“This Blessed House” explores camp—a style characterized by kitsch like this
Jesus-themed snow globe—as a coping strategy for life in a material world.
The Hypocrisy of Camp
Material Culture in Lahiri’s “This Blessed House”
Tyler Nickl
M
aterial culture features prominently in Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Detailed descriptions of saris, curries, and temples appear throughout the text,
and Lahiri is careful to write the fabric and texture of her characters’ lives
into her stories. Readers likely appreciate the way these details exoticize
her themes and plots. However, these details do more than pique r­ eaders’
interest. Lahiri often uses her characters’ material culture as emblems
of the tensions and contradictions in their lives. Her short story “This
Blessed House” is no exception. Through her use of material culture in
this story, Lahiri explores and critiques the possibility of camp—a style
that ironically exhibits poor taste—as a way to relieve some of those
­tensions created by divergent and incoherent experiences of the material
objects that surround us.
In the story, a young Indian couple, Sanjeev and Twinkle, have just
married and have begun to settle into their newly purchased Connecticut
home. As they clean and unpack, they begin to find devotional ­trinkets
left by the Christians who sold the house. Little porcelain effigies, gospelthemed snow globes, and posters and postcards of saints litter the house.
Twinkle decides to display the kitschy knickknacks around their home;
Sanjeev, more traditional and socially self-conscious about his Indian
roots, protests. Gradually the story reveals that Twinkle and Sanjeev’s differences run deeper than their preferences about what sits on the mantel.
Sanjeev grew up in India, attended MIT, and approaches his work with
a seriousness that manifests an anxiety for his peers’ opinions of him.
Twinkle was raised in California and approaches life with an uncalculated
levity that makes her fun but also shallow, spontaneous, and insincere.
They quarrel as Twinkle’s boredom with her new life provokes Sanjeev
to frustration. In the story’s final scene, Twinkle gushes about her kitsch
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discoveries to some dinner guests. To Sanjeev’s discomfort, the story
incites a group treasure hunt around the house to look for more of the
kitsch. As a dinner guest emerges from the attic with a large silver bust of
Jesus, Sanjeev’s discomfort dissolves into bland resignation.
Ideologies of Consumption
Lahiri’s story hinges on the question of what these material objects signify
to her characters. More than just catalyzing the narrative action of the
story, material objects in “This Blessed House” reify a host of attitudes and
values that deeply divide the newlyweds. If Sanjeev’s and Twinkle’s experience of these objects holds so much significance for them, it is important
to ask how the couple came to embed such meanings in physical objects.
After all, the material objects in the story are commodities—products
of economic systems that are subject to numerous social and economic
factors. These objects also affect the ideologies by which people make
sense of the world; surely those social and economic factors play a role in
the characters’ identities as well as the commodities’ production. Because
of the centrality of material culture and commodities to the story, the
divide between Sanjeev and Twinkle may be interpreted in part as a function of their differing ideologies of consumption. Doing so reveals how
both modern and postmodern economies constrain individuals’ search
for happiness and meaning.
This story, like much of Lahiri’s work, lends itself to such a socio­
economic reading because of the gulf Lahiri’s characters inhabit between
two world economies. India is a nation in transition; half of its people
work in agriculture, yet most of its gross domestic product (GDP) comes
from information services and industry. Poverty remains high and most
of the goods and services produced domestically are consumed abroad.1
The United States finds itself in very different circumstances. In 2008,
trade deficits reached a record $840 billion as Americans imported more
and more despite an enormous GDP of over $14 trillion.2 India is a
nation of producers; the United States, a nation of consumers.
Both economies loosely determine some of the social structures and
culture of their respective societies. Social theorist Zygmunt Bauman
dichotomizes those implied social and cultural differences into attributes of modern “producer,” and postmodern “consumer” economies. In
Consuming Life, he focuses on how consumption’s social meanings differ
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The Hypocrisy of Camp
between modern and postmodern economies. To be sure, human life has
always required some consumption as each person needs food, shelter,
and other goods, but Bauman finds that consumption’s socially symbolic
function has emerged more recently.
