Amnesia and the Problem of "Invisible" Institutions

Faraday frets throughout The Little Stranger about the impending implementation of the National Health Service, a governmental body launched in 1948 that guaranteed, through public taxes and other fees, free health care for all UK citizens. He laments to the reader, “Now, with the Health Service looming, private doctoring seemed done for” (33). After he and Caroline become engaged, he experiences a moment of blind panic about how to provide for them as a couple if he loses his practice because of the institutionalization of healthcare. Now, doctors such as Faraday will be obligated to serve the public good rather than cultivate relationships with clients who can pay them the most (or at all). This is the story about institutions that the novel pushes to the foreground and that the narrator and his colleagues discuss most openly.

More interesting, however, is when a character is unaware of his participation or support in an institution. How do conscious participation and endorsement play a role in the power of the institution? For Kindley and his claims about the philanthropic endorsement of modern literature and criticism, “Big Criticism” and “Big Theory” would, he suggests, like to see themselves (and in fact often do see themselves) as being divorced from any “large bureaucratic organization” (81).  Instead, these writers and critics would like to see their work as “a preserve of the aristocratic, precapitalist values of love and honor” (85). What would it mean for Big Criticism and its offshoots to forget the influence of institutions on their historical present? Kindley doesn’t quite explain, although it is clear that from the publication of the article that he thinks the origins are worth remembering.

In Waters’s novel, we see the effects of this institutional “amnesia” not in Faraday’s fear of the NHS, but in his subconscious support of the more "invisible" institution[1] of the British aristocracy. On the surface of the narrative, Faraday expresses pride in his working class roots and solidarity with his maidservant mother. However, his latent desire to become master of Hundreds Hall is only one aspect of his more general support of the aristocratic upper class and his desire for its continuation. An emblematic moment of his “belief” in the aristocracy is when he looks at Caroline late in the novel and thinks, “the sight of her, with her housemaid’s hands, unreasonably annoyed me” (327). Later, he examines those hands closer and chides, “Look what you’ve done to yourself. You perfect child! There’ll be no more of this sort of thing, you know, once we are married” (331). He can’t stand this material evidence of the decay of the upper class, yet can’t consciously admit his dedication to this institution. For our narrator, this amnesia has a very clear result. As one of Faraday’s colleagues puts it, “the subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners… a creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away” (389). An inability to see or remember one’s institutional indebtedness, for this novel, causes a sort of pathological rupture in the self.

The actions of Faraday’s poltergeist don’t provide a very specific way into the question of Kindley’s institutions. However, more generally, I think we can see the novel as offering a sort of cautionary reading, portraying the dangers of forgetting that many ways of thinking are institutionally inherited not merely “naturally” occurring.

word count: 605

---

[1] Here, I am admittedly using the term “institution” in a different way than Kindley, who seems to restrict the word to more “official” organizations. You could certainly take issue with my argument by sticking to a stricter, more material definition of "institution."