘a sacred taboo’” (Kureishi quot-
ed in Thomas, Hanif Kureishi, 134).
103 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 326-27.
104 A remarkable example of a belief in a specific savoir littéraire can be found in
“Morning in the Bowl of Night”, where the divorced protagonist’s hope for a happy
future with his young, pregnant girlfriend is complemented by his reading of Charles
Dickens’ Great Expectations (see ibid., 356).
105 Similarly, Connell has observed that the changed relations of power between men
and women cause some men to revert to “cults of masculinity”, while they induce
others “to support feminist reforms” (Connell, Masculinities, 85).
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236 Bettina Schötz
“Hullabaloo in the Tree” and Mal (“The Real Father”) are struggling
with the demands of their roles as fathers. Whereas Ed and Harry ad-
ditionally doubt whether they have chosen suitable careers, Mal and
Rick (“Remember This Moment, Remember Us”) are dissatisfied with
their moderate professional success. In “Straight”, the protagonist
Brett is even calling into question his entire lifestyle.
However, all male characters manage to solve their mid-life crises
in the course of these stories. Some of them realize that they are “not
so bad”106 and merely lack hope as well as self-confidence (Ed, the
father, Rick). Others become acutely aware of their need to
“change”107 their notions of masculinity. Therefore, they start “adjust-
ing”108 to the expectations of their female partners in order to save
their relationships (Harry) or they begin to direct their attention from
ephemeral to permanent pleasures (Brett). Living in relationships of
equal power, rights and status, those protagonists who have children
are increasingly concerned with the requirements of fatherhood (Har-
ry, Rick, the father, Mal). They are striving to adapt to their bigger
share in raising their children in a postfeminist society. In so doing,
the male characters do not only question the best way of fatherhood,
from authoritarian to permissive parent, but they also probe their rela-
tions of power with their children.
While Love in a Blue Time and Midnight All Day tend to explore
notions of masculinity implicitly, The Body and Seven Stories con-
spicuously brings them to the fore. After fourteen-year-old Heather
has run away from boarding school, one of the things she longs to
discuss with her father in “Goodbye, Mother” is: “What is a man?”109
While Harry contemplates his daughter’s question, he comes to revise
his initial materialistic understanding of masculinity: “Money was a
way of measuring good things. The worth of a man had to be related
to what he was able to earn.”110 He eventually arrives at the conclu-
sion that
... a man was someone who should know, who was supposed to know.
Someone who knew what was going on, who had a vision of where
106 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 505.
107 See ibid., 540, 549, 551, 557.
108 Ibid., 540.
109 Ibid., 532.
110 Ibid., 519.
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“What Is a Man?” 237
they were all heading, separately and as a family. Sanity was a great
responsibility.111
The narrative reveals that Harry’s wife Alexandra used to “run their
lives, the house and the garden, with forethought, energy and preci-
sion”;112 she has “kept them together and pushed them forward”.113
Alexandra therefore seems to fit Harry’s definition of a “man” better
than he does. Hence, it may be argued that this short story highlights
that masculinity – and, arguably, femininity – is a socio-culturally
constructed and, following Butler, performative category rather than a
biological given. In pointing out that women may possess masculine
traits, the narrative indicates that women’s performance of their gen-
der identity is independent from their biological differences from men.
The story refutes traditional stereotypes of gender roles and challenges
women’s inferior position in gender relations of power, production
and cathexis. Therefore, “Goodbye, Mother” is one of many stories
which may serve to invalidate the recurrent claim that Kureishi’s mid-
dle works are misogynistic.114
The protagonist in “Hullabaloo in the Tree” appears to be an in-
structive example of the collection’s increased emphasis on both fa-
therhood and the performativity of masculinity. The middle-aged man
is primarily, and in fact exclusively, defined by his father role. He is
referred to as “father” by the heterodiegetic narrator, his three sons as
well as his young fiancée call him “Daddy”, and he ultimately speaks
of himself as “Daddy”. Additionally, the protagonist remains unnamed
throughout the narrative and thus lacks an individual identity apart
from that relative to his children. Taking into consideration that ever
since the Victorian Age it used to be women who were solely defined
by their roles in relation to (male) others as daughters, wives and/or
mothers, the protagonist may be argued to epitomize the changes gen-
der relations have undergone in the wake of feminism.