The producer society needed to hypermobilize human labor.
Convincing laborers to dramatically increase their productive efforts
required that society construct a social-material discourse that assuaged
doubts and reassured individuals of the meaning and worth of their
unnaturally strenuous workload. Such reassurances came in the form
of apparent security, permanence, and reward. As the producer society
progressed during early modernity, consumption came to offer those reassurances as it took on the new role of stating the durability of the entire
social system, as well as one’s place within that system. These are the types
of “conspicuous consumers” that sociologist Thorsten Veblen described at
the turn of the twentieth century. Bauman characterizes Veblen’s observations in this way: “[It was] the public display of wealth with an emphasis
on its solidity and durability” rather than a “demonstration of the facility
with which pleasures [could] be squeezed out of acquired riches right
away and on the spot.”3 In a producer society, one consumes slowly, prolonging the exposure so as to be seen.
The effect of consuming for the sake of communicating to strangers
limits how consumption signifies in producer societies. Efficiency and
mobilization of labor reinforce social mythos and ethos that give consumption its vocabulary. This condition changes once consumerism sets in.
Eventually, producer societies reach levels of efficiency and production
where natural need cannot clear the market, resulting in overproduction.4
Human desire must then be mobilized, as labor was, in order to reach an
economic equilibrium.
Consumption changes roles at this point, society now recasts “human
wants, desires and longings into the principal propelling and operating
force of society.”5 This reorganization attempts to change the nature of
those wants and desires because it needs to enlist them in the economy’s
service. Like labor before it, desire is objectified by social discourse and
stripped of some significance in order for it to function as an economic
input.6 This objectification dislocates desire and robs it of personality. A
commoditized desire loses some of its more abstract meaning since it can
so readily be weighed in terms of money. The personal significance of
our wants evaporates from the increased pressure and heat of mobilized
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desire. In other words, producer societies tell you what you should want
and what those wants mean; consumerist societies do not care, so long as
you want more and want it faster.
Individuals struggle to define themselves in that type of climate. The
lack of meaning and emphasis on novelty forecasts perpetual boredom as
a sort of postmodern pathology, or ennui. Bauman quotes Georg Simmel
on this point, who attributed the postmodern ennui to this objectification of desire: “[Things] appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat
and grey tone; no one object deserves preference over any other. . . . All
things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream
of money.”7
It is important to note that both economic systems present impediments to the way people give meaning to their labor and consumption.
For a person in a producer society, the anxiety about the value of his or
her own labor translates into a quest for peers’ validation by consuming
in ostentatious ways. For a person in a consumerist society, the pressure exerted by advertising and industry to clear the market of surplus
goods increases the speed of consumption in a way that provides many
options but divests the consumer of his or her attention to them. Like the
immediate landscape seen from the window of a fast train, all distinctions
blur into their basest aspects. Lahiri’s characters in “This Blessed House”
embody these economic differences.
Personality and Consumption in “This Blessed House”
We see the producer-oriented attitude toward consumption in “This
Blessed House” through Sanjeev. We are introduced, nearly at the outset,
to his attitude towards work. He ties his merit to an impending promotion on the job. The text puts his achievements in terms of capacity in
the productive order: “At thirty-three he had a secretary of his own and a
dozen people working under his supervision.”8 He ostensibly displays his
college engineering textbooks as a reminder of simpler times. However,
the text hints that he has more than a little self-satisfaction as it mentions
that “it had been several years since he needed to consult them” and
that people in his employ “gladly supplied him with any information he
needed.”9 Bauman’s comments on the premium producers’ pay for permanence suggest other possible motives for displaying college texts that have
to do with the desired impression they make on a visitor. Linking oneself
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The Hypocrisy of Camp
with success at a prestigious, seemingly permanent university implies a
history and future of continued prosperity. Maintaining that link even
can dictate tastes in quotidian choices. For example, Sanjeev pours over
the liner notes for Mahler and Bach symphonies “so as to understand
[them] properly.”10 He wants his material objects to signify his elevated
place in the society. Unfortunately, his wife sees right through him: “By
the way, if you want to impress people, I wouldn’t play this music. It’s
putting me to sleep.”11 She has struck at the heart of the matter: Sanjeev
is a producer, one for whom material culture casts the irrevocable die of
the social order and who desperately wants to be connected to that order.
