Novel beyond Nation

,QWURGXFWLRQ1RYHOEH\RQG1DWLRQ -HUQHM+DEMDQ Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, Volume 42, Issue 4, Décembre 2015, pp. 347-352 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\&DQDGLDQ5HYLHZRI&RPSDUDWLYH/LWHUDWXUH 5HYXH&DQDGLHQQHGH/LWW«UDWXUH&RPSDU«H For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/crc/summary/v042/42.4.habjan01.html Access provided by Vienna University Library (16 Dec 2015 11:54 GMT) Introduction: Novel beyond Nation Jernej Habjan Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Today, the classical conjuncture between the nation and the novel seems to be challenged by the persistence of the novel despite the crisis of the nationalist social bond. According to Benedict Anderson, “nationalism’s most creative and inluential theorist” (Hollinger 116), the national community is imagined in two forms: the novel and the newspaper. he novel turns the pre-modern cyclical time into the Benjaminian empty, homogeneous time of the calendar (Anderson 24), which means that newspapers are novels without plot, “one-day best-sellers” (35). Building on Anderson, one might say that the novel empties out the majestic We into the anonymous we, and that the newspaper lattens the cyclical time of religious and dynastic imagined communities into today. However, while nationalism is being increasingly replaced by post-nationalist identity politics, the novel is not being sublated by any new form. While the tombs of unknown soldiers, Anderson’s ingenious representational equivalent to one’s unknown national compatriots (9-10), are being overshadowed by monuments to living American presidents erected by emerging identity communities as part of their politics of recognition, Mikhail Bakhtin’s diagnosis of “novelization” (6) as the fate of all genres seems more topical than ever. In short, while everyone is talking about the post-national times, no one argues for post-novelistic times—not even the contributors to ‘New Imagined Communities,’ a recent collection of essays in which Péter Hajdu regards Anderson’s Imagined Communities as “brilliant” (129). On the contrary, while Hajdu’s acknowledgment of Anderson is enforced by the idea that “[t]he breakdown of the nineteenth-century nation state is somewhere between the Schengen Agreement or the wall on the Mexico-US border and non-transparent walls of smart residential areas,” the chapter, since it is written by “a literary scholar” (131), concludes with a literary example, which, to be sure, is a recent novel. But this is indeed a general development: many recent histories of post- or transnational litCanadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC 0319–051x/15/42.4/347 © Canadian Comparative Literature Association 347 CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC erature are to a large extent histories of the novel. he novel is the hero not only of Franco Moretti’s history of the long century of European nationalism, but also of Peter Hitchcock’s history of the “long space” of postcolonialism (Hitchcock 1-43); the novel is the paradigm not only of Fredric Jameson’s concept of “national allegory” (Jameson, “hird-World” 69), but also of Paul Jay’s “transnational turn” (Jay 1). For Jameson’s (in)famous outline of the “third-world literature” of Eastern colonies (“hird-World” 65) and Moretti’s by now equally (in)famous sketch of the “world literature” of Western colonizers (“Conjectures” 55) could have easily speciied their “literature” as novel; but the same goes for Hitchcock’s long space and Jay’s transnational turn, as the former designates four postcolonial novelistic tri- and tetralogies, and the latter, the post-2000 novelistic canon. Moreover, around the time Hitchcock and Jay published their respective books, Jameson and Moretti, too, wrote books, on realism and the bourgeois, respectively (Jameson, Antinomies; Moretti, Bourgeois), that in efect are grounded in the novel—just as, say, Pierre Bourdieu’s he Rules of 348 Art is a reading of Flaubert, and Pascale Casanova’s Bourdieusian World Republic of Letters is accompanied by monographs on Beckett and Kaka; Hitchcock’s and Jay’s, however, may be the purest examples of studies that acknowledge both the ubiquity of the novel and the transnationalist response to nationalism. In other words, there exist accounts of the withering-away of the nation-state in a time when one would search in vain for an account of the decline of the novel form; quite the opposite, discourses on the hegemony of the novel are themselves almost hegemonic, and probably rightly so. Finally, beyond the academic canon, the book market is looded with paperback airport novels, ghost-written autobiographies, novelizations of blockbusters, in short, novels as commodities, which inally brings us to the moment in Anderson’s theory that allows us to bridge the gap between the persistent novel and the decaying nationalism, namely “print-capitalism” (Anderson 18). Print-capitalism is the one massive feature shared by the rise of the novel in the early days of nationalism and the ubiquity of the novel in the current stage of post-nationalism. he question arises, then, what can this persistence of the novel beyond nationalism tell us about the novel in times of nationalism and, conversely, about the nationalism in times of the novel? Does the transition from nationalism to identity politics imply a transition within the history of the novel itself, or does the continuing centrality of the novel imply a continuation of nationalism within identity politics? Or is there perhaps time to return to Benedict Anderson and to rethink his groundbreaking framing of nationalism in the newspaper and the novel? Is the novel perhaps the genre not of nationalism, but of capitalist modernity itself? hese are some of the questions addressed by the contributors to this volume. In the opening contribution titled “Novels before Nations: How Early US Novels Imagined Community,” Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse propose an alternative to the mainstream procedure of linking the novel to the modern nation. hey identify the narrative moves by which novels of the early US republic brought J ERNEJ HABJAN | I NTRODUCTION intelligibility to the colonies of North America. he phenomenon of these novels implies either that they simply abandoned the standard set by other national novels, or that the new US was not a nation in the sense that later novels would insist it was; Armstrong and Tennenhouse hold both implications to be true. hey propose ive notions these novels introduced to narrate unstable networks instead of nationally representative individuals: dispersal, population, conversion, hubs, and anamorphosis. Finally, they ind a homology to this pre-national novel in the contemporary post-national novel, as they trace the contemporary neoliberal biopolitics back to its eighteenth-century birthplace. In my “Pre-modern Joking Relationships in Modern Europe: From Le Neveu de Rameau to Le Neveu de Lacan,” I undertake a synoptic reading of Franco Moretti’s theory of modern European literature and Rastko Močnik’s theory of modern European political institutions. I use these respective conceptualizations of the European novel and the European nation-state in order to outline a set of texts that efectively assess modernity from the perspective of the paradigmatic pre-modern 349 institution of joking relationships between uncles and nephews: Denis Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau (ca. 1761-74), Karl Marx’s Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (1851-52), Louis Althusser’s L’avenir dure longtemps (1985), and JacquesAlain Miller’s Le Neveu de Lacan (2003). A set of quasi-(auto)biographic accounts of the micro-structure of joking relationships thus becomes part of the macro-history of the pre-revolutionary, the bourgeois revolutionary, and post-May ’68 France. Marko Juvan, in “he Nation Between the Epic and the Novel: France Prešeren’s he Baptism on the Savica as a Compromise ‘World Text,’” shows that the novelistic imagining of nations is dominant only in the core of the literary world-system, while outside it, the same role of literary nation-building is played by the romantic return to the pre-modern epic. One such example is Krst pri Savici (he Baptism on the Savica), a 1836 verse tale written by France Prešeren, the Slovenian “national poet.” Juvan reads he Baptism as an example of Franco Moretti’s modern epic, a hybrid between the epic and the novel that emerged along with the modern novel to supplement its nationalism with a supranational or even “world” viewpoint. In Goethe’s Faust, Moretti’s key example, such a viewpoint is provided by Occidentalism. In he Baptism, it is provided by Christianity, the victorious community that interpellates the pre-Christian epic hero of the defeated proto-national community of a Slavonic people. In “he Narrator and the Nation-Builder: Dialect, Dialogue, and Narrative Voice in Minority and Working-Class Fiction,” Alexander Beecrot traces the ways literature has given voice to the subaltern without either eliciting comic efect or polishing their speech to avoid this efect. he usual solution is the compromise between the character’s vernacular and the narrator’s literary registers. his applies to national (or ethnic) as well as to class marginality. Even subaltern authors sympathetic to their equally subaltern characters tend to make their narrators speak in the high styles of the characters’ masters, as examples of homas Cooper, Émile Guillaumin, Martin CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC R. Delany, Toni Morrison, and others show. Hence, Beecrot views the narrator’s literary consolidation of characters’ non-literary styles as an aesthetic dimension of the consolidating work of the nation-state-itself. Which may be why this type of narrator persists as stubbornly as the nation-state resists contemporary transnationalist projects. Emilio Sauri examines, in “Autonomy ater Autonomy, or, he Novel beyond Nation: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666,” a recent idea that Bolaño’s novels mark the shit from the Latin American Boom with its nationalism, Bolivarianism, and literary autonomism to the new generation of novelists with their postnationalism, commodity fetishism, and post-autonomism. Sauri links this post-l’art pour l’art autonomy to the restrictions of artistic autonomy in the periphery of the world-system. his restricted autonomy is acknowledged not only in Bolaño’s interviews, but also in the very structure of his 2004 novel 2666. For the way this novel incorporates a plethora of non-literary as well as literary genres is even more radical than that of 350 the modern, relatively autonomous Western novel. So, 2666 approximates, not the modern Western novel, but the contemporaneous postmodern and post-autonomous one. Unlike postmodernism, however, 2666, as a peripheral novel, marks late capitalism as a crisis-ridden, rather than triumphant, age. Hrvoje Tutek’s “Novel, Utopia, Nation: A History of Interdependence” returns to utopia, a major genre of twentieth-century literature and politics that today is being replaced by apocalyptic and other anti-utopian genres. He rethinks utopia by linking it to the novel. And in order to reject ahistorical readings of utopian iction as a merely monologic subgenre dialogized by the novel, he then links both to the nation. For the nation is imagined not only by the novel, but also by the utopia. Moreover, with homas More, the utopia conceives of the very nationness that the novel ater, say, Daniel Defoe then narrates. However, while utopias locate the ideal society outside the societies of their readers, novels address their own readerships as ideal societies. Hence, even the national(ist) realist novel cannot subsume the utopia; on the contrary, realism is followed by even more concrete estrangements of the given in novels as well as utopias, in James Joyce as well as William Morris. Finally, if novels can still narrate social relations today, these tend to be novels that manage to return precisely to the utopia. In her “Neomedievalism in hree Contemporary City Novels: Tobar, Adichie, Lee,” Caren Irr reminds us that the post-national condition can mean a return to prenational medieval particularism as well as a step toward global cosmopolitanism. As the new global city-states with their rentier classes override national jurisdictions, tackling national economies with their neoimperial and/or regionalist projects, the national Bildungsroman, too, is being replaced by novels of the metropolis. Analyzing the ways in which the medieval chronotopes of the wall, the gate, and the road are reused in Héctor Tobar’s he Tattooed Soldier (1998), Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2013), and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014), Irr shows how contemporary urban iction forsakes the liberal lânerie of the modernist city for the J ERNEJ HABJAN | I NTRODUCTION neomedieval fantasy of the postmodern city-state. Finally, in his “Crisis of the Novel and the Novel of Crisis,” Suman Gupta unpacks the chiasm of his title by sketching a transition from presupposing the crisis of the novel to analyzing the novel of crisis. To this end, he irst demystiies the commonplace about the proximity of nation and novel, showing that the novel has always been beyond nation. Gupta stresses that Benedict Anderson traces the imagining of national communities in books and newspapers, not just in novels and news. his move from the genre to book circulation also allows Gupta to demystify the topos of the crisis of the novel by looking at the broad circulation of novels that narrate the current economic crisis. Moreover, this crisis is not only a topic but also the very discourse of the contemporary novel, concludes Gupta. he volume hence closes with an implicit suggestion that the situation named by the volume “Novel beyond Nation” is older than the contemporary crisis of the nationalist social bond, if not as old as the novel itself. 351 Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Revised Edition. London: Verso, 2006. Print. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Epic and Novel.” he Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 3-40. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. he Rules of Art. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Cambridge: Polity, 1996. Print. Casanova, Pascale. he World Republic of Letters. Trans. M.B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004. Print. Hajdu, Péter. “Ethnicism, Land, and City.”‘New Imagined Communities.’ Ed. Libuša Vajdová and Róbert Gáfrik. Bratislava: Kalligram; Ústav svetovej literatúry SAV, 2010. 127-33. Print. Hitchcock, Peter. he Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Print. Hollinger, David A. “Authority, Solidarity, and the Political Economy of Identity.” Diacritics 29.4 (1999): 116-27. Print. Jameson, Fredric. he Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013. Print. ---. “hird-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88. Print. Jay, Paul. Global Matters: he Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2010. Print. CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC Moretti, Franco. he Bourgeois. London: Verso, 2013. Print. ---. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Let Review 2.1 (2000): 55-68. Print. 352 1RYHOVEHIRUH1DWLRQV+RZ(DUO\861RYHOV,PDJLQHG &RPPXQLW\ 1DQF\$UPVWURQJ/HRQDUG7HQQHQKRXVH Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, Volume 42, Issue 4, Décembre 2015, pp. 353-369 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\&DQDGLDQ5HYLHZRI&RPSDUDWLYH/LWHUDWXUH 5HYXH&DQDGLHQQHGH/LWW«UDWXUH&RPSDU«H For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/crc/summary/v042/42.4.armstrong.html Access provided by Vienna University Library (16 Dec 2015 11:56 GMT) Novels before Nations: How Early US Novels Imagined Community Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse Duke University In this essay, we propose an alternative to the mainstream of novel criticism, which links the novel to the modern nation—whether as a symptom of the nation’s emergence, as the means of producing subjects to inhabit it, or as a representation of the nation that makes that nation seem necessary to the existence of its population. To accomplish this objective, we identify the narrative moves by which novels of the early US republic, roughly the period from 1780 to 1830, brought intelligibility to what in European terms was most certainly a mess—namely, the colonies of North America. Working together, these operations constitute a model of biopolitics before biopolitics, as we have come to understand the term in the last two or three decades through Michel Foucault: a set of policies for managing groups of human beings, aligned with and complementary to the disciplinary institutions that manage the body by producing individualizing efects. If we can assume that the novel is one of those disciplinary institutions that produce such individualizing efects, then we must also assume that novels train readers to imagine community in terms that are responsive to the organization of the liberal state. But what happens to that form and the kind of community that they ask us to imagine when novels do not aim at producing these individualizing efects? Going strictly by the novels produced in the United States during the period of the early republic, one has to conclude either that this substantial body of iction simply abandoned the standard set by other national novels, speciically those published in England, or that the new United States was not a nation in the sense that later novels would insist it was and so could not be imagined as a cohesive aggregate of rightsbearing individuals.1 We hold both conclusions to be true. To make this argument, we accept Benedict Anderson’s inluential hypothesis that novel and nation emerge together, the former as both facilitating and reacting Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC 0319–051x/15/42.4/353 © Canadian Comparative Literature Association 353 CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC to the latter. Like Anderson, too, we are less than satisied with previous explanations of the near simultaneous appearance of novel and nation and what the one had to do with the other.2 Nor do we have major quarrels with Anderson’s deinition of a nation as “an imagined political community—imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). As he goes on to describe the formal characteristics of such an “imagined community,” however, and to elaborate the narrative maneuvers by which it hails readers into a modern nation-space, Anderson’s model community comes to resemble the notion of “the people” (99) that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri rightly criticize for being an idealized and unitary igure that misrepresents the heterogeneity that actually characterizes a population.3 So long as we think of the forms of community—people and multitude—as discrepant in this respect, we cannot quarrel with Anderson’s claim that the novel’s imagined community is one that synchronizes social information to produce a temporality much like Benjamin’s “homogeneous, empty time” (Anderson 24), as well as the temporality that E.P. 354 hompson calls “work-discipline” (56). Caught in the epic sweep of all the novels that back up Anderson’s claim, we see how they use a classiication system of representative characters to make variant local details intelligible to a wide range of readers. In view of Anderson’s stunning examples and the ethnographic sensitivity with which he presents them, why would anyone want to challenge his claim that these formal principles accomplished two such substantial political feats? For Anderson, novels not only created the illusion of temporal coincidence among their multiple plots, but, in so doing, they also made it possible for individuals who never encountered one another to imagine belonging to the same community. To think of themselves as part of such a readership, as Anderson insists, these readers simply had to share certain forms of information published in the print vernacular. As such a form, the novel provided “the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation” (25). Here, however, our account of the novels of the early republic leads us to take issue with Anderson’s argument that novels imagine populations as nations uniied to the degree he suggests. Before the novels that would eventually compose a national tradition persuaded readers to imagine community as a horizontally ailiated body of people who inhabited a single temporal-spatial order, novels produced in the former British colonies persuaded readers to imagine themselves as part of a very diferent form of social organization. Coming before the novels that Anderson links to nation-making, we argue, the irst US novels enabled readers to imagine their world as an alternative to the European fantasy of an America ripe for appropriation as property. Lacking both the boundaries and the sovereignty that Anderson ascribes to nationhood, the community experienced in British America was probably much more like a stateless people. Focusing on this supposedly anomalous body of early American iction, we looked in vain for temporally synchronized plots, representative characters, and a perspective driven by the imperative to become an individual. In the face of the sheer amount and consistency of evidence to the contrary, we could not dismiss these NANCY ARMSTRONG & L EONARD TENNENHOUSE | N OVELS BEFORE NATIONS novels as substandard, incoherent, or even peripheral simply because they failed to materialize the kind of community considered testimony to the nation’s existence. In order to explain the community that the novels of the early US Republic do ask their readers to imagine, we settled on ive concepts, tropes, or aspects of iction—call them what you will. hese terms emerge from the novels themselves as they reverse the narrative moves that would organize experience around the individual accumulation of personal and material property. Identifying the components of this alternative model, we will also suggest that it does not vanish with the novels of James Fenimore Cooper but persists into the so-called American Renaissance. Using our terms to read these novels will expose a dynamic and potentially boundless network of radically horizontal relations at work in novels that do belong to the national tradition. If we recognize social networks as an alternative way of imagining social relations, we cannot ignore the fact that a similar model of community is at work in contemporary novels across the Anglophone world. he resemblance between the pre-national American novel and contemporary global novels that endeavor to imag- 355 ine life ater the nation is so remarkable that we are tempted to see the two bodies of iction as bookending the two hundred years of national novels that separate them. If, as we argue in the irst half of this essay, novels could not make the experience of early America intelligible as a limited and sovereign people, then it would seem likely that novels today face similar diiculties under conditions of global capitalism. I. The Conditions of Intelligibility in Colonial America In addition to the body of iction that provides our subject matter and analytic, there are other indications that, during the late eighteenth century, landed wealth was losing pride of place as the measure of human value. To explain the geopolitical transformations that were happening even as they wrote, such spokesmen of the age as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Immanuel Kant, and Jeremy Bentham had to deal with the threat posed by a marked increase in international commerce. hus, paradoxically, at the moment of modern nation-building it became increasingly diicult to think of the nation as an enclosed space. Land was subject to speculation.4 Where it had once provided a foothold in an organic past for the modern individual, property was on the move and undergoing uncharted substitutions as it crossed borders and passed into other hands. Charlotte Sussman’s work on British migration shows that the same held true for whole groups of people during this period. hese changes in the way people thought about land were compounded by the fact that they took place on or around the vast expanse of the Atlantic Rim (for such a perspective, see Cohen). According to Foucault’s he Birth of Biopolitics, the nascent logic of political economy made the late seventeenth