The story sets in as the father and his seven-year-old twins of his
first marriage as well as the two-year-old son of his present relation-
ship leave the playground one Sunday morning and cross the park,
heading for a café. Since he delights in the fact that all of his sons
111 Ibid., 539.
112 Ibid., 530.
113 Ibid., 531.
114 See Thomas, Hanif Kureishi, 4.
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238 Bettina Schötz
admire him and have even taken to imitating him, the protagonist in-
tends to impress his children by kicking their blue ball as high as he
can: “What were fathers for if not to kick balls high into the air while
their sons leaned back, exclaiming, ‘Wow, you’ve nearly broken
through the clouds! How do you do that, Daddy?’”115 However, the
father immediately experiences the difficulties of living up to his own
expectations and that of his sons: he initially miskicks the ball, and
then catapults it into the very top of a tree when he does hit it while
himself falling over into the mud.
After his first attempts at getting the ball down by throwing things
at it have failed, the father begins to continue their walk, wanting to
have a cup of coffee at the café and planning to replace the cheap plas-
tic ball with a new one. However, the protagonist is instantly halted by
the following thought: “Did he, though, want his sons to see him as
the sort of man to kick balls into trees and stroll away?”116 He “grit[s]
his teeth”,117 overcomes his fear of “any act of physical bravery” and
climbs into the tree, where he feels insecure, anxious and “a slip away
from hospital and years of pain”.118 When a nine-year-old girl climbs
higher into the tree than he does and he has to watch her produce “a
tremendous shaking, far greater than his own”, the father seizes the
opportunity to get down and bring himself into a position where he
may “pick up the ball when the girl knocked it down”.119 However, it
takes another man who has noticed the group of bystanders around the
tree to climb up, vigorously shake the tree and finally get the ball
down by poking at it with a long branch.
This seemingly trivial and highly comic episode may be taken to
teach the protagonist an important lesson in two respects. The son of
an Indian immigrant has questioned his permissive behavior towards
his sons ever since he has met an Indian friend in the park, “who’d
been shocked by the disrespect and indiscipline of the father’s chil-
dren” and who has deprecatingly remarked: “I know we live here now,
but you have let them become Western, in the worst way!”120 Howev-
er, when the protagonist receives help from another man, he is re-
115 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 486.
116 Ibid., 488.
117 Ibid., 490.
118 Ibid., 489.
119 Ibid., 490.
120 Ibid., 485.
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“What Is a Man?” 239
minded of the way in which his Papa used to be helped with his car by
his neighbors. Thus, he realizes that his permissive style of parenting
is not only closely linked with his apparent adaptation to the British
and arguably Western way of life, which has him consider himself
black British rather than Indian,121 but it is also connected with his
personal experience of a father capable of conceding weaknesses and
accepting help from others. The tree episode has the father become
aware of himself and his attitudes towards fatherhood. He concludes:
Much as he might want to, he couldn’t bring up his kids by strict rules
or a system. He could only do it, as people seemed to do most things
in the end, according to the way he was, the way he lived in the world,
as an example and guide. This was harder than pretending to be an au-
thority, but more true.122
Moreover, the events appear to cause the protagonist to realize that
there is no one way of performing a masculine identity. Hitherto, his
masculinity has been disrupted by “a kind of exhausting chaos and a
struggle, in his mind, to work out what he should be doing, and who
he had to be to satisfy others”.123 However, the successful retrieval of
the ball eases his worries and alleviates his fears. It assures the father
that he will achieve his objectives and please others if he stays true to
himself and “the way he was”.