The distinction between religion and culture remains important to
Sanjeev, as a producer, despite his inability to articulate why that should
be. “We’re not Christian,” he reminds Twinkle.12 The text never tells us
about his religious commitment other than to comment on how he wants
his commitment signified to peers and neighbors. For Sanjeev, being a
producer in a consumerist society ends up feeling much like being late
to a party. The irony of his situation, and of the story, is that he duped
himself into thinking it was his party. In the end, he feels a “pang of
anticipation” during the dinner party as he contemplates Twinkle and
feels a longing for some connection with her that he can only obliquely
describe.13 Carrying the bust of Christ found by the dinner guest, he
bears the weight of an image foreign to him.
Twinkle, on the other hand, exhibits the traits of a person from a consumerist society. We find in her the ennui that Georg Simmel diagnosed
as a facet of postmodern life. After an evening out, she complains that she
does “nothing all day except sit” at her work desk and sometimes comes
home early to read in bed because she’s bored.14 Mind you, in Sanjeev’s
opinion, she has plenty of meaningful, useful things to keep her busy.
Why then her listlessness? She is bored because her desires have been
robbed of orienting context that could lend them significance.
Curiosity seems to be the one desire that animates her the most
often. She especially enjoys inventing a use for the malt vinegar from the
cupboard and browsing book after book for “nearly an hour” during an
evening out.15 And of course, the treasure hunt for all the kitschy relics
excites her the most. This is as we might expect. Since curiosity is a sort of
intellectualized novelty, it is a trait well suited to the harried and frenetic
pace of postmodern life.
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The Hypocrisy of Camp
Some would argue that Twinkle’s treasure hunt is a viable antidote to
the instability of postmodern life. If a postmodern economy insists on
a speed of consumption that robs us of the ability to make sense of that
consumption for ourselves, maybe the best thing to do is to deny that life
was ever about making sense at all. The social geographer David Harvey
sums up the problem in his materialist analysis of postmodernity: “How
can we . . . identify essential meanings? Postmodernism, with its resignation to bottomless fragmentation and ephemerality, generally refuses
to contemplate that question.”16 Postmodernism, as Harvey describes it,
forfeits truth and coherence for options and play. This is the sort of cultural logic implicit in Twinkle’s actions. Indeed, her very name suggests
the evanescence that she sees in life. By Twinkle’s rules, you can elevate
yourself above cultural signification and define taste and knowledge for
yourself, but never with certainty or permanence. And why shouldn’t this
work? After all, she seems much happier than Sanjeev and much better
equipped to deal with the vicissitudes of life. She laughs at the kitsch of
modernity, at the empty promises and truth claims. She recognizes the
inability of mechanical forgeries to reproduce the essence of divinity, and
so she laughs.
