Abstract:

This study attempts to reveal the concept of commodity fetishism, with its distinctly postmodern concern of body and beauty, as reflected in Louis de Berniéres’s novel Birds Without Wings. In his work, Berniéres tries to emphasise the material exorbitance of the body and reconsiders some master concepts of Marxist and Freudian discourse, such as fetish and commodity, with reference to use-value and exchange-value of the body and beauty. This study argues that Louis de Berniéres’s novel Birds Without Wings departs from both Marxist and Freudian representation of fetishism, and exhibits instead the social and discursive practices that encourage the fetishisation of objects, as well as the postmodern preoccupation with commodity-body-sign through the lenses of Jean Baudrillard. Louis de Bernières’s characters imagine that they can determine their own value in the world, as they are modern men, but they inevitably come to acknowledge that, as a result of modernity, their body and identity become enmeshed as signs in a symbolic exchange, their value being established by outer phenomena and not by themselves. In their plight for their own authority, these characters see only the annihilation of their assertions, since they become objectified in the political economy of signs, representing only symbolic or static beings whose worth is determined in the exchange process.

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