Significantly, the story presents both depicted performances of
masculinity as equally worthwhile and effective. The protagonist
seems to be the mere opposite of the traditional, patriarchal notion of
masculinity. The narrative informs us that he likes eating buttered
croissants and drinking “semi-skimmed decaf latte”. He is surprised
when his children listen to him, and he is bad at practical tasks. Never-
theless, he reaches his goal of retrieving his sons’ ball because he is
able to accept help from others irrespective of their gender or age.
While the middle-aged man who manages to get the ball does not
look the part of the tough, brave and effective male achiever either, he
proves “surprisingly strong” and clever.124 The father of two girls
121 Thus, this short story illustrates how closely issues of masculinity, or gender in
general, are interlinked with those of ethnicity (see Connell, “The Social Organization
of Masculinity”, 75-76).
122 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 492.
123 Ibid., 486.
124 Ibid., 491.
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looks unfit and wears thick glasses, a pink shirt and office shoes. Yet,
he proclaims self-confidently: “Don’t worry, I’m here”,125 and in a
stereotypically masculine manner he “spat in his palms and rubbed
them together”126 before he climbs the tree and gets the ball.
Although “the helpful man” jumps from the tree “with his arms
raised in triumph”,127 adopting a typical male winner’s pose, he nei-
ther praises himself nor is he praised by any of the other characters as
the hero of the story. Instead, both men happily shake hands. In so
doing, the office worker appears to thank the father for such a physical
adventure, while the latter expresses his gratitude for the former’s help
in getting their ball. Their handshake seems to symbolize their equal
status in contrast to what Connell calls a male relation of “hegemony”
and “subordination”.128 As a result, it may be argued that the tree epi-
sode signifies metaphorically that masculinity is performative, and
that each man’s notion of masculine identity as well as their concomi-
tant conceptions of fatherhood are therefore of equal value.
The depiction of new forms of masculinity in New Stories (2010)
Whereas masculinity is either the main or a subsidiary subject matter
in the overwhelming majority of the short stories collected in Love in
a Blue Time, Midnight All Day and The Body and Seven Stories, the
short fiction first published as New Stories in Kureishi’s Collected
Stories contains three out of eight stories that focus on other themes.
“The Dogs” thematizes killer dogs, while “Weddings and Behead-
ings” is concerned with life in a totalitarian regime at war, and “The
Assault” deals with the cruelty of putting another person under psy-
chological pressure. Hence, the writer’s most recent short fiction
demonstrates an increasing interest in subjects other than ethnicity and
masculinity. Remarkably, in two of these three stories the protagonists
are women.
Those short stories that are concerned with masculinity portray
older characters than the earlier collections. The male protagonists are
no longer in their thirties or early forties but are forty-five, fifty or in
their mid-fifties. While all of these characters go through a mid-life
crisis, Jake’s (“A Terrible Story”) and Mike’s (“The Decline of the
125 Ibid., 490.
126 Ibid., 491.
127 Ibid., 492.
128 See Connell, Masculinities, 77-79.
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“What Is a Man?” 241
West”) distress results from external causes rather than a self-critical
“sense of wasted purpose and many wrong moves made”.129 Jake is
left by his wife for the sake of another man and Mike’s suffering is
exacerbated by the global financial crisis.