The type of sign play with kitsch in which Twinkle engages fits under
the description of camp. The Oxford English Dictionary defines camp as
that which is “ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical” and finds
its earliest use in descriptions of homosexuals’ mannerisms from the
early twentieth century.17 The connection to homosexuality highlights an
­element of camp as it is now more broadly defined. In as much as early
twentieth-century homosexuals paraded and parodied their sexuality,
they knowingly offended social norms of status and taste. This subversive
facet of camp has stuck around, and the word has come to connote things
that are enjoyed because of (rather than in spite of ) the fact that they
are knowingly in poor taste. As Susan Sontag has described it, “It’s good
because it’s awful.”18 Camp operates by subversive irony, and Twinkle is
in good company as one of its proponents. Historian Paul Fussell, for
example, prescribes camp style for the home decór of those who would be
culturally liberated in his analysis of the American class system: “[They]
parody middle class effects, and parodied items [from the underclass] may
make an appearance, like ironically ugly lawn furniture. . . . The guiding
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The Hypocrisy of Camp
principle will be parody display.”19 For Fussell, camp transcends bourgeois
culture. Furthermore, Benton Jay Komins defends camp because of its
democratic tendencies and flexibility: “Camp no longer is portrayed as a
privileged expression of any one group; in the true spirit of its inherent
pastiche, it takes on multiple meanings. . . . [It] allows individuals to
re­appropriate the démodé and is the active process of working through
extant cultural material.”20 He goes on to correctly identify economic
factors as antecedents to this development: “Massive changes in the
production and distribution of cultural products allowed this message
proliferation to take place.”21
To rebut the position that camp is liberatory, let me extend Bauman’s
comments in a way that brings implications to bear on sign systems.
The changes in production and distribution Komins refers to require
great exchangeability. For Bauman, the necessity of exchange requires
homogeneity, not just of physical objects but of human desires. This
condition leads to the blunting of discernment and distinction. As signs
depend upon difference to function, the lack of distinction becomes
incredibly confusing. This fact sheds light on how camp functions semiotically. Once consumerism masks the meaning of “signifieds,” the only
subversive thing left to do is to tease signifiers. Laura Christian finds
that camp “highlights the discernibly exaggerated or ‘off’ qualities of the
signifier; it inserts the signifier into quotation marks, theatricalizing it.”22
Theatrics cannot provide a foundation for personal meaning if its referents shift constantly. That shift portends great confusion for postmodern
life when we consider Lacan’s insight that the subconscious functions
like a sign system. Crafting a signifier that represents oneself in a polysemic sign system is difficult enough; make the signifieds more or less
homogenous and see what happens. For these reasons, the economically
“massive changes” that Komins cites preclude the ability of individuals to
re­appropriate kitsch culture in any meaningful way.
This play on signifiers with its attendant dramatic flair motivates
Twinkle’s character. She perpetually theatricalizes her campy treasure
hunt. She performs it over and over. She tells her Californian friend
about it over the phone. She relishes telling the houseguests about it. In
that instance, her self-conscious irony seems to gush out of the text, like
a line from a stage play. She says, “God only knows what we’ll find, no
pun intended.”23 But the pun seems clearly intended. She confirms this
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reading of the house party as a theatric performance when she adds the
gaudy costuming at the end—the bust of Jesus in a feather hat.
The confusion that arises from forming an ego out of unstable signs
afflicts both Sanjeev and Twinkle. Because Sanjeev is still stuck in the
producer mode of consumptive signification, he seems confused but not
hopeless of finding real meaning based on distinctions. This fact causes
him to give negative definitions and descriptions of his desires. “In truth
Sanjeev did not know what love was, only what he thought it was not.”24
Lahiri then lists the disappointments and loneliness that constitute
Sanjeev’s negative definition of happiness.
Twinkle, as a consumerist, is further gone. All images are foreign
and fleeting; only their pursuit as distraction matters now. Focus for
a moment on the bathtub scene: Sanjeev interrupts Twinkle’s bath to
announce that he is going to throw away the lawn statue of the Virgin
Mary. She tells him in a peevish, childish way that she hates him, throwing a tantrum.25 Clearly desire has no mature significance for her. She
takes no satisfaction in the treasures she had already found, and in the
end the bust of Christ from the attic replaces the novelty from the Virgin
Mary statue in her attention.
As we would expect, Twinkle’s language equivocates and demonstrates
the erosion of meaningful distinction. She gives her reasoning for not
throwing away the little relics: “It would feel, I don’t know, sacrilegious
or something.”26 Her comment downgrades sacrilege into an indistinct
negative feeling, interchangeable with any other negative feeling.
