Roger Waters' Poetry of the Absent FatherBritish identity in Pink Floyd's The Wall

Resumo

In spite of being one the most remarkable and arresting products of late-twentieth-century British popular culture, Pink Floyd’s The Wall has received little scholarly attention. This paper focuses on how in The Wall and in its companion album, The Final Cut, the individual life history and the present predicament of its protagonist stand for the postwar period in British history as a whole. The latter represent the identitary crossroads at which the nation was placed after the collapse of the welfare state system and the major socio-economic and political transformation it underwent at the dawn of Thatcherism. In order to show this, we draw an outline of the historical context in which The Wall is inscribed and attend closely to the film’s complex temporal structure and rich symbolism. We conclude with a brief discussion on how The Wall leaves in sketch an alternative to the present situation which is based on a retrieval of interhuman affects and on justice as the supreme political virtue. As both love and justice bury their roots in the more humane side of the past tradition of the British nation, the work’s Utopian thrust has inevitable conservative overtones.