Although most protagonists come to realize how they may solve
their predicaments, their solutions are far more pragmatic than those
of earlier characters. Jake struggles to accept that he has lost “the
woman [he] still love[s] and [has] wanted more than any other”,130
while he sues for custody of their two daughters. In “Long Ago Yes-
terday”, the homosexual theatre and film producer Billy comes to bear
his inability to have children of his own, but he decides to abandon his
parents’ passive way of life and actively strives to fulfil his dream of
becoming an artist. Max, the protagonist in “Maggie”, learns to live
with his past decision to sublimate his personal desires for the sake of
a less self-fulfilling and more conventional, apolitical life of a hus-
band and father; he appreciates the value of having a family and in-
tends to find meaning in art: “Writing poetry, drawing, learning to
paint.”131 In the short story “Phillip”, Fred considers his life
“wretched”,132 but he discovers “even now I am capable still of rebel-
ling against myself”,133 and he contemplates “go[ing] back to serious
scribbling”.134 Finally, Mike puts up with his sudden unemployment
and his unhappy family life, solving his crisis through stoicism or,
arguably, failing to resolve it satisfactorily.135
Strikingly, all heterosexual protagonists live or have lived in rela-
tionships with strong women who seem to epitomize the recent chang-
es in the gender order. Following Connell, Jake’s wife Julie may be
taken to personify the way in which gender relations of cathexis have
changed. She is a rare example in Kureishi’s short fiction of a woman
who asserts her right to follow her own sexual desires freely by having
129 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 600, the quote is from the story “Long Ago Yester-
day”.
130 Ibid., 668.
131 Ibid., 519.
132 Ibid., 643.
133 Ibid., 650.
134 Ibid., 649.
135 As the protagonists age, memory and the role of the past for the present become
vital concerns. In fact, Billy, Max and Fred solve their dilemmas by being confronted
with important figures from their past who enable them both to come to terms with
past experiences that continue to trouble them, and to gain a better understanding of
themselves at present.
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242 Bettina Schötz
an extramarital affair and eventually separating from her husband.136
Furthermore, Max and Fred are “house-husbands”137 of highly suc-
cessful women. While Max’s wife, “the glamorous Lucy”,138 is mak-
ing a name for herself as a film producer, Fred’s unnamed wife is a
property investor, who has the couple succeed at property to such an
extent that Fred “never ... [has] to do another honest day’s work”.139
Hence, in both couples the production relations characteristic of a
patriarchal society are inverted completely: the men perform the tradi-
tionally feminine task of caring for house and children, whereas the
women act as the families’ breadwinners.
While previous Kureishi stories have hinted at several characters’
homosexual inclinations, Billy is the first explicitly homosexual pro-
tagonist. Thus, he personifies another change Connell discerns in rela-
tions of emotional attachment – that “lesbian and gay sexuality” have
developed into “a public alternative within the heterosexual order”.140
In addition, the eponymous character in “Phillip” is the first bisexual
character in Kureishi’s short fiction, signifying yet a further change in
gender relations of cathexis.141
The depicted changes in the gender order are frequently concomi-
tant with the male characters’ awareness that gender identity is per-
formative. Thus, various protagonists deliberately attempt to bend
stereotypical gender roles. Although earlier stories have already por-
trayed male characters who used to wear make-up and high heels dur-
ing their adolescence (“That Was Then” in Midnight All Day) or who
are willing to support their female partners by fulfilling household
duties, these most recent stories explicitly emphasize reversals of gen-
der roles and attempts at transcending gender barriers.
Max is a self-declared “feminist house-husband”, who “had ‘run
the house’ and attended to the children while his wife established her-
self as a producer”. To his friend Maggie, he boasts: “All I do is sup-
136 According to Connell, women have come to claim “sexual pleasure and control of
their own bodies, which has affected heterosexual practice as well as homosexual”
(Masculinities, 85).
137 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 621.
138 Ibid., 626.
139 Ibid., 647.
140 Connell, Masculinities, 85.
141 Since bisexuality is already a main concern of Kureishi’s debut novel, Buddha of
Suburbia, this development is markedly late.