If camp serves only as a distraction, what might be the way out? Living
in society entails exposure to media, and we cannot control completely
how our actions and material objects will signify to others. Neither can
we avoid consumption in a way that does not extract us from society and
(on a much more basic, biological level) life completely. Rather, the solution comes into focus as we identify a commonality between consumerist
society and the camp style.
The consumerist society can only succeed to the degree that it leaves
its members perpetually unsatisfied. It builds desire for today’s product,
but then must denigrate that product in order to mobilize desire for
tomorrow’s economy. Over time, this cycle comes to define the “realm of
hypocrisy” that spans the gulf between popular opinion and the realities
of consumers’ lives.27 The advertisements, billboards, and media all say
one thing about desire to their audience but mean another. In a similar
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manner, camp is theatrical. It is sign play for the sake of an audience.
Both the consumerist mode and camp style have a preoccupation with
audience and with others. That preoccupation mediates our experience
with our real desires by filtering our idea of a material object or of a sign
through someone else’s lens. Sanjeev displays his college books and the
effects of Indian yuppie gentility; Twinkle has her menagerie on the bookshelf. In both cases, desire’s symbolic function trumps other concerns.
Had they been unconcerned with what their material objects signified
to others, they may have removed some of the noise from their cultural
surroundings and stabilized the sign system that they use.
Jhumpa Lahiri presents her characters with incoherent and contradictory forces of society that they, and we, must navigate. Her writing
also positions ordinary desires and longings as points of cultural conflict.
These cultural conflicts can sometimes manifest the constraints imposed
by the socioeconomic organization of a society. When those constraints
are derived from commoditization, exchangeability pervades our use
of signs in ways that make self-conception problematic. This problem
ultimately brings about a crisis of identity and desire as exchangeability
reduces cultural difference to its most basic, consumable parts. Camp
as a style is merely another mode of consuming images that recognizes
distinction only in terms of an audience. In reflecting on the nature of
our real desires, we must silence that audience if we ever hope to find
wisdom.
Tyler Nickl graduated from BYU as an American Studies
major in 2010. He chose to write this paper for English 358
(Postemodern American Literature) because he was interested in
exploring consumerism’s influence on the cultural meanings we
attach to material things. Tyler is currently pursuing an M.A. in
American Studies at Utah State University. In his spare time, he
enjoys playing the electric guitar. Tyler grew up near Flagstaff,
Arizona, but he presently lives in Logan, Utah, with his wife.
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Notes
1 U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, “India,” CIA World Factbook, 7 April 2010,
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/in.html.
2 U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, “United States,” CIA World Factbook,
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html.
3 Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007), 30.
4 Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer
Culture (New York: Basic, 2001), 31.
5Bauman, Consuming Life, 28, author’s emphasis.
6Ewen, Captains of Consciousness, 34.
7 Quoted in Bauman, Consuming Life, 41.
8 Jhumpa Lahiri, “This Blessed House,” Interpreter of Maladies (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1999), 138.
9 Ibid., 137, 138.
10 Ibid., 155.
11 Ibid., 142
12 Ibid., 137, 146.
13 Ibid. 155.
14 Ibid., 141.
15 Ibid., 142, 140.
16 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Press,
1990), 59.
17 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989 (online version, accessed March 2011), s.v.
“camp, adj. and n. 5”
18 Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 1964, http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/
prose/Susan_Sontag_-_Notes_on_Camp.html.
19 Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide through the American Class System (New York: Simon,
1983), 182.
20 Benton Jay Komins, “Popular Culture, Kitsch as Camp, and Film,” CLCWeb:
Comparative Literature and Culture 3, no. 1 (2001): 4.
21Ibid.
22 Laura Christian, “The Signs Send-up: Camp and the Performing Subject of
Semiosis,” Semiotica 137, no. 1 (2001): 118.
23 Lahiri, “This Blessed House,” 153.
24 Ibid., 147–148.
25 Ibid., 149.
26 Ibid., 138.
27Bauman, Consuming Life, 47.
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