and eighteenth-century world seem less rather CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC than more intelligible. He puts the problem of intelligibility this way: “he economic world is naturally opaque and naturally non-totalizable. It is originally and deinitely constituted from a multiplicity of points of view” (Foucault 282). As he tells the story, the incoherence of this economic discourse was countered by the informal articulation of an impulse to stay home and take care of one another—to be so grounded even when it was far more proitable to do otherwise. Foucault sees the concept of civil society as the expression of this counter-impulse. he early American novel did not organize itself by means of the contrary impulses that Foucault identiies with liberalism. he irst American novels imagine community before this split opened up and the contradiction we call liberalism became the accepted means of holding it together; before, that is, Cooper, Hawthorne, and a number of now canonical authors sliced and diced and parceled of as property the dynamic network formed by trade, migration, transient familial relations, and territorial disputes. In this section of the essay we will set the stage for recovering that earlier model of community by explain356 ing two conditions that a novel had to meet in order to make sense of the American experience to readers on the western side of the Atlantic; in the second section, we will sketch the narrative operations by which the novels of the early republic met those conditions. Condition 1: That Property is Fundamentally Antisocial Clearly intent on being recognized and read as novels, early American novels characteristically begin by ofering us the material that would go into making a personal world of experience that looks something like John Locke’s little commonwealth.5 According to this model of human life, an individual comes into his own as an individual as he mixes his labor with available resources and converts them into his personal and material property. he early novel breaks up this narrative and reorganizes its material according to a principle that forecloses exactly the formal possibilities that Locke had envisioned—a bounded piece of land, a well-fortiied home, and an individual who is sovereign over all it contains. Why is eliminating this possibility a necessary condition for imagining community? Roberto Esposito provides an explanation for the apparent contradiction that property is the very negation of community. If we think of “communitas” as that “relation, which in binding its members to an obligation of reciprocal donation, jeopardizes individual identity,” then, writes Esposito, we have to understand “immunitas” (or self-removal) as a “defense against the expropriating features of communitas.” Property afords an immunity that spares the individual contact with people who are constantly exposed to risk. In keeping these people out, property initially “restores borders that were jeopardized by the common” (Esposito 50).6 hus, for Esposito, the means by which one removes NANCY ARMSTRONG & L EONARD TENNENHOUSE | N OVELS BEFORE NATIONS himself from the community is also the method by which he deines himself as an individual. To acquire human identity in this way, one has to wrap his or her sense of self around two paradoxes. First of all, to deine one’s life as one’s own property is to understand oneself in terms of what one is not. To avoid the social position that his father had in mind for him and to become his own man, so to speak, Robinson Crusoe had to lee all human society, not just family but traders, ship captains, and fellow seafarers as well. Defoe engineered a sequence of such removals as the means of creating a protagonist capable of claiming his labor as his own, and on this basis, Crusoe became the self-made individual that his name would signify thereater. Having removed himself from any semblance of community, Crusoe devotes himself body and soul to maintaining the body that labors on behalf of its own well-being. As Esposito says of Locke’s equation of self-removal with self-fulillment: “Life and property, being and having, person and thing are pressed up together in a mutual relation that makes of either one both the content and the container of the other” (Esposito 64). Seen in this light, the logic 357 of property translates readily into the formal characteristics that Georg Lukács ascribes to the novel’s “inner form,” that is, the “individuality of a living being,” the process of “the individual journeying toward himself” (80). Here, Lukács refers to the process by which a traditional protagonist acquires psychological roundness, as he removes certain things and people from the lux of history and encloses them within his sovereign purview. From this follows a second paradox: when naturalized and circulated in the novel form, the concept of self as self-removal transformed the notion of freedom from a positive right, or “freedom for,” to a negative right, as in “freedom from” encroachments on one’s right to maintain and increase oneself through property (Esposito 71-73). What are Austen’s heroines but Crusoes of the manor house, earning themselves a place in feminist historiography by claiming an unprecedented right to say no? Here, modern liberty emerges as “that which insures the individual against the interference of others through voluntary subordination to a more powerful order that guarantees it” (Esposito 72). Austen’s heroines willingly accept the hands of men whom they have willfully rejected. hey are free, in other words, only to deine themselves by hesitations and minor deviations in a process that ensures their reproductive suitability. Rather than individuals somewhat at odds with themselves and thus not only rounded and self-enclosed but also more alike than diferent from one another, the early American novel favors lat and discontinuous characters from a wide range of types. Such characters can combine and recombine with others, each altering his or her possibilities for becoming someone in the process. A narrative that behaves in this way will never yield a consistent protagonist. his holds as true for he Algerine Captive, a novel in the tradition of the Barbary captivity narrative, and Brocken Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, a disjointed Bildungsroman, as it does for Hannah Webster’s he Coquette, a seduction novel. When we focus on the links between inconstant CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC characters, we ind that a pattern nonetheless repeats itself from novel to novel. A broken home, an infusion of strangers, seduced daughters, and wayward sons—such routine failures of traditional kinship relationships eliminate all possibility of selfenclosure and continuity over generations. Out of the human debris of traditional society, these devices produce a dynamic network both immanent in, and resistant to, pathways that map the political-economic force ield. Condition 2: That Existence Depends on Connecting Something happens in the early American novel to make the narrative double back on itself and de-ontologize the content that might otherwise cohere around a character to produce the basic unit of society we call an individual. In de-ontologizing 358 property, however, the early American novel also ontologizes some quality or feature of that character—a name like Molineux, a profession, a lirtatious disposition, oten just sheer gullibility. hese provide the protocols for articulating what at irst seem random parts as elements of a common or popular social body. his event relocates the semiotic basis of community from separate modules of property to the connective tissue that frees a character from himself so that he can combine and recombine with a much wider range of character types than one inds, say, at some country dance or in the Pump Room at Bath in an Austen novel. To say that a new form of community comes into being with this change in its material content is both to understate and to overstress the importance of the novel’s biopolitical turn against property. On the one hand, the emergence of a social network would seem to insist that a social principle independent and more basic than property organizes life itself. On the other hand, by downplaying the fact that the new social principle depends on money and love in order to destroy property, we perhaps exaggerate the power inherent solely in that principle to make connections among such a diverse ield of types. But we would certainly be underestimating the part the social principle plays in forming the early American novel were we to overlook the irreversibility of its efect. hus, we opt for overstating the importance of that principle. he American novel refuses to reinstate property as the basis of identity: it will not allow a new household to replace an old one, and a protagonist to earn a place of pride within it, in contrast, say, to Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. In this way, the novels we have in mind turn themselves into an ongoing experiment in social connectivity. If neither money nor love, they force us to ask, then what does make social connections? hese novels stop just short of saying that narrative itself exercised this form of social agency for the diverse readers of the early republic, provided that the novel could persuade those readers to locate themselves within the network that was forming. Despite what may seem the newness of the network form, key features of that model also correspond to what can be considered the earliness of early American NANCY ARMSTRONG & L EONARD TENNENHOUSE | N OVELS BEFORE NATIONS iction. Contrary to the argument of Benedict Anderson, Trish Loughran’s account of print culture in the age of US nation-building contends “there was no ‘nationalized’ print sphere in the years just before and just ater the Revolution, but rather a proliferating variety of local and regional reading publics scattered across a vast and diverse geographical space” (xix). Loughran attributes the failure of local American communities to form horizontal relationships with one another to a failure of infrastructure: “the absence of roads and canals to carry goods into the western interior, up to the Canadian border, and throughout most of the South” meant that “newspapers, novels, plays, and pamphlets” had only the most limited means of domestic circulation (20). Until the 1830s, these publications were more likely to make it to England from Philadelphia than to the American South or Western Territory. Loughran sees the success of the US Constitution as that of “a printed iction to create a veneer of oicial consensus” (20). It took considerable rhetorical skill to bring a “dispersion of its parts, their generative dislocation out of actual face-to-face ties, into the elusive 359 realm of the (early) national” (26). Loughran’s evidence leaves little doubt that the early American readership was a patchwork afair of diferent localities, each largely enjoying its own works of iction. We take issue only with Loughran’s assumption that to do their work, novels, like constitutions, must create a character capable of subsuming local diferences and in this way “represent” a broader and more heterogeneous readership. he proliferation of network novels during this period suggests that, by contrast, the novel emerged in the new US because it called attention to the dispersion of incompatible parts and created random, oten unsettling, connections between them that did not suppress irreconcilable diferences. In reading a number of these novels, one consequently inds a network not only emerging within a given novel but also repeating itself outside that novel—as other novelists use network protocols to reorganize a narrative that might otherwise have taken a biographical form. II. Aspects of Early American Fiction In this section, we propose a set of conceptual tropes, narrative moves, or aspects of iction that indicate how these novels made the American experience intelligible as that web of social relations we call a network. In creating this web, the novels we examine also tried out various ways of maximizing human life—not of producing a representative individual. Aspect 1: Dispersal Dispersal is the irst of the ive aspects we identify because it is the irst move by which the novel countered Locke’s ebullient assertion that America ofered ideal conditions CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC for imagining a world turned endlessly into property. he term dispersal describes a way of forming social relations that works against the qualities of continuity, unity, and ixity necessary to materialize the idea of the person as property. As it advances at the cost of one household ater another, the story of Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn similarly asks us to abandon the concept of a personal “journey” or group “diaspora” in favor of the concept of “dispersal.”7 Mervyn is so oten stripped of his most salient features that his character becomes a makeshit afair of abandoned clothing, names, and women, as well as the positions to which they were attached. No matter how inclined this protagonist may be to make these things his own, he is incapable of hanging onto them long enough to substantiate an identity. His Telon coating consequently makes Mervyn available for others to appropriate and mold to their purposes. Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee ofers an explanation of the thinking that underlies the protagonist who repeatedly falls apart. In the course of Book I, Lee suf360 fers a heart attack digging for buried treasure and falls into the pit. As he does so, he also “falls into a trance,” from which he awakens only “to be riveted to the earth with astonishment” on seeing before him “the dead body of a man.” Astonishment turns to “horror” as Lee sees that the body bears “my face, my igure, and [is] dressed in my clothes” (Bird 48). When that body mysteriously vanishes, Sheppard Lee is let with a disembodied voice and no story to tell. Its plot suspended, narration nonetheless proceeds. In direct violation of the idea that one’s body is the irst thing that one owns and the basis of extended ownership, Lee quickly helps himself to the body of Squire Higginson, lying on the ground nearby and reasons thus: “Why might I not, that is to say, my spirit [...] take possession of a tenement which there remained no spirit to claim, and thus, uniting interests together, as two feeble factions unite in the political world, become a body possessing life, strength, and usefulness?” (58). Making use of Higginson’s body, Lee becomes Squire Higginson, but the protagonist of Byrd’s novel is Lee, not Higginson. Why is this so, if not because Lee rather than Higginson continues to become entirely diferent people as the opportunity presents itself? Aspect 2: Population Protagonists for whom such plasticity is their salient characteristic tend to leave a path of wreckage—old selves, old relationships, old households—behind them as they encounter new ones. he loss of individual coherence at the level of plot usually reverberates at the level of narration, forcing the narrator to break up and continue the story from a very diferent vantage point. Published in 1782, Letters From an American Farmer by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur is perhaps somewhat of the beaten path for a study of the early American novel (for accounts of Letters as a novel, see Rice 99-124 and Larkin). he 1783 edition in English has been read so widely and its our model of the early American novel so neatly, however, that we use it to explain NANCY ARMSTRONG & L EONARD TENNENHOUSE | N OVELS BEFORE NATIONS why narration breaks down in the novels at hand and what it takes to restore intelligibility once this happens. In an early letter, Crèvecœur’s ictional letter writer rolls out his Lockean credentials, beginning with an account of how his father transformed American soil into a farm on which “in return [...] is founded our rank, our freedom, our power as citizens, our importance as inhabitants of such a district” (54). hen, in the opening of his inal letter, Farmer James ceases to write as that individual and understands himself instead as part of a “convulsed and half dissolved” society that recalls both Hobbes’s headless multitude and the demonic population of Milton’s Hell. No longer set apart from other people as his own property, Farmer James speaks as a population “seized with a fever of the mind, transported beyond the calmness which is necessary to delineate our thoughts” (Crèvecœur 201). Fast forwarding seventy years to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, we ind the author abandoning her narrator and placing herself within the distressed community whose vicissitudes she has been describing. his move from outside to inside instantly redeines the local misery created by treating people as property into 361 a problem of far greater magnitude. here is no longer any outside (or historical context) for the work of iction, as the narrator, now author, places herself within the alicted population that has taken over what Lukács called “the inner form” of the novel: “A mighty revolution is abroad, surging and heaving the world, as with an earthquake [....] Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in itself the element of this last convulsion” (Stowe 629). Aspect 3: Conversion We settled on the term conversion as the most suggestive way of conceptualizing the events that transform individuals into such a population. We see this transformation as a cluster of small narrative moves that, in combination, nullify the principle of contractual exchange binding individuals to their property, so that social relations can proceed on an entirely diferent basis. Essential to this event is an intensiication of the energy that wells up from a source within the protagonist and instantaneously connects him to all those within reach.8 his force transforms many small forms of resistance into that of a single convulsing body that acquires power only as individuals—from Farmer James to Harriet Beecher Stowe—relinquish self-sovereignty and accede to its needs and demands. his paradox unfolds perhaps most clearly in the religious experience of conversion, where individuals temporarily shed certain features of their mortal identity in order to join an elite spiritual community (see Segal 150-83 and Stout 202-03). Like the popular festivals that serve Bahktin as models of the carnivalesque, each repetition of the conversion ritual transforms the very substance of those who undergo it in a manner that uniies and renews the corporate body.9 In the early American novel, however, conversion works in exactly the opposite direction—from the meta- CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC physics of election to the biopolitics of a population. he conversion efect extends beyond categories of class or status to include and equalize virtually everyone who gives him or herself over to it. By naturalizing the event through which they deine themselves as American novels, the novels of the early republic use conversion simultaneously to rob the novel form of its organic past and to disable the reversibility that characterized Bakhtin’s inverted social world and leveled hierarchy. So, for instance, Stowe’s polemical conclusion overturns the sentimental appeal of the novel itself that beatiies Uncle Tom, forcing readers to think of slavery as a disease that alicts an all encompassing social body. he novel ofers no immunity to this disease. What makes the conversion efect irreversible? Or, put in Bakhtinian terms, what enables popular energy to burst the framework of festival and transform the sovereign power that formerly authorized these contained, performative inversions? An entirely diferent concept of human life must emerge within the performative framework; it must exceed the limits of the novel’s inner form and reverse its relation to 362 the tradition it was engaging and thus to readers’ expectations. To perform the reversal to end all such reversals, the early American novel releases land from property, and property from person, so the materials of biography can enter into circulation. Where festival releases popular energy within the limits of a performance space, the early American novel allows that energy to break the frame that contains personal experience and use it to fuel the vital pulse of a potentially boundless network. Aspect 4: Hubs Such a narrative will inevitably form hubs. Any self-organizing form worth its salt inevitably raises the question of whether it can maintain the practical features of that organization over time. At least two problems gnaw away at most attempts to answer this question.10 First and foremost, there is the instability of any system whose only inalienable property happens to be an obstinate resistance to becoming property. From this, it follows that to contemplate these novels as self-forming, or autogenic, we have to alter our understanding of form itself. But before we can do so, we have to question the prevailing assumption that a novel, like a household, is condemned to reproduce itself, that only by reproducing key features of other novels can it maintain the continuity that we ascribe to individuals, families, species, and literary genres. If to become an American novel, a novel had to destroy the form of household with which the genre was identiied, then how do we explain the production of so many recognizably novelistic works of prose during the early republic? Moreover, what ensured that the collective intelligence we call a readership would consolidate itself as such around that model of community, as the sheer number of these prose narratives suggest was indeed the case? Compounding the violence that makes it possible for the novel to reorganize its material is the equally vexing problem that any system of social relations is exclusion- NANCY ARMSTRONG & L EONARD TENNENHOUSE | N OVELS BEFORE NATIONS ary in its own distinctive way. Much like a model of government, a network novel deines itself not only by its capacity to connect various elements of a population, but also by what exclusions allow it to make the connections it does. he network of social connections that organizes early American iction was far more restrictive than it appears to the reader, given that it automatically excluded those who, like the tribes of native Americans, generally lacked the ability to read vernacular English. To understand how the novel imagined that such a system of social relations could sustain its limits over time, we have to reimagine the household as a hub. Translate what we mean by hub into today’s network science, and we ind that insofar as hubs establish “preferential attachments,” they serve as social glue to maintain connections among members. While “random networks, despite their redundancy, fall apart quickly in the face of an uncoordinated attack” (Buchanan 131), networks with strong hubs or superhubs connecting smaller hubs tend to stay intact through the loss of many of their peripheral members. Once we think of a household as a hub or relay station rather than as an enclosure, we can see why a household would 363 defeat its purpose and disappear were it to prevent strangers from passing through. On the other hand, the kind of indiscriminate mingling that occurs at the limits of a network would keep the household—and by implication the novel—from developing an enduring identity. Enter the seduction story, perhaps the most popular ictional form of this period. Key to the success of Anglo-American seduction stories throughout the antebellum period is their ability to convert the heroine into an unanchored and permeable body no longer eligible for the role of wife. By virtue of its reproductive insuiciency, this body was capable of serving as a hub. Rather than exclude these women, as the English novel generally does, the American novel lets them remain in the household so long as their permeability provides the means of connecting otherwise unrelated individuals. How does removing an otherwise quite eligible woman from the marriage market promote social relationships unthinkable within the constraints of family? Even in the best of eighteenth-century circles, courtship required a series of near misses before a woman identiied a man with whom she could share a reproductive future: should she err in the direction of promiscuity, a woman would take herself out of circulation and become an abject sexual object. But let her err in the direction of purity, and she all but vanishes from the network that connects individuals to one another. he fallen heroine serves both functions at once—indiscriminate mingling and strict regulation of sexual reproduction. When we situate the seduction novel in the same predicament as its heroine, we are in a position to appreciate how it uses that dilemma to open up a multitude of possible narrative connections. Hannah Foster’s he Coquette is one of any number of such novels that addresses this issue. Once she has fallen, Eliza the coquette remains very much in circulation as a cautionary tale. Converted into a repentant epistolary heroine, the fallen woman serves as a relay station distributing her experience to countless readers. By weeding out the truly unsuitable suitors, her story maximizes CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC the capacity of the community to expand and yet retain its coherence. he advantageously managed hub is essential to the self-organizing community envisioned by these early novels. Where the novel by its dependence on print vernacular screens out those who lack a rather high degree of literacy, the hub limits the imagined community further by iltering out those incapable of learning from the sorry experiences of others, thus minimizing relationships that would disrupt its ability to make preferential attachments. Aspect 5: Anamorphosis Anamorphosis is most oten used by way of reference to the visual arts to refer to a peculiar form of distortion. Twisted beyond recognition, the anamorphic object becomes intelligible only as something seen from a double perspective. To recog364 nize what has been disigured beyond recognition, one has to know exactly where to position oneself in spatial and/or temporal terms. Only then can one see that object as both normative and monstrous, conjoining irreconcilable perspectives within a single framework. he capacity to be diferent things depending on the perspective from which one sees it enables the anamorphic object to hold together a fractured ield of vision while expanding it to expose the limits of any normative perspective. Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle famously wakes up from a long sleep to confront the unrecognizable face of George Washington peering from a frame that used to contain a portrait of King George III. Where dispersal detaches property from owner and sends it into circulation, anamorphosis pulls those fragments together, as in the case of the two portraits, to form an object that appears from one perspective to be an entirely diferent thing than it does from another. Such is the case of Sheppard Lee’s body. Stolen by a German doctor and embalmed, a display of his body provides the centerpiece of a spectacle that advertises mummiication as the best way to protect oneself from the unhealthy inluence of the American environment. Lee arrives on the scene in the person of Mr. Megrim. As he recognizes to “my shock and amazement [...] in that lifeless body, my own lost body,” an anamorphic object is born (Bird 406). hose gathered for the purpose of viewing the human body as an object instead encounter a body available for use but not for ownership. Animated by the return of its original inhabitant, the mummiied body hops out of the display case, gathers up its toga, and runs for its very life. Given the extensive use to which Melville, say, in he Conidence Man or Benito Cereno, and, still later, Henry James, in so many of his novels, make of anamorphosis, we must assume that these authors, like Stowe (who sees the situation from both North and South, the perspectives of both slave and owner), exploited the intrinsic reversibility of anamorphosis to say what they wanted their novels to say. Its advantage rested on the ability of anamorphosis to conjoin conlicting viewpoints without reconciling them. his enabled novels to assemble a diferential system that included NANCY ARMSTRONG & L EONARD TENNENHOUSE | N OVELS BEFORE NATIONS numerous concepts of the whole in which each played a part, including concepts that contradicted one another. he hinge that allows what is familiar in one view to appear hideously deformed in another also meant that an obtuse view could erupt within the normative framework without deracinating either. Anamorphosis not only provided readers scattered throughout the Atlantic world with a way of imagining themselves as part of a network resistant to unity, but let them know from which position within that network they were being addressed. Conclusion: The Art of Statelessness We blame the relative neglect of the early American novel on a canonical standard irst established by Sir Walter Scott’s Lives of the Novelists (1821-24) and then promulgated over a century later by the likes of E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, F.R. Leavis’s he Great Tradition, Ian Watt’s he Rise of the Novel, as well as the many 365 attempts by American critics to formulate a national tradition that equates the English version of the novel with the novel itself, making it the center of a system that consequently had no center. But is it really fair to blame these post-war critics? heir sense of their nation’s durability had been shaken, and they wanted to ensure its continuity through the centuries as the object of novelistic representation and the best possible way of imagining community. Acting on this common impulse, they created a lineage for the novel that depended on reproducing certain features, all of which observe the logic of property and make the novel itself an expression of the immunization paradigm. We hold the same post-war deinition of the novel form responsible for our habit of thinking of American, Canadian, and Australian novels in hyphenated terms. In doing so, we implicitly deine them as localized deviations from a normative standard rather than as integral parts of the multinational and metastatic expansion of the book market that Franco Moretti traces in his Atlas of the European Novel. Our argument is based on what we consider convincing evidence that the eighteenth-century reader just did not see social relations in the same terms that readers ater James Fenimore Cooper apparently did. We believe that may well hold true as well for those novels in English classiied as post-colonial, a denomination that automatically puts them in a subordinate position to European realism. While iction published in recent decades is well beyond the scope of this essay, our understanding of the novels of the early republic suggests to us that the capabilities and limitations of that earlier network form are undergoing changes as it confronts conditions for making sense of a present that bear uncanny resemblance to the conditions that novelists confronted in early British America. We are not suggesting that early British American novels were exceptional in this respect. Quite the contrary. In he Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott considers those populating a national landscape dotted with “little nodes of hierarchy and power [that] were both unstable and geographically conined” as virtually stateless people.11 Given that most of its CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC inhabits indeed lived outside the ambit of colonial government and were similarly ailiated with very diferent local communities, much of North America would, in all likelihood, have struck the European as quite like the stateless community that Scott describes as a periphery without a center and refers to as “a world of fragments” (7). If its inhabitants experienced early America in similar terms—as historian Richard White convinces us many of them did—then American novelists of that time could not have hoped to make sense of their world in relation to some form of sovereignty—whether that of the federal government or of those opposed to the state’s imposition on their individual sovereignty. To address the inhabitants of such a middle ground—natives, immigrants, refugees, outcasts, speculators, adventurers, military people—the early novel had to imagine ways of occupying this territory that did not prevent the low of goods and people by subjecting them to one form of domination. Judging by its proliferation during the period from the 1780s up to the 1830s, the network novel apparently addressed the need to imagine community without 366 some form of sovereignty. It does not require specialized knowledge of the contemporary ield to see that the capabilities and limitations of the network novel are undergoing important changes as it confronts conditions for making sense of a present that bear an uncanny resemblance to the conditions that novelists confronted in early America—an accelerated erosion of local diferences and their reappearance in new technological conlations of people, goods, and information. If, on such a cursory glance at the evidence, we decided to venture a claim, it would be to note the obvious—that is, that a network novel is presently emerging from the cocoon of an outmoded modernism. Populations formed by almost instantaneous communication, connected to a fragile landscape and vanishing animal species, broken up and scattered by the policies of corporations that are indistinguishable from governments, and reduced to scavenging by the subsumption of other forms of labor by capital itself have obviously prompted contemporary novelists to abandon the immunization paradigm that sustains the fantasy of individualism by protecting private property. Deploying the very tropes to which we attribute the emergence of the network form in the early American novel, these Anglophone novels exploit logistic apparatuses and forms of dispossession that feed global capitalism. Unwilling to stop there, these novels devote their considerable powers of invention to reorganizing the debris of a shattered modernity as an afective network that combats the alienation produced by substitution and hierarchy with metastatic horizontal connections. If thinking in terms of the tropes of national community—bounded and sovereign—kept us from understanding how early American novels imagined community, those tropes cannot hope to elucidate the world we now confront and the strange new novels that strive to imagine community there. But we do think the formal operations of the network can. NANCY ARMSTRONG & L EONARD TENNENHOUSE | N OVELS BEFORE NATIONS Notes 1. To understand how diicult it was to determine the constituent exclusions of this imaginary world, as well as the forms of sovereignty that enforce them, it is useful to recall that, during the period from 1790 to 1802, Congress passed four diferent naturalization acts. his was also a decade when at least 100,000 immigrants entered the US. he Naturalization Act of 1790 enabled an immigrant who was both free and white to become a citizen ater just two years of residency. Worried about the number of potential citizens entering the country from revolutionary France and the increase in immigrants leeing troubles in Ireland, Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1795 extending minimum residency to ive years. hose who were naturalized were required to swear allegiance to the US, renounce loyalty to their former sovereigns, and give up any and all claims to noble ranks and titles. his act was in turn revised by the Naturalization Act of 1798, which required immigrants to register with a proper agent within forty-eight hours of arriving in the US, stretched the waiting period for citizenship from ive to fourteen years, and prohibited anyone from obtaining citizenship who was a citizen of a state with which the US was at war. he Naturalization Law of 1802 repealed the Act of 1798. With a national debate on immigration running for the entire decade, it is not surprising that novels featuring a cosmopolitan but still American population would have popular appeal. 2. In his “Introduction” to the revised edition of Imagined Communities, Anderson argues that “[i]n contrast to the immense inluence that has exerted on the modern world, plausible theory about it is conspicuously meagre” (3). He sees the solution to this problem of omission in “the cultural roots of nationalism” (7). 3. “he component parts of the people [...] become an identity by negating or setting aside their diferences,” according to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, while the many singularities that make up a multitude “stand in contrast to the undiferentiated unity of the people.” Although such a population “remains multiple,” they continue, this does not make it “anarchical or incoherent” (99). 4. Martin Brückner calls attention to “a runaway real estate market from New England to Georgia” during the eighteenth century: “Speculative transactions in landed property (mostly property that was yet to be occupied by the English) soared” (24). 5. John Locke famously wrote that “in the beginning, all the World was America” (301). 6. Esposito’s statement suggests that “the common” is not entirely benign and, if instituted in the age of property, will necessarily prove destructive however positive and egalitarian its ultimate objectives are. Indeed, the dispersal of property tends to assume such an aggressive role in the novels we examine. 7. For the diference between “dispersal” and “diaspora,” see Tölölyan. 8. For a detailed description of this phenomenon as the central event of a short story, see Armstrong. 9. For a full explanation of this ritual transformation, see Clark and Holquist 302. 10. Our understanding of these two characteristics of self-organizing communities is owing to Elinor Ostrum’s Governing the Common. 11. James C. Scott contends that “[a]t a time when the state seems pervasive and inescapable,” we forget “that for much of human history, living within or outside the state—or in a intermediate zone—was a choice” (7), an “alternative to life within the state” (6). he novels of early British America are oten staged in such a zone, as are an increasing number of contemporary novels. 367 CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Revised Edition. London: Verso, 2006. Print. Armstrong, Nancy. “Hawthorne on the Paradox of Popular Sovereignty.” Novel 47.1 (2014): 24-42. Print. Bird, Robert Montgomery. Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself. New York: New York Review of Books, 2008. Print. Brückner, Martin. he Geographic Revolution in Early America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006. Print. Buchanan, Mark. Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks. New York: Norton, 2002. Print. 368 Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bahktin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986. Print. Cohen, Margaret. he Novel and the Sea. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010. Print. Crèvecœur, J. Hector St. John de. Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Print. Esposito, Roberto. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Trans. Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Print. Foucault, Michel. he Birth of Biopolitics. Trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude. New York: Penguin, 2004. Print. Larkin, Edward. “he Cosmopolitan Revolution: Loyalism and the Fiction of the American Nation.” Novel 40.1-2 (2006): 52-76. Print. Locke, John. “Second Treatise.” Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 265-428. Print. Loughran, Trish. he Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Print. Lukács, Georg. he heory of the Novel. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1971. Print. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900. London: Verso, 1998. Print. Ostrum, Elinor. Governing the Common: he Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Print. Rice, Grantland S. he Transformation of Authorship in America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Print. Scott, James C. he Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Print. NANCY ARMSTRONG & L EONARD TENNENHOUSE | N OVELS BEFORE NATIONS Segal, Alan F. Paul the Convert: he Apostulate and the Apostacy of Saul the Pharisee. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Print. Stout, Harry S. he New England Soul. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Print. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. London: Penguin, 1986. Print. Sussman, Charlotte S. “he Empty Spaces of he Heart of Midlothian: Nation, Narration, and Depopulation.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 15.1 (2002): 105-26. Print. hompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present 38 (1967): 56-97. Print. Tölölyan, Khachig. “he Contemporary Discourse of Diaspora Studies.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27.3 (2007): 64755. Print. 369 3UH0RGHUQ-RNLQJ5HODWLRQVKLSVLQ0RGHUQ(XURSH )URP/H1HYHXGH5DPHDXWR/H1HYHXGH/DFDQ -HUQHM+DEMDQ Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, Volume 42, Issue 4, Décembre 2015, pp. 370-381 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\&DQDGLDQ5HYLHZRI&RPSDUDWLYH/LWHUDWXUH 5HYXH&DQDGLHQQHGH/LWW«UDWXUH&RPSDU«H For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/crc/summary/v042/42.4.habjan.html Access provided by Vienna University Library (16 Dec 2015 11:58 GMT) Pre-Modern Joking Relationships in Modern Europe: From Le Neveu de Rameau to Le Neveu de Lacan 370 Jernej Habjan Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Two decades ago, midway between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Twin Towers, Franco Moretti ofered a geographical sketch of modern European literature. A decade later, halfway between Moretti’s sketch and this article, Rastko Močnik proposed a theoretical formalization of modern European politics. Writing at a time when Europe fell “in love with Milan Kundera,” Moretti (“Modern” 109) sensed the end of modern European literature, including its novel. Writing in a time when the “implicit philosophy of the Council of Europe” entrusted culture to “the invisible hand of the ‘free market’,” Močnik (“Regulation” 201, n. 3) announced the eclipse of modern European political institutions, including its nation-states. In my article, I will use these respective histories of the European novel and the European nation-state in order to trace and comparatively read a set of modern texts on the relationship between uncles and nephews: Denis Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau (ca. 1761-74), Karl Marx’s Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (1851-52), Louis Althusser’s L’avenir dure longtemps (1985), and Jacques-Alain Miller’s Le Neveu de Lacan (2003). I will thus delineate this Parisian topos of uncles and nephews against the background of Močnik’s theoretical formalization of the paradigmatic political institutions of modernity, which I will in turn read alongside Moretti’s historical sketch of the modern institution of literature. Moretti traces modern European literature as it is being terminated by the postmodernism of Milan Kundera’s kind; conversely, Močnik grasps modern European politics as it is being sublated by the new paraCanadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC 0319–051x/15/42.4/370 © Canadian Comparative Literature Association J ERNEJ HABJAN | FROM LE N EVEU DE R AMEAU TO LE N EVEU DE L ACAN digm of institutional identity politics. In short, while the former announces the death of the modern novel, the latter declares the demise of the modern nation. For my part, I will sketch a certain dimension of both the literary and political modernity in Europe, namely a set of political as well as literary renditions of emblematic uncles and nephews as it was recently inalized by Miller’s return to Diderot’s initial introduction of the theme. Močnik speaks about key modern political institutions—monarchic authority, nation, and identity community—by comparing them to pre-modern ones, particularly the so-called joking relationships between, for example, uncles and nephews. I will use this account of modern politics in order to speak about modern European literature, which is Moretti’s concern. his will allow me to delineate a set of texts that belong not only to the literature that interests Moretti, but also to the politics that concerns Močnik; texts that, as it were, relect on Močnik’s political institutions by means of Moretti’s institution of literature. he object of my inquiry will hence be found somewhere between Moretti’s and Močnik’s objects, that is, between the 371 literature and the institutional politics of European modernity. Moreover, not unlike the object of my inquiry, the inquiry itself will be something between Moretti’s and Močnik’s, as my synoptic reading of the former’s geographical sketch and the latter’s theoretical formalization will serve to yield a kind of theoretical sketch. Moretti starts his essay on “Modern European Literature” by negating a certain persistent notion of European literature. From Novalis’s Christianity, or Europe, through T.S. Eliot’s “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” to E.R. Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, European culture was perceived as anything but modern: as Moretti notices, and as the titles themselves suggest, European literature was considered to be an entity as long as it was not modern. Be it Christianity, the Odyssey (as the pre-text of Ulysses), or the Latin Romania, this pre-modern Europe is the prenationalist Europe, according to Moretti (“Modern” 87). his hostility toward the nation-state is easy enough to understand, given that these three texts have respectively been written “during the Napoleonic Wars” and “ater the First and Second World Wars” (“Modern” 87). However, beside these circumstances Moretti also inds a structural reason for this hostility: in all three cases, European literature is seen as an entity only insofar as it is a homogenous unity, and “to the extent that European culture can exist only as unity (Latin, or Christian, or both), then the nation state is the veritable negation of Europe” (Modern” 87). Indeed, relecting on this cultural pessimism ive years ater the oicial end of the Cold War, Moretti could easily himself mistrust the consolidating powers of the nation-state, were it not for structural diferences between these views and his own. I will return to the circumstances of Moretti’s intervention, but for now let me only note that his modern Europe is still an entity, although no longer a homogenous one; on the contrary, it is a totality only insofar as it remains a heterogeneous battleield of individual nation-states. For in Moretti’s approach, “the German catholic Novalis is countered by the French protestant François Guizot: ‘In the history of non-European CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC peoples, the simultaneous presence of conlicting principles has been a sort of accident [....] he opposite is true for the civilization of modern Europe [...] all forms, all principles of social organization coexist here [....] Among these forces, a permanent struggle’” (88). Guizot’s equation of “the civilization of modern Europe” with “a permanent struggle” might remind one of the capitalist class and the way it consolidates by simply allowing competition between individual capitals; and indeed, Moretti’s modern Europe is the Europe of capitalism. Moretti’s irst instance of modern European literature is a case in point. As the Europe uniied by Christianity and Latin makes way for the irst modern states, the tragic genre uniied under the models of Seneca and popular religion is replaced by baroque tragedy, a genre whose strength is derived from, rather than stiled by, the fact that it is divided into no less than four powerful and competitive variations: the theater of the siglo de oro, the Trauerspiel, the tragédie classique, and Shakespearean drama. In each case, the self-determining rejection of feudal ties forces the new abso372 lute sovereign to tragically tie himself to his own court and state; yet no matter which court he ties himself to as its inevitable tyrant, he unties himself from one and the same ancient and feudal Fate. Baroque tragedy is “the form through which European literature is irst touched by Modernity, and in fact torn apart by it” (91). his constellation of four new cultural centers is countered by one last attempt at uniication. he relationship between the four variations of baroque tragedy is not strong enough to prevent one of the four centers, France, to revive the Res publica Christiana as République des Lettres. Unlike the stateless Germany, and the less populated and geographically less central Spain and England, France is able to override the irst modern cultural autonomization of European states not only with the cosmopolitan âge classique but also with the guerres napoléoniennes. Yet there are two additional reasons for this success—freedom from the economic constraints of an empire and from the cultural burden of a Dante, or a Shakespeare, or a Calderón— which tell Moretti (“Modern” 94) that this undoing of the rise of modern states is always already attempted by one of these states (rather than their pre-modern predecessors). As such, it can ultimately only strengthen the communication between the new cultural centers (instead of weakening it). Hence the great European novel. Radclife, Goethe, Scott, and then Austen, Stendhal, Shelley, Pushkin, Balzac, and Manzoni—it only took a handful of names and decades for the novel to introduce most of its modern European forms and to cover the majority of the modern European nations. he âge classique with its prerevolutionary conte philosophique and its quasi-imperial Paris is followed by the long nineteenth century in which the post-revolutionary Bildungsroman struggles to replace conte’s cosmopolitanism with nationalism, just as Paris becomes a mere capital of a nation: “At this point, diversity joins forces with interaction, and ater [Henry] Hallam’s paratactic Europe, and the French Republic of Letters, it is the turn of the European literary system in the proper sense. Neither European literature, nor merely national ones, but rather, so to say, national literatures of Europe” (95). J ERNEJ HABJAN | FROM LE N EVEU DE R AMEAU TO LE N EVEU DE L ACAN Hence, ater breaking free from Curtius’s Romania via the tragédie classique and then reviving it on its own terms in the âge classique, French literature inally replaces Romania with its great roman réaliste. Yet if the conte philosophique, the dominant genre of the âge classique, was unmistakably French, the Bildungsroman, which replaces the conte, was not; and if the initial break with Romania was achieved by the tragédie classique as well as the Trauerspiel, the second and inal break was executed by Germans, if not even Scandinavians and Russians. he inal break with pre-modernity and Romania is a farewell to the Mediterranean. France, the former northern edge of Romania, becomes a southern center of the new European bourgeois mimetic literature or “poetics of solidity” (Moretti, “Modern” 100). his solidity, once it spreads across the new Europe, is suddenly broken up by a set of extreme polarizations: between Joyce and Kaka; Eliot and Rilke; Picasso and Kandinsky; or, say, Schönberg and Stravinsky. Once saturated geographically, the new European space is opened up aesthetically, as in these great modernist oppositions. Moreover, as a whole, these oppositions are themselves in opposition to the 373 other dent in European realism, namely mass literature. he space of Europe is therefore opened up not only aesthetically but socially, as “[a]n audience space” (104): at the turn of the century, the bourgeois readership turned either to modernism’s or to mass literature’s negation of realism. But this does not mean that this division between mimetic realism and antimimetic modernism and mass literature is without a geographical dimension. If the novel of the major nation-states or the drama of the stateless German nation spanned the capital and the provinces, or the city and the countryside, the new audience space is shaped by communication between cities themselves. his is a literature of exiles welcomed by metropolises. Joyce’s Ulysses, whose polyphony forms the above-mentioned opposition with Kaka, “is the clearest sign of a literature for which national boundaries have lost all explanatory power” (106). English modernism, as such, is a product of exiles—if English is the right word for Heart of Darkness, Cantos, he Waste Land, “or inally, but it’s too easy, for Finnegans Wake” (106). Finally, “for the avant-garde, Paris is closer to Buenos Aires than to Lyon; Berlin more akin to Manhattan than to Lübeck” (105). It seems that the closer Moretti comes to his own present, the more European modernity is constrained by Europe itself. And indeed, with the crisis of classical imperialism, which was to modernism and the avant-garde what the French revolution was to realism, both Manhattan and Buenos Aires started supplying European literatures not only with themes but also with forms. With North American postmodernism and South American magic realism, the low of extra-European exchanges is hence for the irst time turned around; “as for intra-European relationships, a continent that falls in love with Milan Kundera deserves to end like Atlantis” (Moretti, “Modern” 109). Just before forsaking Novalis’s pre-modern unity in homogeneity for Guizot’s modern unity in heterogeneity, Moretti invokes a text that assumes the perspective CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC of the former, unity-as-homogeneity, to look at the object of the latter, modernity. In he heory of the Novel, Georg Lukács presents a European “novelistic universe” that “is no longer a ‘home’ for the hero,” no longer, in other words, the Europe presented by Novalis. “And even though Lukács never explicitly says so, his novelistic universe [...] is precisely modern Europe,” concludes Moretti (“Modern” 88). he heory of the Novel, “which opens with an unmistakable allusion to the irst lines of [Novalis’s] Christianity” (“Modern” 88), spells out the consequences of the absence of Novalis’s pre-modernity from Guizot’s modernity. Novalis posits the pre-modern European culture; Lukács negates this by positing its absence from modern Europe; and Moretti in efect negates this negation itself by positing the absence of pre-modern Europe in modernity as a speciic presence, a condition constitutive of modern Europe, the Europe that can reproduce itself precisely because is it free from any pre-modern center “(Latin, or Christian, or both).” If Lukács conceptualizes the implications of Novalis’s Europe, reading the modern novel as the absence of the pre-modern epic, 374 then Moretti in his turn conceptualizes Lukács’s own implications, recognizing in that absence of the epic no less than modernity itself. his is then how Moretti seems to negate, as I claimed above, a certain persistent notion of European literature. his negation, however, is not severed from the circumstances of Morettti’s intervention; as I also mentioned, there is something to be said about the fact that Moretti writes on Novalis and Lukács ive years ater the end of the Cold War. Beside the obvious immanent diferences in approaches—due to which Moretti equates European identity not with its imperialist homogeneity, as Novalis and Lukács do, but with its nationalist heterogeneity—there is also a diference between the pan-European wars during which Novalis and Lukács are contemplating Europe and the wars that follow the fall of the Berlin Wall. he wager of Rastko Močnik’s relection on modern European institutions, to which I will turn now, is that the so-called ethnic conlicts of the early 1990s, during which Moretti is writing, speak not of the hegemony of the nation-state, but of its crisis in the face of the rise of post-national and neo-colonial identity communities. So, if Lukács looks back on the European empires as the Great War is replacing them with a heterogeneous system of nation-states, Moretti looks back on nation-states as post-socialist conlicts are dissolving them into ever new identity communities awaiting recognition by the new hegemon. For Moretti, the zenith of modern European literature is its nineteenth-century novel. As he shows in his Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, these novels map the city as being divided in half between the ruling and the lower classes—until Balzac and Dickens introduce the third, mediatory sphere, which becomes the true protagonist. his sphere can be embodied in a character, the market, culture, or, as in the case of Comédie humaine, Paris itself, argues Moretti (Atlas 105-06). On the basis of Močnik’s theory, this third sphere mediating between labor and capital can be identiied with nation itself, when it comes to Balzac and Dickens: the national character, the national market, the national culture, or, indeed, Paris as the J ERNEJ HABJAN | FROM LE N EVEU DE R AMEAU TO LE N EVEU DE L ACAN nation’s capital. Moreover, Moretti’s third sphere is homologous to what Močnik (“he Balkans” 114, n. 59; 115, n. 66; 113, n. 55) conceptualizes by referring precisely to the institutionalization of our uncle/nephew relation: the so-called joking relationships. As “a relation between two persons in which one is by custom permitted, and in some instances required, to tease or make fun of the other, who in turn is required to take no ofence” (Radclife-Brown 90), the joking relationship solves the problem of unavoidable encounters of two mutually exclusive relationships, according to A.R. Radclife-Brown’s classical interpretation. In a patrilinear kinship system that, say, institutionalizes the male child’s attachment to his mother’s relatives as well as detachment from his father’s relatives, the relation to his mother’s male sibling becomes a problem, as it demands both attachment and detachment. his problem is then solved by the supplementary institution of joking relationships, “a compound of friendliness and antagonism” (Radclife-Brown 104), which allows nephews to make fun, and even to take the property, of their mothers’ brothers. he contradiction produced by the normal functioning of the institution of kinship is resolved by more of 375 the same, a supplementary institutionalization of compromise. he demand of both attachment and detachment is satisied by a compromise between attachment and detachment—be it joking, as between uncles and uterine nephews, or avoidance, as between mothers-in-law and sons-in-law. his supplementary institutional resolution of inherent institutional contradictions that Radclife-Brown discovered in status societies Močnik inds in individualist societies as well. In modernity, the increasing social contradictions are alleviated by the institution of nation with its monarchist pre-history and identitary atermath. he nation resolves the contradictions arising between now legally free individuals by providing a sphere of mutual translatability of their positions—primarily the national culture, including, one might add, Moretti’s Balzac and Dickens. he nation thus achieves what the early modern state relegated to the monarchic authority and what the postmodern identity community will try to accomplish with its struggle for recognition by transnational institutions. Universalizing the pre-modern mediatory sphere of joking relationships, the nation relegates its demand of mediation to language as such; the national language becomes the Other that was embodied in the monarch in early modern societies and which will be sought in the new global hegemon by post-national identity communities. So, throughout modernity, the resolution of contradictions resulting from the normal functioning of institutions is entrusted on three supplementary institutions: the absolute monarch, whose authority is used precisely to decide the undecidable; the nation, whose very language and culture translate its contradictions in non-antagonistic terms; and, inally, the identity community, according to which its contradictions are resolved as soon as its identity is recognized by the hegemon (whose recognition is sought by emerging identity communities in a time when, as mentioned above, Moretti looks back on their predecessors, the modern nation-states). he “distinguishing principle of the power of the sovereign as such” is “the moment CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC of ultimate decision as the self-determination to which everything else reverts and from which its actuality originates,” writes Hegel ive years ater the fall of Napoleon (313). he “‘struggle for recognition’ is fast becoming the paradigmatic form of political conlict in the late twentieth century [....] In these ‘post-socialist’ conlicts, group identity supplants class interest as the chief medium of political mobilization,” writes Nancy Fraser six years ater the fall of the Berlin Wall (68). Between this selfdetermined absolute monarch and these self-doubting identity groups, the national language and its culture emerge, according to Močnik, as the source of self in the era following early modernity and preceding postmodernity. Here is the transition from the pre-modern to the national supplementary institution: 376 We conceive the nation as the zero-institution pertaining to the individualist type of society. It difers from the non-individualist zero-institution in that it is inclusive in the heterogeneous dimension (it includes other institutions of the same society), and exclusive in the homogeneous dimension (it excludes other institutions of the same kind, i.e., other nations); the “standard” non-individualist zero-institution, by contrast, is exclusive in the heterogeneous dimension and is inclusive in the homogeneous dimension. (Močnik, “Ater” 126-27) And here is the relation between the nation’s pre-history and atermath, that is, between monarchic authority and identity community: At the dawn of modernity, Corneille’s Chimène was torn between genealogical loyalty and the loyalty to her emerging bourgeois Ego: an impossible dilemma which could only be resolved by having recourse to the alibi of the monarchic authority. But if Chimène needed complex ideological backgrounds to construe cette généreuse alternative with which she addressed the king, nothing so redundant is needed any more: the “ideological background” is now the alternative itself. (Močnik, “Regulation” 189) In this respect, our uncles-and-nephews series traces the transformations of a supplementary institution of pre-modern status societies in the enlightened, modern world. Intervening in the pre-revolutionary, bourgeois revolutionary, and post-May ’68 Paris with enlightened, historical, and structuralist materialism, these texts on uncles and nephews exemplify in many ways the two histories of European modernity ofered by Moretti and Močnik. Both these histories open with the absolute monarch and Corneille’s tragédie classique; they are both continued with the rise of national languages ofering a “formal matrix of mutual translatability of all actual or possible notional schemes” (Močnik, “Ater” 127) and thus curbing “[t]he multiplication of languages and ideologies” (Moretti, “Modern” 96); and, inally, they both end with neoliberalism and its “submission of cultural sphere to the mechanisms of ‘free market’” (Močnik, “Regulation” 201, n. 3) all across the “continent that falls in love with Milan Kundera” (Moretti, “Modern” 109). In terms of Paris—“a metropolis which is a true palimpsest of history” (100)—the Enlightenment and the conte philosophique mediate between the age of the monarch and Corneille, on the one hand, and the age of the nation and the novel, on the other, with the latter age being in turn J ERNEJ HABJAN | FROM LE N EVEU DE R AMEAU TO LE N EVEU DE L ACAN followed by the ongoing period of identity communities using their Kunderas to obtain recognition in Paris. As mentioned above, the texts that will interest me here are Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, Marx’s he Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Althusser’s he Future Lasts Forever, and Miller’s Lacan’s Nephew. hese quasi-(auto)biographical texts depict Jean-François Rameau, Louis Bonaparte, Louis Althusser, and Jacques-Alain Miller as respective nephews of a celebrated composer, a worshipped emperor, a mysterious homonymous uncle, and a legendary psychoanalyst. Comparing a famous composer with an infamous original, a tragic revolutionary with a farcical counter-revolutionary, the anonymous Louis Althusser with the notorious one, and the wittiest follower of Freud with the strictest follower of that follower, the texts respectively belong to and intervene in the Enlightenment of pre-revolutionary France, the 1848-51 phase of the bourgeois revolution in France, and the structuralist movement in post-May ’68 France. As such, they can be read from the standpoint of some of the most world-historic moments of the “capital of the nineteenth century” (Benjamin 3; 377 Moretti, “Modern” 106). Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew embodies, as it were, the point of intersection of two kinds of focus on contemporaneity: the Enlightenment one and the novelistic one. In Michel Foucault’s (37-39) reading of Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment brings about relection on the present as the present of this relection, a relection that, moreover, explicitly perceives itself as Enlightenment relection. And in Mikhail Bakhtin’s (“Epic” 13-38) reading of yet another German commentator of the Enlightenment, namely Goethe, the modern novel returns to the dethroning genres of Menippean satire and the Socratic dialogue in order to open up the epic and its enthronement of what Bakhtin calls, building on Goethe, the “absolute past” (“Epic” 13). Exempliied in works such as Petronius’s Satyricon and Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, Menippean satire is a “carnivalized genre, extraordinarily lexible and as changeable as Proteus, capable of penetrating other genres,” according to Bakhtin (Problems 113). In Rameau’s Nephew, Bakhtin sees “in essence a menippea, but without the fantastic element” (143), an idea Stephen Werner develops into a book-length discussion of Rameau’s Nephew as a Menippean satire: “As revised by Diderot’s second version of the form, satire maps out interests of an aesthetic as well as philosophical kind. he ainities the form displays are with the novel rather than Horatian satire [....] Indeed, with Le Neveu de Rameau, satire falls away from its position as a mere genre [....] Satire is now an independent Socratic mode” (Werner 69). Because of its Menippean anti-individualistic novelization of (auto)biography, Rameau’s Nephew can even serve here as a paradigm for the actualizations of the nephew theme in Marx, Althusser, and Miller. For the same features of Menippean satire can be observed in Marx’s materialist carnivalization of such merely monologic Horatian satires on Napoleon’s nephew as Victor Hugo’s Napoléon le Petit; in Althusser’s shocking honesty, which reverses the confessions genre and reminds one of the “extremely frank confessions” that Bakhtin (Problems 143) underscores in Diderot’s Menippean satire; or, inally, in CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC Miller’s ambivalent positioning between Diderot’s Moi and Lui, the philosophe and the original. So, Tzvetan Todorov (8-9), for example, is simply misleading when he attributes the rise of the novel and autobiography in the Enlightenment to the rise of the individual. As Bakhtin shows us, the process has more to do with the history of genres itself, starting with the carnivalization of the epic; and as Foucault shows us, the rise of the individual in the Enlightenment coincides with the rise of the transindividual categorical imperative. In the light of Moretti’s third, mediatory sphere—such as Paris itself—the opening of Rameau’s Nephew is striking: the philosophe meditates on the pleasures of the promenade, the allées, and the cafés of Palais-Royal before introducing Rameau, “a compound of elevation and abjectness” (Diderot 8-9), who spends his nights in garrets, suburban taverns, and stables. In the course of the dialogue, this notorious nephew of the famous composer Jean-Philippe Rameau tries to transgress every ideological barrier by transgressing the barrier dividing Paris in half, ending the dia378 logue abruptly on the “bell” not of the church, which is open to anyone, but of the elitist Opéra (87). As such, Diderot’s Rameau personiies the capital of modernity, the Paris of contradictions depicted in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (Stierle 101-05), the bestseller of the century published in the same year that Diderot started working on his clandestine satire. So, the joking relationship, “a compound of friendliness and antagonism” (to go back to Radclife-Brown’s description), no longer connects the infamous nephew with his famous uncle, but is embodied in him, “a compound of elevation and abjectness” (to reuse Diderot’s characterization). Marx, too, uses the igure of nephew to depict the compromise mediation between the halves of Paris. During the revolution of 1848-51, Louis Bonaparte raises the specter of his uncle, Napoleon, to represent in the capital city the peasants of the provinces, “the most numerous class of the French,” which “do[es] not form a class” (Marx 101). He mediates between the socialist prologue from February to June 1848 and its betrayal during a year-long rise and fall of the republican bourgeoisie by becoming the President, only to mediate between the parliamentary bourgeoisie and his own presidency by orchestrating the coup d’état of 2 December 1851. An entire century of class struggles in Paris, France, and even Europe is condensed in the Brumaire’s inal image of the statue of Napoleon the soldier, which, “high on the column in the Place Vendôme, will plunge to the ground” as the “imperial mantle falls at last onto the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte” (Marx 109)—which came true between 1863, when the nephew-emperor made his uncle change into the imperial uniform, and 1871, when the statue was demolished by the Communards. On the other hand, Althusser and Miller use the nephew to embody not social mediation but merely their own unmediated individualities, the diference between themselves and their media reception—as if the lie of the latter were not dialectically linked to the truth of the former. Both their texts are highly testimonial. Althusser wrote he Future Lasts Forever in 1985, ive years ater killing his wife in a state of mental illness from which he had sufered most of his life. he text was supposed to J ERNEJ HABJAN | FROM LE N EVEU DE R AMEAU TO LE N EVEU DE L ACAN intervene in the private and media reports on this killing by referring to the facts of the author’s life, starting with his ixed idea that, through him, his mother lived her love for his father’s dead brother ater whom Louis was named. he name “contained the sound of the third person pronoun (‘lui’), which deprived me of any personality of my own, summoning as it did an anonymous other. It referred to my uncle, the man who stood behind me: ‘Lui’ was Louis” (Althusser 39). By choosing the perspective of the nephew, Althusser loses sight of the third, mediatory sphere, which he had been analyzing in all his previous theory. his is why the memoir cannot realize its internationalist or postcolonial potential, even though its author was born into a petitbourgeois family from Algiers and went on to teach (and live) in the École normale supérieure for thirty years, making “the name of the ‘rue d’Ulm’ echo as far as the poblaciones of Chile and the campuses of Japan and Australia” (Balibar 107). It was only his student and colleague, Étienne Balibar, who sketched a proper Althusserian analysis of Althusser’s legacy by relecting precisely on Althusser’s attachment to the mediatory sphere, the Parisian intellectual life of the 1960s and 70s. 379 As for Miller, he completes our body of texts as he assumes both viewpoints of Diderot’s satire, the philosophe’s and Rameau’s, and subsumes them under the title “Lacan’s Nephew.” But his 2003 “satire,” Le Neveu de Lacan, lags behind not only Le Neveu de Rameau, but even he Future Lasts Forever. Like Althusser, Miller broke a long silence. In his case, however, the silence was caused not by a personal tragedy, but by editorial work on the seminars of his teacher (and father-in-law) Jacques Lacan; and the break was caused not by public and private ostracism, but by a pamphlet by Daniel Lindenberg accusing everyone who was anyone on the French intellectual scene, from the anti-communist Alain Finkielkraut to the communist Alain Badiou, of being the new reactionaries. And like Althusser, Miller resorted to his dead uncle, only in his case a ictitious one suiced. Even Miller’s fantasies fall short of Althusser’s, as, say, the image of a ictitious “Académie des sciences immorales et politiques” run by the actual Jesuits (Miller 80-101) is a far cry both from Althusser’s illness and from his attempts to analyze it. Diderot’s reply to Charles Palissot’s comedy Les Philosophes, whose prime target was none other than Diderot, was silence due to his editorial work on the Encyclopédie; and his nephew text itself cannot possibly be reduced to a retort to Palissot. On the other hand, Miller’s response to Lindenberg’s attack, whose anti-intellectualism was no smaller than Palissot’s, was precisely his failed return to Diderot’s nephew text, and that despite the fact that he was not Lindenberg’s main target at all, and that there is still a lot of editorial work on Lacan’s seminars ahead of him. As mentioned in relation to Močnik, our set of texts on uncles and nephews traces in the modern world the transformations of a supplementary institution of premodern status societies, the joking relationships between such relatives as uncles and nephews. As we have seen, all four texts acknowledge the anachronism of this supplement; they all show that joking relationships, which had allowed uterine nephews to tease and even take the property of their uncles, are no longer in place. So, CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC the musical legacy of Jean-Philippe Rameau is no longer his nephew’s birthright: the joking relationship, Radclife-Brown’s “compound of friendliness and antagonism,” no longer connects Rameau the infamous nephew with Rameau the famous uncle; instead, this “compound of friendliness and antagonism” is embodied in the nephew, who is himself “a compound of elevation and abjectness.” So too, Louis Bonaparte can only simulate Napoleon’s authority; Althusser can no longer rely on his mother’s levirate marriage; and Miller cannot even identify with Lacan’s nephew and choose between Lui and Moi. However, the chronotopes of Rameau and Louis Bonaparte are allegorical of the supplementary institution of their time, namely the absolute monarchy in its enlightened, even revolutionary, transition into a modern nation. On the other hand, in their identitary struggle for media recognition, Althusser’s and Miller’s nephews are merely part, rather than relexive allegories, of the ongoing global dissolution of the national social supplementation into the identitary one. Rameau, the “compound of elevation and abjectness,” and Louis Bonaparte, the last 380 monarch and irst president of France, are a negative and a positive sign of the end of absolute monarchic rule: the former registers the crumbling feudalism, while the latter registers the rising nationalism. On the other hand, Althusser’s and Miller’s structuralist work around 1968 and their autobiographic follow-up are a negative and a positive sign of the end of the hegemony of nations: their radically critical structuralist work stands for the crumbling nationalism, while their late autobiographies stand for the rising identity politics. Diderot and Marx speak of an anti-colonial institution, the nation, and consciously; Althusser and Miller speak of a neo-colonial institution, the identity community, and spontaneously—as if to mark the eclipse of modern European literature and politics. Works Cited Althusser, Louis. he Future Lasts Forever. Trans. Richard Veasey. New York: he New P, 1993. Print. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Epic and Novel.” he Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 3-40. Print. ---. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Print. Balibar, Étienne. “Althusser and the Rue d’Ulm.” Trans. David Fernbach. New Let Review 2.58 (2009): 91-107. Print. Benjamin, Walter. he Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. Print. Diderot, Denis. “Rameau’s Nephew.” Rameau’s Nephew, and Other Works. Ed. R.H. J ERNEJ HABJAN | FROM LE N EVEU DE R AMEAU TO LE N EVEU DE L ACAN Bowen. Trans. Jacques Barzun and R.H. Bowen. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1964. 8-87. Print. Foucault, Michel. “What is Enlightenment?” Trans. Catherine Porter. he Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard et al. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 32-50. Print. Fraser, Nancy. “From Redistribution to Recognition?” New Let Review 1.212 (1995): 86-93. Print. Hegel, G.W.F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Ed. Allen W. Wood. Trans. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print. Marx, Karl. “he Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” Trans. Terrell Carver. Marx’s ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’: (Post)modern Interpretations. Ed. Mark Cowling and James Martin. London: Pluto P, 2002. 19-109. Print. Miller, Jacques-Alain. Le neveu de Lacan : satire. Paris: Verdier, 2003. Print. Močnik, Rastko. “Ater the Fall: hrough the Fogs of the 18th Brumaire of the Eastern Springs.” Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Ed. Michael Sprinker. London: Verso, 1999. 110-33. Print. ---. “he Balkans as an Element in Ideological Mechanisms.” Balkan as Metaphor. Ed. Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2002. 79-115. Print. ---. “Regulation of the Particular and Its Socio-Political Efects.” Conlict, Power, and the Landscape of Constitutionalism. Ed. Gilles Tarabout and Ranabir Samaddar. London: Routledge, 2008. 182-209. Print. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900. London: Verso, 1998. Print. ---. “Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch.” New Let Review 1.206 (1994): 86-109. Print. Radclife-Brown, A.R. “On Joking Relationships.” Structure and Function in Primitive Society. Glencoe, IL: he Free P, 1952. 90-104. Print. Stierle, Karlheinz. Der Mythos von Paris. Munich: Hanser, 1993. Print. Todorov, Tzvetan. In Defence of Enlightenment. Trans. Gila Walker. London: Atlantic Books, 2009. Print. Werner, Stephen. Socratic Satire: An Essay on Diderot and Le neveu de Rameau. Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1987. Print. 381 7KH1DWLRQEHWZHHQWKH(SLFDQGWKH1RYHO)UDQFH 3UHĢHUHQ૷V7KH%DSWLVPRQWKH6DYLFDDVD&RPSURPLVH ૺ:RUOG7H[Wૻ 0DUNR-XYDQ Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, Volume 42, Issue 4, Décembre 2015, pp. 382-395 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\&DQDGLDQ5HYLHZRI&RPSDUDWLYH/LWHUDWXUH 5HYXH&DQDGLHQQHGH/LWW«UDWXUH&RPSDU«H For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/crc/summary/v042/42.4.juvan.html Access provided by Vienna University Library (16 Dec 2015 11:59 GMT) The Nation between the Epic and the Novel: France PreŠeren’s The Baptism on the Savica as a Compromise “World Text”* Marko Juvan Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts 382 In this article, I take as the point of departure two concepts produced by Franco Moretti: the concept of the “modern epic” as the “sacred/world text” of a given cultural tradition (Modern 1-39, 88), and the concept of “compromise” as the form and content of the interliterary contact between the center and the periphery (“Conjectures” 58-60; “More Conjectures” 78-79). As understood by Moretti, the modern epic is an important agent of the fracture between uniied, class homogeneous “classical writing” and pluralist “modern writing” marked by class conlict—the process that, for example, Roland Barthes (17, 58-60) identiies in nineteenth-century French literature and its construction of the institution of Literature. Just when Literature had irmly established itself within the framework of classical writing, it immediately began to fall apart, as authors turned to modern writing under the inluence of the bourgeois ideologeme of pluralism. In the absence of a common sociocultural framework, the styles of the mid-nineteenth century became equal, comparable, and interchangeable, which led authors to a frustrating engagement with the problematic nature of language as a literary medium (Barthes 60-61). In contrast to the natural individuality of personal style and the spontaneous reality of the language system, Barthes conceives of writing as a social framework for the discourse consciously or unconsciously chosen by the writer. Writing is therefore a mode of “the relationship between creation and society,” “the morality of form, the choice of that social area within which the writer elects to situate the Nature of his language” (Barthes 14-15). he transition from classical to modern writing is also manifest in the correlation between the genre system and the political processes participating in the construction of a nation in pre-bourgeois and bourgeois societies. While (semi)-peripheral European literatures, including, for example, German literature, seek to establish national identity with the aid of the epic as a privileged Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC 0319–051x/15/42.4/382 © Canadian Comparative Literature Association M ARKO J UVAN | THE NATION BETWEEN THE EPIC AND THE N OVEL form of classical writing, the central and well-established national literatures, such as English literature, demonstrate their identity with the novel as a popular form of modern writing distributed via the print media of the bourgeois society (see Moretti, Modern 50; Anderson 24-25). he novel, which according to Benedict Anderson and Moretti is a key ideological factor in the conception of a nation, played its part more quietly and in the background compared to the epic, which functioned as an explicitly nation-building genre and had a lasting efect on a broader readership. he novel acted on the imaginary social ties between individuals immersed in their privacy with spheres of action that marked the living space of a nation (see Moretti, Atlas), with a language that sought to mimetically internalize the reality of contemporary heteroglossia and with plausible narratives about heroes with whom readers could identify, seeing themselves as the heroes’ compatriots. As Moretti explains, the prosaic regularity of everyday life of the “serious century” was presented by the novel to its bourgeois readership through a subdued rhetoric of the efects of the real (see Moretti, “Serious” 368-70, 383 375-86, 391-92). he subterranean ideological agency of the novel, which, with its “prosaics” (Morson and Emerson 15-25), turned the idea of society based on a common language, traditions, habits, and space into something natural, everyday, and real, represents a modern alternative to the traditionally aristocratic and poetic monumentality of the epic. hus, treating the arts that symbolically unite and represent nations (for example, monumental architecture, sculpture, patriotic music, and historical painting), Hegel, the metaphysicist of German cultural nationalism, provides a particularly extensive treatment of epic poetry in his Lectures on Aesthetics, speciically mentioning “a national epic [ein nationales Epos]” (Hegel 1057). In “epic proper,” Hegel sees the sacred book of a nation, its foundation and the expression of its history, spirit, and culture: “[T]he content and form of epic proper is the entire world-outlook and objective manifestation of a national spirit presented in its selfobjectifying shape as an actual event” (1044). he monumental, heroic, and poetic form of the epic encompasses, in an encyclopedic fashion, the totality of an individual nation (its beliefs, character, habits, space), while at the same time, through the narrative on war and paradigmatic individuals (heroes), particularizing both the suprahistorical generality and each speciic historical case of national essence. he novel, on the other hand, is, for Hegel, merely a modern, degraded form of representing such a totality. As a philosopher of the rising literary semi-periphery, Hegel declares the novel to be the “modern bourgeois epic [moderne bürgerliche Epopöe],” which still possesses “the wide background of a whole world [der breite Hintergrund einer totalen Welt],” while lacking “the original poetic situation of the world [der ursprünglich poetische Weltzustand]” because it presupposes “a reality already prosaically ordered [setzt eine bereits zur Prosa geordnete Wirklichkeit voraus]” (Hegel 1092; translation modiied). If Hegel’s formulation of the novel as a “bourgeois epic” is viewed from the perspective of Barthes’s conception of writing, the change of the CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC mode of positioning literary form along the relation between its production and consumption becomes evident: the novelist, by submitting to modern writing, places his or her language in the heteroglossia of post-feudal bourgeois society, its demystiied rationality, seriousness, and private routines. If Hegel was so enchanted by the epic, the enthusiasm for the epic in many other parts of the (semi)-periphery, especially Central and South-Eastern Europe, should come as little surprise. he national movements of these countries strove for greater cultural and political autonomy within imperial monarchies, which is why, in accordance with Hegel’s lordship and bondage dialectic (Hegel, Phenomenology 111-19), they showed the need for a national awareness formed—in conditions of dependence on the ruling Other—through the monumental narrative of the nation. his kind of heroic historical narrative was conceived of by national movements as an imaginary counterweight to the real political power of the Master. Epic mania erupted in the late eighteenth century, in the atmosphere of European cultural nationalism, and did not 384 subside in the following century. As I have explained in detail elsewhere, the epic of Antiquity and the Middle Ages—be it the artistic or the folklore epic—was the object of historical and philological studies, and a model for a series of imitations and mystiications, while literary critics and aesthetes saw in the epic an authentic foundation and expression of the so-called national spirit (see Juvan, “Uvod”). he extensive historical retrospectives in Hegel’s aesthetics symptomatically show that the modern nationalist conception of the epic looked to the distant past for models, to a time when diferent ideological forms of collective allegiance, such as kinship, dynastic, and regional allegiance, were in place. In Antiquity, the epic evolved from the need for a canonical consolidation of collective ties via mythological narratives. he nineteenth-century “national epic” modeled itself on its precursors from Antiquity and Early Modernity (such as Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, Camões’ Os Lusíadas [he Lusiads], Ronsard’s La Franciade [Franciad]). Its ideological and poetic structure, however, was determined by historicism, nationalism, and fractures between classical and modern writing. he national epic, the heir to aristocratic culture, explained the contemporary state of the imagined community it was addressing and legitimized the aspirations of the nationalist bourgeoisie and intellectuals. hus, in addition to editions and arrangements of medieval narrative cycles and heroic epics, many original historical epics, dramatic poems, and narrative poems were written that thematized major battles as well as religious, racial, and ethnic conlicts, such as Ernst Schulze’s Caecilie, Jan Holly’s Svatopluk, Jovan Popović’s Milošijada, Adam Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod and Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve), Petar P. Njegoš’s Gorski vijenac (he Mountain Wreath), Alexander Pushkin’s Poltava, Mikhail Lermontov’s Poslednij syn vol’nosti (he Last Son of Freedom), and France Prešeren’s Krst pri Savici (he Baptism on the Savica) (see Juvan, “Uvod” xxix–xxx). In he heory of the Novel, Georg Lukács established a series of dichotomies between the epic and the novel: totality vs. fragment, transcendence vs. immanence, closed vs. process form, homogeneity vs. heterogeneity. Similarly, Mikhail Bakhtin M ARKO J UVAN | THE NATION BETWEEN THE EPIC AND THE N OVEL deined the novel as the antithesis of the epic, proposing these dichotomies: completed vs. developing genre, high and canonized literature vs. low and non-canonized literature, monologism vs. dialogism, absolute past vs. open-ended present, poetic language vs. heteroglossia. Lukács’s and Bakhtin’s counterpositions, along with the other distinctions between the genres—verse vs. prose, collective vs. individual, oral vs. written, public vs. private—owe a great deal to Hegel. Massimo Fusillo argues that, based on such diferences, the epic can be understood as “a spontaneous and auroral genre,” and the novel as “the preeminent secondary genre” (34). Regardless of this binary opposition, Moretti (Modern 56) argues that both genres played an equivalent discursive role in the ideological process of nation-building: they organized the national space centripetally. Moretti treats Goethe’s Faust as the irst modern epic. his dramatic poem resembles the classical epic in its scope as well as in its poetic tendency to substantiate in verse the existence and signiicance of the community in which it came into being. Much like the classical epic, it seeks to allegorically grasp the totality of the existence 385 of the world, while occupying a position no less important than that of the classical epic in the canon. In fact, the modern epic has the status of a sacred text of its culture, which is why it is continually republished, interpreted, taught, adapted, and referred to (Moretti, Modern 1-88). According to Moretti, the modern epic is an attempt of the bourgeois epoch to demonstrate that it is on a par with the foundations of Western civilization (classical Antiquity and feudal Christianity) by means of an original and prestigious adaptation of the binding legacy of the magniicent epic form (36). Compared to a multitude of novels, modern epics are exceptional, even indigestible for the average reader, yet they function as masterpieces (6, 38-39). Faust, written by the cosmopolitan Goethe, a known adversary of young romantic nationalists, is interpreted by Moretti as a “world text”: rather than subordinating itself to the construction of national identity, it allegorizes the dominant position of the West in the world-system. In opposition to the novel, which represents the heterogeneity of contemporary society by internalizing its heteroglossia, Goethe’s modern epic depicts the heterogeneity of the global space as a synchrony of historical periods (41-59). In the following paragraphs, I will try to demonstrate that, in addition to the monumental form of the cosmopolitan and allegorical encyclopedic material transpiring in Faust, the modern epic—at the turning point between classical and modern writing—developed many other varieties, including some that were much shorter and more emphatically integrated into nation-building processes. Just as Moretti permitted himself to generalize the essence of the modern epic from a handful of canonized Western texts, I will venture to point out the vast ield of variants of the modern epic, a hybrid between the classical epic and the modern novel, by analyzing a key text of one of the semi-peripheral literatures. he Baptism on the Savica (1836), a verse tale by France Prešeren, was printed thirty years before the irst Slovenian novel, Deseti brat (he Tenth Brother) by Josip Jurčič. In the historical genre adopting terza rima and stanzas, Prešeren, the poet, outlines CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC the downfall of an epic hero, Črtomir, who trades the destroyed proto-national community of the Slavonic people of Carinthia for the supranational community of victorious Christianity, while in a prose representation of his time, Jurčič, the writer and journalist, depicts the rise of an unexceptional individual who manages to integrate himself into the ruling class of the proto-bourgeois society in the Slovenian territories. Set in the periphery that today is called Slovenia, both the poetic descent of an epic hero into universal Christianity and the prosaic ascent of a modern individual into universal capitalism unfold along the trajectory of a love story that ends, in the irst case, with renouncement and separation, and, in the second, with the institution of marriage. he Baptism on the Savica, the irst printed long epic versiication in Slovenian, establishes a relationship with the national epic genre conditioned by the clet between classical and modern writing. Prešeren anchors his poetic iction referentially in the sources of Carniolan historiography of the Baroque and Enlightenment, such as J.W. 386 Valvasor’s Die Ehre des Hertzogthums Crain (he Glory of the Duchy of Carniola, 1689) and A.T. Linhart’s Versuch einer Geschichte von Krain und den übrigen Ländern der südlichen Slaven Oesterreiches (An Essay on the History of Carniola and Other Lands of the Austrian South Slavs, 1789-91). He interprets narratively the epochal events in world history that are worthy of a national epic, namely the universal process of the Christianization of the European pagan peoples, which, according to the Salzburg Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum (see Kos, Conversio), included the Alpine Slavonic population of the independent Duchy of Carantania. he epic subject of Prešeren’s poem is the rebellion of the pagan Carantanians against the bearers of the new Christian civilization—missionaries of the Salzburg and Aquilean Dioceses, as well as the military forces of the Bavarian nobility and the converted Slavonic peoples—and their inal defeat in which the Alpine Slavs lost their cultural, religious, and state autonomy. he Baptism on the Savica is, paradoxically, a narrative of the origin of the catastrophic hiatus in which Slovenians as a collective subject vanished from the historical scene. However, it is precisely this ictitious invention of the continuity of the Slovenian ethnic group, its language, culture, and space as bases for a national history that was to nineteenth century tastes. his is a function that is consistent with that of the national epic since Virgil’s Aenēis (Aeneid) via Camões’s Lusiads to the romantic poems of Pushkin, Mickiewicz, and Njegoš. Seemingly, the role of the national epic is fulilled by at least some features of he Baptism on the Savica, such as its formal-stylistic classicalness, the aetiological constitutive character of the historical narrative, and the representation of personal fate against the backdrop of world history, which is what the Schlegel brothers expected from Nationalgedicht or Heldengedicht (see Paternu 95-101). With the assistance of his friend Matija Čop, librarian, philologist, aesthete, and the brain of Slovenian romanticism, Prešeren, the poet, was aware of the dawning of the space of Goethe’s world literature in which the core of the most cherished European traditions—Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, and French—was M ARKO J UVAN | THE NATION BETWEEN THE EPIC AND THE N OVEL joined as an equal by the (semi)-peripheral literatures of Central and South-Eastern Europe, including German and Slovenian literatures (see Juvan, “World”). his is why with he Baptism on the Savica, dedicated to his recently deceased friend Čop, Prešeren, with emphasized relection on his own discourse, entered the European genre system, which had become pluralistic in the transition from classical to modern writing as it abandoned hierarchies inherited from Antiquity and gave writers the possibility to freely chose form and topic from a range of places and historical periods. Prešeren followed in the footsteps of Schlegel, Schiller, de Staël, and other protagonists of the romantic aesthetic, who historically and typologically counterposed their modernity to classicism and its sources in Antiquity (see Furst 7-10; Rajan 260). Prešeren consciously chose forms and topics that originated in the epic tradition from Antiquity to the Renaissance, adapting them freely to his romantic message, which associated an elegiac personal confession with the narrative of a defeated but historically resilient Slavonic nation, and which was written in a minor literary language of a province that sought to establish its cultural autonomy within 387 the predominantly German Habsburg Empire. Intertextually, he Baptism on the Savica evokes Western epics and topoi. It refers to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Tasso with meaningfully selected strophic forms (terza rima and stanzas), Homeric comparisons, borrowed epic motives (laying siege, the rousing address before a hopeless battle with a stronger enemy, fratricidal massacre, the igure of a religiously haloed virgin), and, most importantly, the theme of the historical demise of a civilization and the birth of another (see Kos, Prešeren in evropska 39-52, 112-18, 139-40, 167, 183-209; Prešeren in njegova 143-60). Drawing on earlier studies on Prešeren, classical philologist Marko Marinčič (17-37) provides a penetrating insight into he Baptism on the Savica, deining