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“What Is a Man?” 243
ist (Jake).
port women.”142 While Fred used to experiment with a “‘feminine’
position” in his sexual relationship with Phillip,143 he presently
defines himself exclusively through his father role. “I was beginning
to wonder”, the autodiegetic narrator reflects, “that if I wasn’t a father,
what in fact was I?”.144 Billy remembers how he used to replace his
mother, who was overtaxed by “the uproar and demands of two boys”
and “died herself, inside”.145 He has performed the role of “Dad’s girl,
his servant, his worshipper”146 during childhood and has been “a
handmaiden”147 ever since. Having come out as gay in his youth, he
also used to apply make-up before catching the train to London.
However progressive the characters may seem in this respect, the
postfeminist gender order has also deeply disrupted their notions of
masculinity. Two out of five protagonists are in therapy (Billy, Max)
and a third is being advised to see a psychotherap 148
While Kureishi’s middle works have repeatedly been criticized for
their alleged shift in attention from political to personal issues, the
explicit critique of materialism, consumerism and capitalism inherent
in his latest short stories amply demonstrates how unjustified such
accusations have been and continue to be. This is especially apparent
in “The Decline of the West”, a direct response to the credit crunch.
The story provides an instructive example of the new forms of mascu-
linity that Kureishi’s latest short fiction tends to portray and relates
these emergent notions of masculinity not only to the requirements of
a changing gender order but also to other societal developments.
After he has been made redundant from his job in corporate fi-
nance unexpectedly, Mike comes home early to find his fifteen-year-
old son Tom behave disrespectfully towards him, his eleven-year-old
son Billy patronize him and his wife Imogen treat him indifferently,
while all of them ask for further material possessions. Thus, the forty-
five-year-old protagonist realizes that his actual wife and children are
in stark contrast to the dream vision of his family. During “the most
142 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 621.
143 Ibid., 640.
144 Ibid., 643.
145 Ibid., 609.
146 Ibid., 607.
147 Ibid., 608.
148 This is in stark contrast to Harry’s initially strong hostility towards his wife’s
interest in hypnotherapy in the previous collection of short stories (“Goodbye, Moth-
er”).
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244 Bettina Schötz
desolate” tube journey of his life “he’d been looking forward to open-
ing the door into the warm hall, hearing the voices of his wife and
children, and seeing the cat come down the stairs to rub itself against
him”.149 When a fuse blows and the entire house on the prosperous
outskirts of London goes dark and silent, disillusioned and heavily
indebted Mike contemplates “how tempting it was – suddenly would
be best – to die!”.150 However, he pulls the lever, metaphorically start-
ing “their awful world ... up once more with its humming and vibrat-
ing”.151
Significantly, the protagonist’s suicidal thoughts appear to be not
only connected to the disruption of patriarchal notions of masculinity
but also to the global financial crash. In fact, it may be argued that
“The Decline of the West” is Kureishi’s first short story that explicitly
emphasizes the significance of the socio-historical context for the
formation of (gender) identity.
While the heterodiegetic narrator informs us that “Mike and his
wife considered themselves to be equals”,152 this observation only
holds true with regard to what Connell terms power relations and rela-
tions of cathexis. Although Imogen works for a charity three days a
week and is already at home when her husband returns, she does not
leave any of the family’s organic dinner over for Mike but expects
him to live off the frozen meals he finds inedible. Furthermore, her
powerful position in their marriage becomes obvious when she orders
her husband to clean not only his plate but also those of his entire
family. Since she generally refuses to do any of the household duties
and their children do not carry out the chores either, the family em-
ploys a pregnant Bulgarian immigrant as a cleaner, thereby establish-
ing their Western position of hegemony.
Moreover, Mike and Imogen’s relationship is emotionally de-
tached. Imogen is insensitive to her husband’s distress and apparently
unaware of the fact that he has come home earlier than usual. It is only
after having had a few drinks, taking a bath and helping Tom with his
homework that she considers listening to the news Mike wants to tell
her. She asks, “Is it attention you’re after?”,153 objectifies him by
149 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 651.
