A ‘Dorothy Hodgkin of vagabonds, a derelict Nobel Prize-Winner’ (PB 65): The Spectacularisation of Social Invisibility in Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van (1989)

Abstract

Before becoming a narrative, a play and, more recently, a film (2015), The Lady in the Van was a fortuitous (non-)event in Alan Bennett’s life. It all started off when a tramp woman, living in a van, ended up in the driveway of his suburban house in Camden Town. As the old bum settled in her routine, Bennett noted down in his diaries how her encroaching presence progressively took its toll on his daily life. Through The Lady in the Van, social testimony morphs into aesthetic creation. Bennett’s work is a blending of biography and drama, and Miss Shepherd draws her substance from flesh and blood, or rather rubbish and faeces as, in hyperrealist mode, she soon becomes a festering pustule ruffling suburban ataraxy. With the split between the two authorial figures—Alan Bennett and Alan Bennett 2—the contemporary playwright blatantly tropes the motif of specularisation/spectacularisation. Miss Shepherd’s thespian hypervisibility may underscore an existential and ontological denial of individuality. Such interstitial, liminal existence, however spectacular—and Dame Maggie Smith does achieve a remarkable performance—might ultimately partly erase the elusive original model.

Keywords

• social invisibility
• spectacularisation
• specularisation
• hermeneutical injustice
• distribution of the sensible
• modal anthropology