it in terms of a palimpsest of Latin classics: through an allegiance with the classical symbolic power of the Latin world, the poet attempted to rid himself of the contemporary imperialism of German culture and establish himself as a Slovenian and Slavonic canonical author. According to Marinčič, with he Baptism on the Savica Prešeren programmatically created the Slovenian Aeneid, an epic that narrates the founding, aetiological myth of a nation-state. However, through the igure of the defeated Črtomir—the Slavonic double of the “pious” Aeneas and his spiritual self-portrait—Prešeren steered Virgil’s patriotic model in the direction of the “antiphrastic epic” (Marinčič 47) and the Roman (Ovidian) elegy, that is, the genre of the “conceptual periphery of Augustan classics” (36), which, rather than a patriotic position, expresses the poet’s personal lamentations on loss, exile, and renunciation (45-88). On the one hand, then, he Baptism is a classical work, yet it is a romantic deconstruction of monumentality, a hybrid between the epic and the lyrical. On the other hand, with the work’s subtitle (“verse tale”) and text structure, Prešeren clearly forms part of the modern current of versiied epic originating in Byron’s “metrical tales,” creating, at the point of the transition from the age of the epic to the era of the novel, a syncretic blend of genres (see Kos, Prešeren in evropska 190-209; Paternu CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC 95-99, 145-52). Prešeren’s dense epic story lows into elegiac lyricization, with the introductory sonnet dedicated to Čop characterizing the entire poem as “a touching poem” (“pesem mila” in Slovenian, the term for elegy at the time), while the story of Črtomir and Bogomila renouncing their love is interpreted self-relectively as an autobiographical allegory on the resignation of the poet himself (Juvan, Imaginarij 103-10). In he Baptism, the epic fragment of the “Introduction,” laid out in a mere 26 Dantesque terza rimas, is substituted by a hybrid of two genres in the main part (“he Baptism”), what is signaled by the architectonic switch to another strophic form: that of 53 stanzas modeled on Tasso and Byron. On the one hand, the narrative mode of “Introduction” is replaced by the dialogic form of drama, on the other hand, however, the “Baptism” evokes the structure of the novel: the hero withdraws from the sphere of the public into his private intimacy, while the narrative of love, the baptism, and separation of Črtomir and Bogomila is non-linear, progressing via ambivalent focalizations, digressions, inserted stories, and metaiction. With a lot 388 more reserve than in Byron’s poems (for which, see Žirmunskij 43-47), Prešeren’s irst-person voice in he Baptism on the Savica blends in with the narrative of the Middle Ages, characterized by the voice’s subjective confession and addresses to the contemporary reader, incorporating this narrative into the political reality of the pre-March period and inding parallels between his own life and that of Črtomir. he narrative evaluation of the central character and action is excitingly ambivalent, intentionally inconsistent, full of contradictions, ambiguities, the unspoken and the indeinite, which undermine every possibility of a homogenous collective identiication with the individual, problematic hero, who, as it seems, is far from the exemplary character of the national epic. he magniicent collectivist epic story in he Baptism on the Savica is narrated litotically in a mere 509 verses. It is interrupted at the point of defeat, which, unlike in the Aeneid, is not followed by a promise of the transference (translatio) of failed statehood to another location or a later time. Following the “Introduction,” the epic discourse is transformed into a novelistic love narrative that, in terms of genre, resembles Hermann und Dorothea, Goethe’s idyllic pastoral in verse that, together with Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (Sir haddeus), was considered by Matija Čop as “a true epic of our time,” “eine wahre Epopöe unserer Zeit” (Čop 284). Unlike some forced national epics (145), Čop appreciated both works for their representation of everyday life against “a world-historic, action-intensifying background,” “einen welthistorischen die Handlung hebenden Hintergrund” (284). Črtomir, a variant of the torn romantic characters from Byronic poems, loses the attributes of the classical epic subject in a series of consecutive defeats: following the defeat of his rebel army in the beleaguered Ajdovski Gradec, he fails as a protagonist of the action and a sovereign of his people; when, due to his desire for a private life with the beloved Bogomila, once the priestess of the Slavonic goddess of love, he abandons thoughts of suicide, he also loses the features of a hero of stoicism. In submitting to Bogomila’s wish to follow her conversion to Christianity, allowing to be baptized, and bidding farewell to her, Črtomir is extinguished as the subject M ARKO J UVAN | THE NATION BETWEEN THE EPIC AND THE N OVEL of desire, only to disappear completely from the text, at the end, as the subject of speech. In the closing stanzas of the poem, Črtomir is simply silent, with the psychonarration ceasing to disclose his desires, emotions, and thoughts. Črtomir lives to see the end of he Baptism on the Savica as a hollow subject (Juvan, “Modernost” 356-58) and resigns hypnotically to the overpowering Other—the symbolic order of Christianity as it is emanated in the igure of Bogomila, the virgin, shining in God’s light, thus sublimating the erotic form of love (éros) into Christian agápe. In relation to the passive baptism of Črtomir as the subject alongside whom the national identity of Slovenians was formed, Slavoj Žižek concludes: “In he Baptism, Prešeren expounds in a pure, existentially radicalized form on the indicated fundamental feature of the symbolic economy of the Slovenian ‘national identity,’ that is, its failure to internalize the universal Law” (38). According to Žižek, the national identity of Slovenians “‘successfully avoids being captured’ by the universality of the Law,” so much so that “in a ‘Slovenian’s’ relation to the ideological discourse, that is, to the symbolic network constitutive of his or her ‘national identity,’ there lacks a ‘quilting 389 point’” (34). he Baptism on the Savica is therefore a national epic, but constructed with an intentional law. his is why it had strengthened its position in the literary canon by the end of the nineteenth century—together with its author, the “national poet” Prešeren—not as a quilting point, but as a point of ideological and aesthetic dissensus. he dissensus produced by critical and ambivalent ideologemes is no less a factor of conlictual social cohesion than the consensus imposed by the ideological state apparatus; Prešeren always acted through both consensual and the dissensual channels. hus, as early as the second half of the nineteenth century, the heroic “Introduction” to he Baptism on the Savica became part of the set curriculum of Slovenian schools, the leading ideological apparatus of the emerging bourgeois society. On the other hand, this “antiphrastic epic” dealing with a problematic subject matter and clad in the aesthetic perfection by the standards of world literature has throughout produced opposing interpretations, intertextual references, and derivations, as well as selectively reduced uses in public discourse iltered by individual interests. Since the 1860s, Slovenian newspapers, divided into Catholic-conservative and liberal-progressive camps, have appropriated proper names (the title, heroes’ names, settings) from Prešeren’s text, through which they arrogated sentences, motives, persons, and topics as well. Critical, journalistic, and literary metatexts have, according to the logic of antonomasia, turned these names into appellatives for general or recurring characteristics of the community—for understanding Slovenian history in the Biblical key of ‘a thousand years of servitude,’ for the worldviews of political parties, and for the constants of the ‘Slovenian national character.’ hrough this recurrent use of antonomasia, politicians, essayists, journalists, and literary authors have transformed he Baptism on the Savica into a repository of interpretants that have served to articulate modern problems and to relect on national identity in a historical perspective (see Juvan, Imaginarij). Transformed from a youthful heroic ighter for his pagan fathers’ CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC faith and the freedom of his people into a calm Christian missionary reconciled with his fate who sets out to spread the new religion among his fellow countrymen and beyond their borders, Črtomir gave rise to controversial responses on the part of interpreters of the text, as well as literary and theatre writers: some saw this as an artistic deiciency of the poem, while others identiied a praiseworthy conversion of Prešeren, the freigest, to a devout Catholic, along with an apologue of Christianity; some saw it as a depraved betrayal of the freedom-loving struggle for the national cause and a manifestation of the servile nature of the Slovenian people, while others perceived it as a modern and inevitable compromise with an overpowering force, enabling the poet and the nation to survive, albeit beyond romantic heroism. In Slovenian culture, Prešeren’s narrative, thematizing as it does the involuntary compromise of an epic hero and his renouncement of the ight for the national cause, was paradoxically canonized as a major or sacred text that deines ‘Slovenianness’ and as such gives rise to ever new critical, literary, and artistic reinterpretations. his is in 390 contrast to Jurčič’s he Tenth Brother (1866), the irst Slovenian novel, which, through the school curriculum, numerous printed editions, and dramatizations, achieved much more widespread popularity among readers and has become standard reading for young readers; however, in Slovenian comparative literary studies—outwardly more cosmopolitan than its counterpart, the national literary history—this work was marked as a failed, belated, and aesthetically inferior adoption of a genre whose prototype originated in the major, more developed English literature (see Habjan 572-74). Applying Moretti’s formula of literary evolution (“Conjectures” 58-60), one could say that Jurčič’s novel comes across as an (unhappy) compromise between a foreign form imported from the core of the literary world-system (the English novel) and the local material (a Slovenian educated person) and narrator (who is committed to establishing a Slovenian-speaking social space). Some years ago, while analyzing Jurčič’s relation to Walter Scott, I myself succumbed to a typical peripheral (and postcolonial) defensive reaction to the imperial harshness of Moretti’s systemic formula. I pointed out that, in the irst paragraph of the irst Slovenian novel, Jurčič himself revealed to his Slovenian readers, by way of metaictional self-commentary, his inferior, belated, and socially weaker implementation of Scott’s genre model, seeking to level out, with a tinge of irony, the inequities between the originality of the writer of European stature (representing the leading, developed culture) and his unknown Slovenian imitator representative of a peripheral culture. Jurčič’s sophisticated exordial rhetoric led me to believe that Moretti’s formula—while it does in fact adequately describe the real relations of production and reception in the literary world-system, relations that reproduce the dependence of the periphery upon the shiting core of economic, political, and cultural domination—is too unreined at the level of intertextual analysis. his led me to argue that talented authors from the periphery know that they are in no way poorer in terms of artistic power compared to the privileged leading igures, and that they know how to convey this to their readers (see Juvan, Literary 82-84). he recent intervention M ARKO J UVAN | THE NATION BETWEEN THE EPIC AND THE N OVEL by Jernej Habjan (675), who framed Jurčič’s metaictional irony and my thesis about it in a Mannoni formula of negation (“I know well that I’m no Walter Scott, but all the same I believe I am”), reminds us, however, that a fetishistic disavowal of one’s own peripheral position—such as that at the level of the intertextually imaginary— cannot replace the sociological and class analysis of this position at the level of the world-system. Only acceptance of the non-exceptional nature of the fact of one’s own dependence and belatedness enables a criticism of global asymmetries that is unlikely to end in the discourse of guilt and inferiority, or in the discourse of deprivation and imaginary equality. In our case, it becomes evident from this perspective that drawing exclusive parallels between he Tenth Brother and Walter Scott (and other top quality French, English, or Russian novels of the time that were consecrated internationally by European metropolises) leads to erroneous theses of literary history. Slovenian comparative literature has predominantly focused on the relations of the irst Slovenian novel with the novels of European centers, while neglecting parallels with the works 391 of the same genre from other (semi-)peripheries and with the popular production of the German-speaking world that also reached the Slovenian regions. It thus postulated the impossibility of the Slovenian novel: as an optimistically ideological text of the Slovenian national movement, he Tenth Brother by Jurčič supposedly concealed the ontological diference that is revealed upon the downfall of the main hero in great realistic novels, and therefore does not yet represent the essence of the novel as a genre; when, however, at the turn of the century, this essence is inally achieved in the Slovenian novel with the novelistic œuvre of Ivan Cankar, the traditional European novel is already in the process of self-abolition, making way for the modern novel (see Pirjevec, “Pri”; “Problem”). In other words, the embeddedness of the genre of the novel in the political agenda of the Slovenian national movement, which had not yet fully developed an autonomous and class-diferentiated society, presumably prevented the fully-ledged aesthetic articulation of Lukács’s “transcendental homelessness” (41) or Bakhtin’s “dialogism” (279), both of which were crucial for the canonical European novels of the nineteenth century. Here lies the answer to the question as to why, in the nineteenth century, the Slovenian nation was partly constituting itself on the “sacred text” (Moretti, Modern 1, 88) of a compromise but singular epic, rather than merely on the mass printing of compromise novels (as would follow from Anderson’s thesis). he peripheral situation of a society acting as the emerging community of a nation, which, due to its weak bourgeoisie, had not yet developed a sociolectal diferentiation suicient for the establishment of the novel as a protagonist of modern writing, ofered a better option for the revision of classical writing and the epic. Classical writing privileged poetic (verse-regulated) genres, while in the modern revision of the watershed romantic period the poetic was deined by the subjectivist conceptions of the aesthetic and the individual rather than by traditional classicist formal and stylistic attributes. Prešeren’s he Baptism on the Savica is a distinguished literary work that, CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC in a peripheral, nascent literary space, through the treatment of a ‘local’ historical theme, internalized and established the universalism of European romanticism, including its historicism and global horizon, in the domestic scene. Prešeren developed his poetic language in Slovenian, a language saturated with the voices, stories, images, and forms of world literature. He gathered these from the European literary canon from Antiquity to modernity, allowing a single unique voice to be articulated through a language that internalizes a polyphony of historical periods, languages, and cultural spaces. his is the voice of an individual’s modern experience, which, paradoxically, presents itself as both the singular and the generic at the same time. It was Prešeren’s unique poetic individuality itself, repeatedly perceived as the general model, that became established as a voice that—to paraphrase Louis Althusser (261-72)—interpellates other individuals, its addressees, to become the subjects of Slovenianness as a collective individual in the world arena. he lyrical variety of the Slovenian language that was to gain permanent access 392 to the world canon was conceived by Čop and Prešeren as a strategy of compensating for the objective deiciencies of the community, addressed and ideologically co-created by Slovenian literature with the symbolic capital of its aesthetic universality and expressive individuality. he Slovenian national movement, located at the periphery of the expanding capitalist world-system, was economically and politically dependent, lagging behind culturally, and socially incomplete due to its weak bourgeoisie. In the spirit of European cultural nationalism, Prešeren and Čop programed the transfer of the repertoires and norms of the universal aesthetic literature to Slovenian as a catalyst that, in the province of the Habsburg Empire lacking a Slovenian-speaking bourgeoisie, was to encourage the development of public discourse in the Slovenian language among intellectuals. Only then can a nation, in the post-Enlightenment sense of the word, be formed. To sum up, he Baptism on the Savica is, ater all, a “world text” of the kind that Moretti describes based on Goethe’s Faust, in view of the fact that it stages local history and the hagiography of a converted national hero against the backdrop of world history and within the aesthetic discourse of world literature. It is a story about the inevitable compromise between the universalism of European Christian civilization and the ethnicity of Slovenians. As opposed to the cacophonic polyphony and the act of ascribing actual spaces to historical periods in the modern epic represented by Faust, the world’s sacred text and the generator of a multiplicity of incommensurable interpretations (Moretti, Modern 45-50), Prešeren’s poem, including its form and genre, is a compromise between epic and novelistic discourse. Prešeren’s Byronic verse tale is a hybrid of the epic and the novel, of drama and elegy. But this generic compromise is so exceptional that it aesthetically empowers the depicted Slovenianworld story and, through a history of efects, transforms itself into a Slovenian sacred text. Metatextual and intertextual sequences attached to Prešeren’s he Baptism have canonized Prešeren in the registers of literary and scholarly discourse as the indisputable national poet, the author of the (hybrid) modern epic about the constitutive past M ARKO J UVAN | THE NATION BETWEEN THE EPIC AND THE N OVEL of the Slovenian nation; at the same time, the ictitious Črtomir from he Baptism has, with the aid of controversial political interpretive appropriations, been made into a controversial symbol of the unprincipled national hero who repeatedly evokes the conception of Slovenian national identity as constitutively split in two. he title of my essay, “he nation between the epic and the novel,” inally suggests a historical dimension. Almost exactly halfway between the year of the publication of Prešeren’s modern epic about the Christianization of the people whom the poet considered to be the predecessors of the Carniolan Slovenians, on the one hand, and the year of the publication of Jurčič’s novel about a young intellectual’s ascent in the emerging Slovenian bourgeois society, on the other, is the Spring of Nations of 1848, which brought the irst demand for a “united Slovenia” signed by a great many Slovenian intellectuals. Taking into account Miroslav Hroch’s historical typology of Central and Eastern European national movements, I can conclude that, in the Slovenian territories, the aesthetically universal and poetic form of the national epic, albeit ambivalent and modernized in a hybrid fashion, is the prominent genre of the 393 irst, predominantly philological-cultural phase of the national awakening in which the inner circles of church and lay intellectuals addressed the inner circles of literary readership through almanacs, rare books of lyrical poetry, German periodicals, and the irst Slovenian newspapers. he second, mass phase of the national movement, which, ever more explicitly political, in addition to intellectuals also attracted broader circles, including farmers, bureaucrats, cratsmen, and the lower bourgeoisie, relied on the mass production of the novel, a genre that circulated in the form of feuilletons in daily newspapers, literary journals, and regularly published book series. Note * Translated by Mojca Šorli and Neville Hall. Works Cited Althusser, Louis. “Appendix 2: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” On the Reproduction of Capitalism. Trans. G.M. Goshgarian. London: Verso, 2014. 23272. Print. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Revised Edition. London: Verso, 2006. Print. Bakhtin, Mikhail. he Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Print. Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC York: Hill and Wang, 2009. Print. Čop, Matija. Pisma Matija Čopa. Prva knjiga. [Letters by Matija Čop. Volume 1.] Ed. Anton Slodnjak and Janko Kos. Ljubljana: SAZU, 1986. Print. Furst, Lilian R. Romanticism. London: Methuen, 1976. Print. Fusillo, Massimo. “Epic, Novel.” he Novel: Volume 1. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 32-63. Print. Habjan, Jernej. “Prvi slovenski roman in literarni svetovni-sistem.” [he First Slovenian Novel and the Literary World-System.] Slavistična revija 62.4 (2014): 569-77. Print. Hegel, G.W.F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Volume II. Trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1975. Print. ---. he Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Print. 394 Hroch, Miroslav. “From National Movement to the Fully-formed Nation.” New Let Review 1.198 (1993): 3-20. Print. Jurčič, Josip. “Deseti brat.” [he Tenth Brother.] Zbrano delo. Tretja knjiga. [Collected Works: Volume 3.] Ed. Mirko Rupel. Ljubljana: DZS, 1965. 139-371. Print. Juvan, Marko. Imaginarij Krsta pri Savici v slovenski literaturi: medbesedilnost recepcije. [he Imaginarium of he Baptism on the Savica in Slovenian Literature: he Intertextuality of Reception.] Ljubljana: Literatura, 1990. Print. ---. Literary Studies in Reconstruction. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2011. Print. ---. “Modernost Krsta pri Savici?” [he Modernity of he Baptism on the Savica?] Romantična pesnitev: ob 200. obletnici rojstva Franceta Prešerna. [he Romantic Poem: On the Two-hundredth Anniversary of France Prešeren’s Birth.] Ed. Marko Juvan. Ljubljana: Filozofska fakulteta, 2002. 347-60. Print. ---. “Uvod: Panorama romantične pesnitve.” [Introduction: A Panoramic View of the Romantic Poem.] Romantična pesnitev: ob 200. obletnici rojstva Franceta Prešerna. [he Romantic Poem: On the Two-hundredth Anniversary of France Prešeren’s Birth.] Ed. Marko Juvan. Ljubljana: Filozofska fakulteta, 2002. xvxxxvii. Print. ---. “World Literature in Carniola: Transfer of Romantic Cosmopolitanism and the Making of National Literature.” Interlitteraria 12 (2012): 27-49. Print. Kos, Janko. Prešeren in evropska romantika. [Prešeren and European Romanticism.] Ljubljana: DZS, 1970. Print. ---. Prešeren in njegova doba. [Prešeren and His Time.] Koper: Lipa, 1991. Print. Kos, Milko. Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum. Ljubljana: Znanstveno društvo, 1936. Print. Lukács, Georg. he heory of the Novel. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: MIT P, 1971. M ARKO J UVAN | THE NATION BETWEEN THE EPIC AND THE N OVEL Print. Marinčič, Marko. Križ nad slovansko Trojo: latinski palimpsesti v Prešernovem Krstu pri Savici. [he Cross Above the Slavonic Troy: Latin Palimpsests in Prešeren’s he Baptism on the Savica.] Ljubljana: Slovenska matica, 2011. Print. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900. London: Verso, 1999. Print. ---. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Let Review 2.1 (2000): 54-68. Print. ---. Modern Epic: he World-System from Goethe to García Márquez. Trans. Quintin Hoare. London: Verso, 1996. Print. ---. “More Conjectures.” New Let Review 20 (2003): 73-81. Print. ---. “Serious Century.” he Novel: Volume 1. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 364-400. Print. Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990. Print. Paternu, Boris. France Prešeren in njegovo pesniško delo 2. [France Prešeren and His Poetry: Volume 2.] Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1977. Print. Pirjevec, Dušan. “Pri izvirih slovenskega romana.” [At the Origins of the Slovenian Novel.] Problemi 10.109 (1972): 31-36. Print. ---. “Problem slovenskega romana.” [he Problem of the Slovenian Novel.] Trans. Tomo Virk. Literatura 9.67-68 (1997): 63-75. Print. Prešeren, France. “Krst pri Savici / he Baptism on the Savica.” Poems. Trans. Tom Priestly and Henry R. Cooper, Jr. Klagenfurt: Hermagoras Verlag, 1999. 110-47. Print. Rajan, Tilottama. Dark Interpreter: he Discourse of Romanticism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. Print. Žirmunskij, Viktor. Bajron i Puškin. Leningrad: Nauka, 1978. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. Jezik, ideologija, Slovenci. [Language, Ideology, Slovenians.] Ljubljana: Delavska enotnost, 1987. Print. 395 $XWRQRP\DIWHU$XWRQRP\RU7KH1RYHOEH\RQG1DWLRQ 5REHUWR%ROD³R૷V (PLOLR6DXUL Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, Volume 42, Issue 4, Décembre 2015, pp. 396-409 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\&DQDGLDQ5HYLHZRI&RPSDUDWLYH/LWHUDWXUH 5HYXH&DQDGLHQQHGH/LWW«UDWXUH&RPSDU«H For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/crc/summary/v042/42.4.sauri.html Access provided by Vienna University Library (16 Dec 2015 11:59 GMT) Autonomy after Autonomy, or, The Novel beyond Nation: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 Emilio Sauri University of Massachusetts, Boston 396 “Let’s be radical,” writes Jorge Volpi in El insomnio de Bolívar (2009), “Latin American literature no longer exists” (165).1 What was known as Latin American literature, he explains, emerged fully in the second half of the twentieth century, and particularly with the Boom of the 1960s, “that nomadic brotherhood” whose works “crushed the obsolete bourgeois nationalism of their countries.” At the same time, insofar as writers such as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa contributed to the creation of a “Latin American front with deep Bolivarian roots,” Volpi maintains that “[p]aradoxically, in escaping from their cages,” they also “contributed to founding a new nationalism, Latin American this time” (167). “he result,” he continues, “was a resounding success”: [O]n the one hand, local media were once again satisied to have a literature of their own, distinct from what was produced elsewhere, capable of providing a “unique identity” to Latin American nations as a whole; on the other hand, foreign readers, editors, and critics discovered a last redoubt of exoticism—of diference—within the increasingly predictable margins of Western literature. (Volpi 167-68) he Boom, in this sense, not only contributes to the creation of a Latin American nationalism, but also gives rise to “literatura latinoamericana©” (as Volpi writes it), a market phenomenon that meets consumer demand at home and abroad. According to Volpi, this is the idea of a national literature against which a generation of authors born ater 1960 will deine their own work. Unlike their Boom predecessors, these more contemporary writers “have no Bolivarian aspirations and do not aspire to become spokespersons for Latin America” (Volpi 170). “Witnesses to the collapse of real socialism and to the discrediting of utopias, and increasingly skeptical of politics,” Volpi writes, “these authors seem to have inally freed themselves from any Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC 0319–051x/15/42.4/396 © Canadian Comparative Literature Association EMILIO SAURI | AUTONOMY AFTER AUTONOMY national constraints” (168). What remains are novels “tracing a hologram,” the “mystery of Latin America” (176). But if Volpi suggests that, in this way, writers such as Ignacio Padilla, Mario Mendoza, Cristina Rivera Garza, and he himself refuse to meet the literary market’s demand for “exoticism” and Latin American “diference,” he also believes that, while the Boom novelists had aimed for “literary purity,” the writer’s aspirations today include “money” (164). Considering the Boom has long been identiied with what Angel Rama described as the moment of “literature’s absorption within the mechanisms of consumer society” (53), we have every reason to be skeptical of this reading. And yet it is just as true that the Boom emerged in a period when “real socialism” and “utopias” to which Volpi refers not only lent credence to the Bolivarian aspirations of an earlier generation, but also sustained the belief, however impractical, in “literary purity,” the belief in a literary autonomy understood today as the Boom’s aesthetic ideology. For Volpi, then, it is as if what is to be found beyond the nation—beyond “national constraints”—is literature’s more 397 complete embrace of the market. Importantly, Volpi notes that this contemporary novel inds its “best model” in Roberto Bolaño’s he Savage Detectives (1998) and, above all, 2666 (2004). “Ater Bolaño,” he observes, “writing with the Bolivarian conviction of the Boom has become irrelevant. his does not mean that Latin America has disappeared as stage or focus, but that it begins to be perceived with a postnational character, devoid of a ixed identity” (176). hus, for Volpi, Bolaño ofers a blueprint of sorts for the “postnational” Latin American novel. But if Bolaño would, for this reason, become the “guru of new generations” (171) of writers, in what follows, we will see that Bolaño’s ictions also suggest that, far from resulting in a more complete embrace of the market, the hollowing-out of this “Bolivarian conviction” has instead given rise to the possibility of a literary autonomy ater autonomy. One of the many places where 2666 takes up art’s relationship to commerce is the story of the ictional British artist Edwin Johns. In “he Part about the Critics,” Liz Norton tells Piero Morini that Johns’s ‘masterpiece’ “was an ellipsis of self-portraits, sometimes a spiral of self-portraits (depending on the angle from which it was seen), seven by three and a half feet, in the center of which hung the painter’s mummiied right hand” (53). Morini, for his part, tries to understand why the painter cuts of his own hand, and later, ater visiting him in a Swiss lunatic asylum, tells Norton “he thought he knew why” (97): he did it, Morini explains, “for the money [...] because he believed in investments, the low of capital, one had to play the game to win, that kind of thing” (97). Norton is not convinced. But why not? As the novel makes clear, Johns’s paintings are everywhere caught up in processes for which the term “lows of capital” seems appropriate enough; and indeed, Johns’s art is said to have not only “ushered in something that would later be known as the new decadence or English animalism” (52), but also attracted other painters, as well as architects and families, who would eventually transform the neighborhood in which he lived into “one of the trendiest neighborhoods in London, nowhere near as cheap as it was reputed to be” CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC (53). Situated within the circulation of symbolic and economic capital alike, what the novel describes as the “most radical self-portrait of our time” is ostensibly nothing more than a commodity; and like any commodity, it can be said to play a signiicant role in the valorization of capital. From the perspective of this same process of valorization, however, Johns’s masterpiece is no more signiicant—really, no diferent—than, say, a Hollywood blockbuster, a saw, or a hammer. To believe Morini’s claim—he did it “for the money”—consequently requires the critic to treat Johns’s “masterpiece”—and his self-mutilation—as a product of market-driven calculation like any other. And yet, since we never hear Johns’s response—ater all, Morini only tells Norton he “thought [creía saber] he knew why”—it is not entirely obvious this is the case. To be sure, the novel here dramatizes a common situation for critics, where artists are concerned. But while we rarely have any reason to decide whether writers and artists are in fact doing it “for the money,” it is no less true that 2666 is deeply invested 398 in the question of the artwork’s status as commodity. hus, the same motivations Morini believes animate Johns’s work will eventually ind an equivalent in Benno von Archimboldi’s view of his own books, which he sees not only as a “game” but also a “business”: “a game insofar as he derived pleasure from writing, a pleasure similar to that of the detective on the heels of the killer, and a business insofar as the publication of his books helped to augment, however modestly, his doorman’s pay” (817). Nevertheless, as Sharae Deckard has shown in a brilliant reading of 2666, although Archimboldi’s story indicates that “[n]o artist dependent on material constraints, forced to mine his or her own experience and sell it as a commodity, can claim to be autonomous” (362), the novel is underwritten by a “formal embedding of the contradiction between [...its] own commodity status and its aim to produce an ideologically distantiated understanding of totality” (372). No doubt it is this “distantiated understanding” that the artwork’s assertion of autonomy had promised, and that Adorno and Horkheimer, for example, had seen underlying the “distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system” (95) that the cultural industry had efaced. hat 2666 everywhere registers this contradiction between the artwork’s autonomy and heteronomy is undeniably true. As we will see, however, in staging this problematic, Bolaño’s work ultimately returns to the question of the “logic of the work”—the question of the artwork’s ontology and function—to demonstract how the claim to autonomy itself has become plausible once again. At stake here is not l’art pour l’art alone, and, as contemporary discussions of the “problem” of world literature demonstrate, the question of the artwork’s autonomy is already the question of what the movement of literary forms and genres might tell us about the political and economic inequalities that have marked the world-system for some time now. Hence the three questions with which Pascale Casanova begins her essay “Literature as a World”: Is it possible to re-establish the lost bond between literature, history and the world, while maintaining a full sense of the irreducible singularity of literary texts? Second, can lit- EMILIO SAURI | AUTONOMY AFTER AUTONOMY erature itself be conceived as a world? And if so, might an exploration of its territory help us to answer question number one? (71) For Casanova, the answer is to be found in what she identiies as “world literary space,” a “parallel territory, relatively autonomous from the political domain, and dedicated as a result to questions, debates, inventions of a speciically literary nature.” Such relative autonomy, she argues, constitutes world literary space as a “market where non-market values are traded, within a non-economy; and measured [...] by an aesthetic scale of time” (72). At the same time, it is not entirely clear what Casanova thinks mediates the relationship between this “non-economy” and the global economy; for this reason, we might agree with Ignacio Sánchez Prado when he notes that, for Casanova, “colonial relations appear to be traces that the ield of power let in the autonomous system of literature during its moment of constitution and autonomy, but do not necessarily play a role in the processes of consecration within the literary system” (Sánchez Prado 27). Casanova, in other words, provides an incomplete picture of the relationship between the formation of world literary 399 space and the development of the world-system—a relationship that seems crucial to our understanding of the novel today. his becomes all the clearer when we consider that Casanova’s study extends primarily to a period in which the emergence of peripheral literatures were not only marked by an acute awareness of the manner in which relations within world literary space relect and oten contest unevenly developed relations within the world-system, but were also tasked with addressing and even compensating for such unevenness. Bolaño himself points to this dynamic when he notes that, in Latin America, “economic underdevelopment doesn’t allow subgenres to lourish. Underdevelopment only allows for great works of literature. Lesser works, in this monotonous or apocalyptic landscape, are an unattainable luxury” (“‘Reading’” 57). But even as “the writer aspires to meet these expectations [...] reality—the same reality that has fostered these aspirations—works to stunt the inal product” (58). Here, Bolaño would appear to echo Casanova’s claim that the “hierarchy and inequality” (Casanova 82) of world literary space redeines the distinction between dominant and dominated literature in terms of “greatest autonomy” versus “greatest heteronomy” (83). hus, while the “great works” that Bolaño mentions ofer some means by which to avoid what 2666 calls the “garbage pit of history” (228), they are no less subject to the demands that underdevelopment places on the Latin American writer. Yet in contrast to Casanova, Bolaño’s comments highlight the degree to which the options available within a zone of “greatest heteronomy,” such as the Latin American literary ield, are underwritten by the ideology of modernization—a desire for a modernity, spurred on and at the same time circumscribed by the unevenly developed lows of global capital.2 But while Bolaño’s comments here speak directly to this dynamic, this is all complicated by the fact that 2666 approximates something like a vast compendium of subgenres, ranging from the historical novel and detective iction, through the CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC thriller and Mexican narconarrative, to romantic comedy. So, while he believes that “[u]nderdevelopment only allows for great works of literature,” it is also true that 2666 lies in the face of this assertion by making such subgenres the raw material of a novel that imagines itself as a “great work,” an example of what, within 2666, the Chilean exile Amalitano describes as “great, imperfect, torrential works” (227) such as Moby-Dick and he Trial. In this way, Bolaño’s novel registers a shit within the political coniguration of the world-system with far-reaching consequences for the literary. To understand how, we should begin with Carlos J. Alonso’s recent identiication of “the novel without literature” (3). Drawing on the critic Joseina Ludmer’s account of “postautonomous literatures,” Alonso argues that the contemporary third-world novel poses a challenge to those approaches that have sought “to incorporate it into the larger history of the novel as a genre” (4).3 For Alonso, the comparative approaches endorsed by critics such as Fredric Jameson, Roberto Schwarz, and Franco Moretti “will not help 400 us navigate the non-Western novel in the age of globalization and its unrelenting commodiication of culture.” his, he maintains, is plain to see in the case of the contemporary Latin American novel, which no longer seeks to “incorporate Latin American ‘reality’ in any meaningful fashion,” bearing witness instead to an “indifference to being consumed [...] as literature—as well as their ready availability to market-driven circulation” (4). In this sense, Alonso’s “novel without literature” is a novel that not only takes leave of the nation and Latin America, but also dispenses with any claim to formal and ontological speciicity because it understands itself as a commodity (much like Morini understands Johns’ “masterpiece”); from this perspective, authors and even critics today only do it “for the money.” Alonso subsequently locates the origins of the “novel without literature” in what he describes as the “collapse” of the “autonomy of the literary ield and all the claims that derived from it” (3). Meanwhile, Alonso also maintains that the novels written in Spanish by writers such as Alan Pauls, Santiago Gamboa, Ignacio Padilla, and Jorge Volpi “mark their distance from the preceding novels of the Boom by taking leave from Latin American history and circumstance and by sufusing their texts with paradigms, categories, and even plots derived from mass media, the new digital technologies, and global networks of circulation and meaning” (4). In this way, the “novel without literature” ostensibly makes explicit a claim that Volpi only gestures toward: that the Latin American novel begins to be perceived as postnational at the same time it becomes postautonomous—twin developments that, according to Alonso, render previous modes of comparative analysis outmoded, if not altogether obsolete. He subsequently concludes by asking, “Does it make sense to speak of the novel when the claim for literary autonomy can no longer be sustained?” (5). In efect, however, he raises another question, recalling Volpi’s El insomnio de Bolívar: Does it make sense to speak of Latin American literature today? Presumably, this collapse of literature’s autonomy would also entail the dissolu- EMILIO SAURI | AUTONOMY AFTER AUTONOMY tion of the so-called “relative autonomy” of Casanova’s world literary space.4 Now, this dissolution is the scenario that has long deined artistic production within the centers of the global economy: a de-autonomization associated with what Jameson identiied nearly three decades ago as postmodernism, or, the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” his may be why we cannot help but see in Alonso’s “novel without literature” shades of Jameson’s claim that “[t]he theory of postmodernity airms a gradual de-diferentiation [...] the economic itself gradually becoming cultural, all the while the cultural gradually becomes economic” (“Globalization” 449). From a certain perspective, then, the idea of a “novel without literature,” or of a postautonomous literature more generally, points to the enlargement of a dynamic to which Jameson’s concept of postmodernism refers: namely, capitalism’s ceaseless march across the globe into previously unincorporated enclaves of cultural production. his is this same de-diferentiation between aesthetic and commodity production that, for Jameson, precipitated the rise of a situation within the irst world in which “we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current 401 experience” (Postmodernism 21). What Alonso’s account suggests, therefore, is that the standpoint of the novel written by Latin Americans today is no diferent than that of the irst world, and it is precisely this indistinctness that 2666 will oten register in approximating the vanishing point of postmodernism’s own contemporaneity, a sense of the present no diferent than that of the commodity.5 In Bolaño’s novel, this sense of the present is embodied by the prostitute Vanessa, who, as the narrator explains, “never thought about the future [...] but only the present, the perpetual present” (84). hat this description could just as easily apply to any number of characters in 2666 indicates the extent to which this perceived absence of any future or past underlies the novel as a whole. hus, while driving through new housing developments in Santa Teresa, Marco Antonio Guerra insists, “People say these neighborhoods are the city’s future [...] but in my opinion this shithole has no future” (214). Meanwhile, Augusto Guerra believes literature “does have a future [...] and so does history,” but considering this comes from the disingenuous dean of the university’s Faculty of Literature, we have every reason to be skeptical. More importantly, it is this “perpetual present,” or conviction “that nothing would ever change” (638)—as Archimboldi’s father announces—that the novel evokes by way of the leitmotif of “boredom” in the epigraph taken from Baudelaire, “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” his theme subsequently reemerges most notably in Lotte Reiter’s dream, in which she imagines seeing her brother, Archimboldi, walking across the desert she describes as “unfathomable and hostile,” but which the Archimboldi of her dream decribes as “just boring, boring, boring” (879). One cannot help but think here of Francis Fukuyama’s notorious claim in 1989 that the “end of history” not only marked the conclusion of the cold war, but will also “be a very sad time.” “he struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal,” he writes, “will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC sophisticated consumer demands,” ushering in “centuries of boredom” (Fukuyama 18). Viewed from this perspective, the desert in Lotte’s dream begins to look like the landscape of neoliberalism’s vision of a world in which everything is a market; and indeed, in Latin America, the ascendancy of this vision was itself attended by the “collapse of real socialism and [...] the discrediting of utopias,” which Volpi believes marked the end of an earlier generation’s “Bolivarian aspirations,” replaced now by Fukuyama’s “economic calculation” and “satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands,” which Alonso in efect sees in the contemporary novel. And yet, what we see in 2666 is not the “postmodernization” of the novel; on the contrary, while Fukuyama also contends that “[i]n the posthistorical period there will be neither art nor philosophy,” Bolaño’s novel not only demonstrates the opposite—that art does, in fact, continue to exist—but also shows the degree to which the shit in Latin America’s cultural and historical situation that Volpi and Alonso outline marks not the triumph of capitalism, but its crisis. 