150 Ibid., 655.
151 Ibid., 656.
152 Ibid., 658.
153 Ibid., 659.
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“What Is a Man?” 245
briefly stroking his head like that of a pet, and insists on her need to
relax before they may have a conversation. Hence, Imogen seems to
misunderstand gender equality by leading a self-absorbed life, indif-
ferent to her partner. Furthermore, by calling her husband “mad” and a
“ridiculous, foolish man” in front of their children, she undermines his
position of authority, and arguably power, with regard to their sons
and inspires them to treat their father as callously and disrespectfully
as she does.
Concerning gender relations of production, however, Mike and
Imogen’s marriage follows the traditional patriarchal pattern. He per-
forms the role of the breadwinner, whilst she acts as “the family con-
science” through her poorly paid work for a charity. The narrative
focalized through Mike informs us accordingly: “Unlike some of his
friends, he didn’t want a woman who worked as hard as him, a woman
who was never at home.”154 The protagonist’s insistence on traditional
production relations suggests the extent to which he suffers from his
loss of patriarchal hegemony in every other respect. However, Imogen
has “begun to feel ‘unfulfilled’” by her subordinate economic position
and she has been “planning to train as a therapist”. In so doing, she
threatens to invert this type of gender relations within their marriage,
too, and challenges her husband’s position as the family’s only – and,
in fact, insufficient – breadwinner: “‘Once I’m earning,’ she argued,
‘this whole family will be much better off.’”155 Consequently, Mike
will soon be left in a position of power over no one but himself, a
power that he has recently proven by giving up smoking.156
Although it has become obvious that the disruption of Mike’s con-
figuration of masculine practice is directly linked to the reversal of
patriarchal gender relations that his self-confident and strong-willed
wife demands, it may be argued that it is also triggered off, or at least
exacerbated, by the credit crunch. When the protagonist loses his posi-
tion as the head of department and is forced “to execute the employees
he had engaged and, in two weeks’ time, pack up and remove him-
self”,157 he comes to question both the financial system and the capi-
talist economy on which it is based. Mike reflects on a remark an ac-
154 Ibid., 657.
155 Ibid., 658.
156 Ibid., 651.
157 Ibid., 653.
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246 Bettina Schötz
quainted sculptor has made about the “fundamentalist” nature of his
profession and the “cult of money” he is serving,158 and he concludes:
Since capitalism was cracking under the weight of its contradictions as
the Marxists had predicted – neither the communists or Islamists being
responsible for its collapse – the family would have to find a smaller
place, sharing the household duties like everyone else. If there was no
comfort, what then were the consolations of capitalism? If there was
no moral accretion, nor any next life, why would anyone support it?159
A more implicit critique of capitalism seems to be inherent in the fact
that Mike’s twelve-hour working days have alienated him from his
family (and vice versa), as well as himself. Not only is he “restless”160
and, as Imogen insists, in need of a hobby, but he also fails to think of
anything else that he could do for a living apart from corporate financ-
ing. In addition, the short story appears to level a more general criti-
cism at materialism. The depiction of a family that equals an assembly
of selfish human beings, each following their own interests and no one
genuinely caring for the other, indicates the way in which materialism
inspires “vanity and greed”,161 but effaces immaterial, ideal as well as
ethical values and meaningful emotional bonds. Having become una-
ble to provide his family with the “continuous material improvement”
they ask for,162 Mike realizes that in the eyes of his wife and sons he
has become a mere “Delivery Man”. They regard him as someone
who earns money in order to fulfill their wishes rather than an uncon-
ditionally loved husband and father.163 This decline in sincere family
relationships, respectable behavior towards others and ethical princi-
ples becomes strikingly apparent when Tom, who “for fun ... some-
times put his father in a headlock and pulled him round the room”,
shouts at Mike: “Leave me alone! Don’t ever talk to me again! ... Fuck
off, evil old man, just die!”164 The loss of ethical values and decrease
in serious, long-lasting relationships is also observable outside the
family circle: not only does the family’s neighborhood exploit skilled
158 Ibid., 654.
159 Ibid., 658-59.
160 Ibid., 651.
161 Ibid., 652.
162 Ibid., 655.
163 Ibid., 657.
164 Ibid., 656.
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“What Is a Man?” 247
Polish laborers as cheap workforce,165 but the unemployed Mike also
predicts that his prosperous friends and acquaintances will shun him
now that he is unable to maintain the family’s high standard of living,
rendering him “a sort of ‘disappeared’”.166
Thus, this short story seems to be a highly perceptive analysis of
contemporary British and, ultimately, Western society concerning not
only the shift from a patriarchal society to one defined by gender
equality, but also the effects of an excessive belief in materialism.
Both social developments result in a severe disruption of the protago-
nist’s notion of masculinity. However, Mike is unable to transform his
gender identity in a way that may satisfy him and solves his quandary
by stoically putting up with the role of the “Delivery Man” he has
been allocated in a materialistic society.
After “My Son the Fanatic” (1994),167 this story may once again
prove Kureishi’s literary prescience. Read against the background of
the violent riots in various English cities in August 2011, “The De-
cline of the West” appears to be a far-sighted warning of the effects
that excessive materialism and consumerism may have on people’s
values and their relationships with others, especially with regard to the
generation growing up under the aegis of material possessions.
Whereas Mike’s involuntary transformation into a “Delivery Man”
signals the decline in immaterial values and emotional bonds, Tom
personifies the young generation’s aggression and violence that results
from such a lack of ethical principles and meaningful relationships.
Although the protagonist’s father used to stress Mike’s good fortune
of having grown up without the horrible experience of war, arguing
that he is “one who escaped the twentieth century”, the narrator mean-
ingfully adds: “But not the twenty-first.”168
Conclusion
Hanif Kureishi’s short stories are indicative of the same interest in
“the increasingly popular genre of ‘male testimonial’” that has already
165 Ibid., 652.
166 Ibid., 655.
167 First published in The New Yorker in 1994, “My Son the Fanatic” is arguably one
of Kureishi’s most anthologized short stories because it wisely predicts the danger of
Islamic fundamentalism that results from the failure of Western societies to permit
immigrants a meaningful life in their midst.
168 Kureishi, Collected Stories, 653.
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248 Bettina Schötz
been particularly apparent in Buddha of Suburbia.169 However, in his
short fiction Kureishi shifts his focus “From the broad canvas of pano-
ramic, picaresque novels ... inwards, to explore male interiority”.170
Accordingly, Thomas summarizes the critical reception of Kureishi’s
middle works by stating that “the main debate ... has centered not on
representations of ethnicity [or, the alleged lack of these representa-
tions] but on masculinity”. And she continues: “Here the critical di-
vide has been between those who see Kureishi exploring new forms of
masculinity in a postfeminist era, tackling the contemporary break-
down of heterosexual relationships with honesty and insight, and those
who argue that these works are misogynistic.”171
Following Connell’s sociological analyses, it has become apparent
that Kureishi’s short fiction is chiefly concerned with the effects of the
post-war changes in gender relations of power, production and cathex-
is onto the conceptualization of masculine identity. The discussion of
select stories typical of the respective short story collections suggest
that the exploration of contemporary masculinities proceeds in four
steps: first, Love in a Blue Time mainly depicts the disruption of mas-
culinities resulting from the changes of the gender order in the post-
feminist era;172 second, Midnight All Day chiefly portrays the trans-
formations necessitated by these changes; third, The Body and Seven
Stories tends to emphasize the performativity of masculinity as a ne-
cessary prerequisite for any transformation; and fourth, New Stories
imagines new forms of masculinities such as the homosexual man, the
bisexual man, the “house-husband”, and the “Delivery Man”. These
diverse representations of masculinity indicate that the chameleon-like
short story genre is highly suited to experiment with various kinds of
(gender) identity.
In accord with Ermarth, it may be argued that Kureishi’s short fic-
tion does not simply “repeat the same old ... emphases, the same,
same, old stories over and over again”,173 but increasingly uses the
power of literary language to transcend traditional, patriarchal notions
of masculinity in order to arrive at alternative configurations of mas-
169 Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, 192. Moore-Gilbert argues that Hanif Kureishi’s
Buddha of Suburbia was instrumental in the very foundation of this genre, influencing
Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (1992).
170 Ranasinha, Hanif Kureishi, 105.
171 Thomas, Hanif Kureishi, 4.
172 See Volkmann, “Explorationen des Ichs”, 149.
173 Ermarth, “Beyond ‘The Subject’”, 415.
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“What Is a Man?” 249
culine practice. In so doing, the stories illustrate that masculinity is not
an essentialist biological given but a sociocultural construction.
Not only do the short stories question stereotypical notions of gen-
der roles and gender boundaries,174 but they also imagine new possi-
bilities for the formation of masculine identity. The majority of Ku-
reishi’s short fiction challenge traditional conceptions of masculinity
through the portrayal of known alternatives – such as men willing to
enter relationships of equal power, rights and status with their female
partners, homosexual men or bisexual men. Additionally, a few stories
introduce new concepts of masculinity, that is the positively connoted
“feminist house-husband” or the “Delivery Man” as the unfavorable
by-product of a more and more materialistic society. Thus, the short
stories increase the systemic potential of narrating or writing mascu-
linity and, in accordance with Ermarth, “contribut[e] ... directly to
social health”.175 Significantly, male characters like Billy in
“D’accord, Baby” and Alan in “Morning in the Bowl of Night” are
acutely aware of the savoir littéraire demonstrated by Kureishi’s short
stories. For, apart from philosophy, they turn to literature for “guid-
ance” on how to construct their masculine identity.
Although Kureishi’s short fiction predominantly focuses on mascu-
linities, it is far from misogynistic. While there are unsympathetic
female characters like Imogen in “The Decline of the West”, the sto-
ries also depict an abundance of sympathetic female figures. Indeed,
short stories such as “D’accord, Baby”, “Four Blue Chairs” and
“Goodbye, Mother” allow for an outright pro-feminist reading. More-
over, by having the male protagonists serve as focalizers, the stories
provide an unvarnished, unsparing and critical portrait of the mostly
middle-aged men who have frequently left their first families and
struggle to come to terms with their self-assured female partners.
Nevertheless, criticism may be leveled at the fact that in the majority
of the short stories female characters merely serve to illustrate the way
in which gender relations have been changing and explain the mid-life
crises the male characters are suffering. Only four stories possess fe-
male protagonists.
In approaching Kureishi’s short fiction from a masculinity studies
perspective, it becomes obvious that the allegedly postcolonial writer
partakes in the contemporary discourse on masculinities. This illus-
174 See especially “Goodbye, Mother” (Kureishi, Collected Stories, 507-48).
175 Ermarth, “Beyond ‘The Subject’”, 411.
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250 Bettina Schötz
trates that the (re)negotiation of masculine identity has become a vital
concern in a postfeminist society. But it also points to the inadequacy
of both perceiving Kureishi first and foremost as a black rather than a
British writer, and reading his works solely through the lens of post-
colonial theory. Laurenz Volkmann rightly emphasizes that feminism,
gender studies and masculinity studies have yet to discover the “post-
ethnic Kureishi”.176 Accordingly, the present discussion of the writer’s
short stories has attempted to show how the frequently neglected mid-
dle and recent works may be fruitfully investigated with the tools pro-
vided by masculinity studies. After all, the singular breadth and diver-
sity that is characteristic of Kureishi’s œuvre can only come to the fore
if critics employ a similarly wide range of analytical approaches.
176 Volkmann, “Explorationen des Ichs”, 143 (my translation).
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