402 To begin, it goes without saying that whether or not we believe that the work of art has always been a commodity like any other, what Alonso describes as the collapse of the “autonomy of the literary ield” presupposes some prior moment when literature’s claim to autonomy was consistent enough to assume that a formalization of the literary ield was possible; a moment, that is, when the question of diferentiating between aesthetic production and commodity production was still on the table. But as Julio Ramos has shown, within the ambit of Latin America, autonomy has historically been much less a fact than a problem. Ramos explains that the “institutionalization of art and literature presupposed their separation from the public sphere, which in nineteenth-century Europe was already developing its own ‘organic’ intellectuals, along with its own administrative and discursive apparatuses” (xli-xlii). In Latin America, however, the “obstacles that confronted the institutionalization of literature paradoxically generated a literary ield whose separation from the political sphere was incomplete and uneven” (xlii). Under these conditions, the impulse toward the autonomization of the literary sphere was immediately bound up with that desire for a modernization that was everywhere else denied, a desire to which, as we have already seen, Bolaño alerts us by claiming that “[u]nderdevelopment only allows for great works of literature.” In Alonso’s account, nonetheless, the contemporary novel written in Spanish by Latin Americans renders such unevenly developed lows of capital illegible, a view encapsulated in neoliberalism’s metaphor of the global market as the “tide that lits all boats” or the “latness” of its world. For Bolaño, in contrast, the conviction that the problem of underdevelopment has been solved is treated as an error. his is most evident in the description of Santa Teresa ofered by the character Chucho Flores in “he Part about Fate.” In Santa Teresa, Flores tells the African-American journalist Oscar Fate: [w]e have everything. Factories, maquiladoras, one of the lowest unemployment rates in Mexico, a cocaine cartel, a constant low of workers from other cities, Central American immigrants, an urban infrastructure that can’t support the level of demographic growth. EMILIO SAURI | AUTONOMY AFTER AUTONOMY We have plenty of money and poverty, we have imagination and bureaucracy, we have violence and the desire to work in peace. here’s just one thing we haven’t got [....] Time [...] We haven’t got any fucking time. (286) Chucho suggests that Santa Teresa is out of time, in the sense of being in a place where time has ceased to progress and where the everyday rhythm of life itself has stalled to become part of what the novel calls the “perpetual present.” But Chucho also points to another sense in which Santa Teresa is out of time: for all its factories, maquiladoras, and urban infrastructure, none of these will lead to the development of Santa Teresa, Mexico, or the “developing world.” Fate himself acknowledges this when he thinks, “Time for what? [...] Time for this shithole, equal parts lost cemetery and garbage dump, to turn into a kind of Detroit?” (286). hus, the illusion of the temporal simultaneity of the irst world and third is ultimately revealed as the disappearance of time itself; the disappearance, in other words, of the sense of time long associated with the project of modernization, a project central to the Latin American nation-state throughout the twentieth century. What would have been seen, at some 403 other moment in history, as a sign of the developing city’s march towards modernity here becomes nothing more than a source of frustration for a class of entrepreneurs, managers, and technocrats with nowhere to go. In the wake of this collapse of modernization, all that remains is a developmentalism without development, and if we can agree with the novel’s claim that the “secret of the world is hidden” (348) in Santa Teresa, it is because Bolaño’s ictional bordertown is one of the many black holes of global capitalism into which entire populations disappear—oten in horrifyingly literal ways—and from which there is no escape, as the fate that befalls its female maquiladora workers and murder victims in “he Part about the Crimes” makes clear. Indeed, their fate and the altered sense of time to which Chucho’s complaint attests ind their origins in what Giovanni Arrighi has described as a “major reversal in the direction of global capital lows,” a reversal precipitated in the late 1970s and early 1980s by a crisis in the world-system. In Arrighi’s words, “the United States, which in the 1950s and 1960s had been the major source of world liquidity and of direct investment, in the 1980s became the world’s main debtor nation and by far the largest recipient of foreign capital” (21). his reversal subsequently resulted in “radical changes in the overall context of hird World development” (6), which culminated in the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, as “the ‘lood’ of capital that hird World countries (and Latin American and African countries in particular) had experienced in the 1970s turned into the sudden ‘drought’ of the 1980s” (24). Following this drought, then, the illusions of developmentalism underwritten by “loan capital” ofered on “highly favorable terms” (18) would eventually collapse under the weight of structural adjustment programs in line with IMF and World Bank prescriptions, which, shiting the burden of crisis onto the developing world, would radically alter, if not altogether eliminate, the conditions of possibility for economic modernization. As Arrighi makes clear, however, “while the new strategy did not deliver on its prom- CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC ises of development, it did [...] succeed in inducing hird World countries to adapt their economies to the new conditions of accumulation on a world scale” (23). No doubt NAFTA and the growth of maquiladora manufacturing along the US-Mexico border, which are central to 2666 and particularly to “he Part about the Crimes,” are themselves among the consequences of this crisis. But insofar as the accommodation to these new conditions of accumulation rendered the developmentalist hope for success within that system—to say nothing of an alternative—impossible, it not only precipitated the dismantling of the political utopias that Volpi identiies with Latin America’s Bolivarian dream, but also serve, in El insomnio de Bolívar, as the origins of his claim that “Latin American literature no longer exists.” Volpi suggests as much when he notes that “for a Latin American, publishing with Spanish publishers [...] represents [...] the only way of escaping his or her national cages and of being read in other countries within the region,” and that the “cause of this phenomenon can be traced to the economic crisis of the 1970s, which 404 practically destroyed Latin America’s publishing industry.” For Volpi, the market is Spain, and Latin American writers are forced to adjust to the demands of the market if they wish to be read at all. From this perspective, the contemporary novel would appear to signal a further step in that “absorption within the mechanisms of consumer society” that Rama already saw in the Boom, a step, that is, toward the real subsumption of literature under capital. For all that, Bolaño’s novel nonetheless proposes that the consequences of this same crisis may ultimately provide the literary with an unexpected political valence in the form of an autonomy ater autonomy. Accordingly, where Alonso and Volpi only see something like the real subsumption of literature under capital, 2666 sees a disarticulation of autonomy and modernization, a process that is no less central to Bolaño’s he Savage Detectives. While literature had been previously conceived as a means by which to achieve what, for example, Octavio Paz viewed as a compensatory modernity, this conviction vanished soon ater a crisis within the world-system shattered any hope of successfully catching up with the irst world. As we have seen, Bolaño maintains that literary genres such the novel had long been taken up in Latin America with an eye to addressing underdevelopment—via the production of so-called “great works”— though 2666 also makes it clear that once there is no modernity to get to, these same forms and genres can be appropriated and retooled for entirely new purposes. But this also means that the attention to formal concerns that Casanova considers constitutive of world literary space would no longer simply function as a source of symbolic wealth; and indeed, as Oswaldo Zavala observes, Bolaño’s ictions not only “subvert Casanova’s model” (652), but also cancel out the “anxiety of being contemporaries of all men, which, since Alfonso Reyes and Octavio Paz, has been the driving force of Latin American modernity, the elusive goal that incriminates, with its absence, the dysfunctional condition of the developing nation-state and its culture” (653). At the same time, and as the rise of Bolaño’s own stardom shows, this is not to say that commodities such as the bestseller will disappear; in fact, the future of the novel may be EMILIO SAURI | AUTONOMY AFTER AUTONOMY one without literature. Nevertheless, as Nicholas Brown puts it in a related context, the “problem is that a world where the work of art is a commodity like any other is the world neoliberalism claims we already live in and have always lived in, a world where everything is (and if it isn’t, should be) a market” (Brown). And it is in this context that an attention to what Casanova calls the “irreducible singularity of literary texts” and what Adorno and Horkheimer describe as the “logic of the work” is transformed into a possible means of distinguishing—however minimally—artworks from commodities, a means, that is, by which the literary text can insist on its irreducibility to market-driven calculation. Perhaps the political meaning of this commitment to literary autonomy is nowhere more apparent than in “he Part about the Crimes,” and particularly in its numerous descriptions of murdered women, whose presence in the novel is reminiscent of the mutilated and mummiied hand that hangs in the center of Edwin Johns’s painting: he body was found half buried some ity yards from the road that crossed El Rosario and intersected a dirt track that ran from the eastern end of the Podestá ravine. It was discovered by a local ranch hand who was passing by on horseback. According to the medical examiners, the cause of death was strangulation, with a fracture of the hyoid bone. Despite the body’s state of decomposition, signs of battery with a blunt object were still evident about the heads, hands, and legs. he victim had probably also been raped. As indicated by the fauna found on the body, the date of death was approximately the irst or second week of February. here was nothing to identify the victim, although her particulars matched those of Guadalupe Guzmán Prieto, eleven years old, disappeared the evening of February 8, in Colonia San Bartolomé. (545) As Jean Franco observes, Bolaño here “parodies the language of police reports, whose pedestrian prose aspires to be ‘scientiic’ but in fact forces the reader to imagine what the dry prose tries to cover” (240). But this also raises the question, to what end? For Franco, 2666 as a whole delivers a “devastating judgment of the ‘desert of boredom’ that needs an ‘oasis of horror’ in which pleasure and cruelty are inseparable” (245). And yet, there is an equally important sense in which this prose not only denies the reader such “pleasure,” but also marks the novel’s indiference to the reader’s experience altogether. It is as if, for Bolaño, any attempt to manipulate what the reader feels reproduces the shortcomings that Adorno had long ago attributed to Sartre’s literary theory, namely that the point of Sartre’s “committed art” is “to work at the level of fundamental attitudes,” that is, “to awaken the free choice of the agent [...] as opposed to the neutrality of the spectator,” by way of which the “work of art becomes an appeal to subjects” that obscures the very reality in which the reader’s choice is supposed to intervene.6 Hence, Adorno’s claim that “[i]t is not the oice of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads” (78). his is the politics of autonomous art, one that becomes plausible only ater the foundering of national development projects, and insofar as Bolaño’s “dry prose” (Franco 240) marks a distance from committed works, it also 405 CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC reveals that what 2666 wants readers to see in the descriptions of the Santa Teresa victims is something like a work of art. But, Adorno also understood this “appeal to subjects” as incapable of keeping the work of art from “decaying into cultural commodities” (75); even when directed at more radical ends. For this reason, in stressing the contemporary novel’s “availability to market-driven circulation,” critics such as Alonso not only blur the distinction between novel and commodity, but must also read any given work as an appeal to consumers, even when this appeal is made on behalf of a politics. And if there is no reason to think that a Hollywood blockbuster, a saw, or even a hammer would not do just as well in a pinch, this is because, from the point of view of both committed art and the commodity, what the work says about itself is less important than what it might say to and about the reader or consumer. In this way, literary questions are immediately bound up with questions about who we are and what we feel. As a critic such as Franco suggests when she claims that “Bolaño recognizes that the killing 406 of women is one aspect of an entire culture” (239), the “misogyny that underwrites it” (241), and that for this reason the “accumulation of descriptions” (238) aims to work at the level of such “fundamental attitudes.” Yet, in refusing any appeal as such, Bolaño’s “dry prose” transforms this accumulation into the mark of its interest in the literary problem of representation, the question of how the artwork might frame this horror, to signal that 2666 instead works at the level of form, something that points to the possibility of seeing the novel as something other than a commodity.7 In 2666, then, what Adorno might have understood as an “appeal to subjects” is bad not only for art, but also for politics. hat is, in marking this indiference to the reader’s or consumer’s experience, Bolaño’s portrayal of the murdered women not only aims to preserve the distinction between novel and commodity, but also reserves the possibility of seeing the structure that gives rise to the femicides in the irst place, an economic structure that functions independently of our attitude toward its victims. What 2666 elicits, in this sense, is comprehension, not emotion, cognition, not afect; and while it cannot quite tell us how each of these women come to meet such horriic ends in the black holes of contemporary capitalism, it does suggest that the novel, and the work of art more generally, can tell us what our relationship to those victims cannot be. And it is by way of this politics of autonomous art that we might yet come to understand that the “secret of the world is hidden” in Santa Teresa. Which is not to say that the best Santa Teresa and its victims can hope for is “to turn into a kind of Detroit,” but that, under a global economic system steeped in crisis, the future of cities such as New York, London, Paris, and Beijing is Santa Teresa. Notes 1. Many thanks to Nicole Aschof, Sarah Brouillette, Stephen Buttes, and Eugenio Di Stefano for their comments on the drats of this article. Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. EMILIO SAURI | AUTONOMY AFTER AUTONOMY 2. As Mariano Siskind shows, this is particularly true in the case of the novel: “Because of the kind of experiences that the novel aforded to the readers of the colonial and semi-colonial peripheries, Latin American intellectuals immediately realized the important role that the consumption, production, and translation of novels could play in the process of socio-cultural modernization” (339). 3. For a discussion of Ludmer’s conception of “postautonomous literature,” see Di Stefano and Sauri. 4. Casanova’s conception of world literary space draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of the “ield of restricted production,” whose autonomy “can be measured by its power to deine its own criteria for the production and evaluation of its products” (115). his is the sphere in which symbolic goods are manufactured for those producers who establish the criteria of aesthetic value, “internal demarcations [that] appear irreducible to any external factors of economic, political or social diferentiation,” including literary categories and criteria. 5. Jameson understood his essay “hird-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” not only as a “theory of the cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature,” but also as a “pendant to the essay on postmodernism which describes the logic of the cultural imperalism of the irst world and above all of the United States” (“hird-World” 87-88, n. 26). his might begin to explain Alonso’s skepticism toward any application of Jameson’s model to the “non-Western novel in the age of globalization,” and it may also begin to explain the distinction Volpi draws between an earlier generation of writers and his own. And this distinction becomes all the clearer if we recall Roberto Fernández Retamar’s 1971 response to a similar question—“Does a Latin-American culture exist?” (3)—in “Caliban,” an essay that belongs to the era of third-world nationalism described by Jameson’s 1986 essay. 6. Considering the connections 2666 draws between the femicides in its ictional Ciudad Juárez and the Holocaust, it is perhaps not surprising that Adorno’s claim that “to write lyric poetry ater Auschwitz is barbaric” even as “literature must resist this verdict” (84) resonates with Bolaño’s concerns here. 7. For an account that takes up the question of autonomy in Bolaño’s Distant Star, see Di Stefano. Works Cited Adorno, heodor W. “Commitment.” Trans. Francis McDonagh. New Let Review 1.87-88 (1974): 75-89. Print. Alonso, Carlos J. “he Novel without Literature.” Novel 44.1 (2011): 3-5. Print. Arrighi, Giovanni. “he African Crisis.” New Let Review 2.15 (2002): 5-36. Print. Bolaño, Roberto. 2666. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: Picador, 2008. Print. ---. “‘Reading is Always More Important than Writing.’” Trans. Margaret Carson. he Last Interview and Other Conversations. Trans. Sybil Perez and Margaret Carson. New York: Melville House, 2009. 53-68. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. “he Market of Symbolic Goods.” he Field of Cultural Production. Ed. Randal Johnson. Trans. Charles Newman et al. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 112-41. Print. Brown, Nicholas. “he Work of Art in the Age of Its Real Subsumption under Capital.” nonsite (editorial). 13 March 2012. Web. 2 May 2015. <http://nonsite. org/editorial/the-work-of-art-in-the-age-of-its-real-subsumption-under-capital> Casanova, Pascale. “Literature as a World.” New Let Review 2.31 (2005): 71-90. 407 CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC Print. Deckard, Sharae. “Peripheral Realism, Millennial Capitalism, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.” Modern Language Quarterly 73.3 (2012): 351-72. Print. Di Stefano, Eugenio. “Reconsidering Aesthetic Autonomy and Interpretation as a Critique of the Latin American Let in Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella distante.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 47.3 (2013): 463-85. Print. Di Stefano, Eugenio, and Emilio Sauri. “Making it Visible: Latin Americanist Criticism, Literature, and the Question of Exploitation Today.” nonsite 13 (2014). Web. 2 May 2015. <http://nonsite.org/article/making-it-visible> Fernández Retamar, Roberto. “Caliban: Notes toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America.” Caliban and Other Essays. Trans. Edward Baker. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. 3-45. Print. Franco, Jean. Cruel Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2013. Print. 408 Friedman, homas L. he World Is Flat, 3.0. New York: Picador, 2007. Print. Fukuyama, Francis. “he End of History?” he National Interest 16 (1989): 3-18. Print. Horkheimer, Max, and heodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. Print. Jameson, Fredric. “Globalization as a Philosophical Issue.” Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 2009. 435-55. Print. ---. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. Print. ---. “hird-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88. Print. Rama, Angel. “El ‘boom’ en perspectiva.” Más allá del boom: literatura y mercado. Ed. Angel Rama. Buenos Aires: Folios Ediciones, 1984. 51-110. Print. Ramos, Julio. Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Trans. John D. Blanco. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Print. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio. “‘Hijos de Metapa’: un recorrido conceptual de la literatura mundial.” América Latina en la “literatura mundial.” Ed. Ignacio Sánchez Prado. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2006. 7-46. Print. Sauri, Emilio. “‘A la pinche modernidad’: Literary Form and the End of History in Roberto Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes.” Modern Language Notes 125.2 (2010): 406-32. Print. Siskind, Mariano. “he Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global.” Comparative Literature 64.4 (2010): 336-60. Print. Volpi, Jorge. El insomnio de Bolívar: cuatro consideraciones imprevistas sobre EMILIO SAURI | AUTONOMY AFTER AUTONOMY América Latina en el siglo XXI. Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, S.A., 2010. Print. Zavala, Oswaldo. “El ensayo Entre paréntesis: Roberto Bolaño y el olvido de la modernidad latinoamericana.” Revista Iberoamericana 240 (2012): 637-56. Print. 409 7KH1DUUDWRUDQGWKH1DWLRQ%XLOGHU'LDOHFW'LDORJXH DQG1DUUDWLYH9RLFHLQ0LQRULW\DQG:RUNLQJ&ODVV)LFWLRQ $OH[DQGHU%HHFURIW Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, Volume 42, Issue 4, Décembre 2015, pp. 410-423 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\&DQDGLDQ5HYLHZRI&RPSDUDWLYH/LWHUDWXUH 5HYXH&DQDGLHQQHGH/LWW«UDWXUH&RPSDU«H For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/crc/summary/v042/42.4.beecroft.html Access provided by Vienna University Library (16 Dec 2015 12:00 GMT) The Narrator and the Nation-Builder: Dialect, Dialogue, and Narrative Voice in Minority and Working-Class Fiction Alexander Beecrot University of South Carolina 410 he representation of social class and other forms of social centrality and marginality (race, regional identity, rurality, etc.) presents a dilemma for literature. Since in most contexts the literary language is, or is at least held to be, a monopoly of elites, to report characters from the margins speaking and thinking in such a register can seem like an egregious violation of the tenets of realism. On the other hand, to have such characters speak as they would in daily life mars the smoothness and literariness of the text’s language, in way most oten thought suitable only for comic efects, from Aristophanes to Dickens. he question of how to balance these issues, marking marginal characters enough to make their status legible without interfering with the expected literary qualities of the text, has been, and remains, a challenge. Earlier periods in literary history relied on other techniques to convey diferences in class and status among characters. Where noble and educated characters in Shakespeare tend to speak in verse, for example, servants and other humble characters frequently speak in prose. Similarly, in Sanskrit drama, such as that of Kalidasa (dating perhaps to the ith century BC), kings spoke in Sanskrit, while other characters spoke in various registers of Prakrit—the partly regionalized, partly vernacularized languages of India that coexisted with Sanskrit (see Deshpande 11314). Similar phenomena can be identiied in other traditions, allowing for the careful demarcation of social class or status while preserving the integrity of the literary language. Modern European literary realism (and its non-European ofshoots) lacks this option. Realism demands that characters speak as they would in daily life, that dialogue accurately record the thoughts of characters without unduly distorting their language. At the same time, the ancient conviction that the literary representation of uneducated, lower-class, or marginal registers of the language can have only comic efect remains surprisingly powerful even in our own time. How can the experiences Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC 0319–051x/15/42.4/410 © Canadian Comparative Literature Association ALEXANDER B EECROFT | THE NARRATOR AND THE NATION -B UILDER of non-elites be represented in the realist novel without either translating those experiences into a literary register that demeans their origins or inciting laughter rather than serious engagement by remaining faithful to the register in which they would have been uttered? When a writer working from a relatively elite position describes marginalized characters, as with Harriet Beecher Stowe and African-American slaves, or Henry James and the working-class revolutionaries of he Princess Casamassima, or D.H. Lawrence with gamekeepers and miners, it seems perfectly natural that the potentially colloquial dialogue of those characters is framed by a soothingly elevated narrative voice, maintaining himself or herself at a cool distance from the experiences described. Any irony or tension that may be felt between the two registers of the language is a perhaps inevitable consequence of attempting to speak for the subaltern. When the writer belongs to the marginalized group described, however, these ironies become more potent—and more problematic. How can a narrator adequately represent the experiences of marginal individuals, when he or she must speak in a language quite alien to them? How does, for example, an African-American writer, or an English writer speaking from the working classes, represent his or her characters in realist iction in such a way as to balance linguistic integrity and literary dignity? As we shall see, an interesting compromise seems to have emerged historically, one taken for granted, perhaps, by many readers: dialogue may be represented in a vernacular register suited to the character, but narrators speak almost exclusively in the standard literary form of the language. While this pattern seems to hold very consistently for writers speaking from some kind of class or social marginality, and the hegemony of standard-language narration remains largely unchallenged even in the post-1945 era, the story is somewhat diferent with writers whose marginality is understood as geographic and/or ethnic (and hence as at least potentially national) in nature. Novels by the latter kind of writers do more frequently employ narrators using non-standard versions of the language, although to be sure many also do use the literary standard language. his observation leads me to suggest, in turn, that the voice of the narrator performs a structural role not unlike that of the nation-state itself. Contemporary intellectual interest in the cosmopolitan has had to live with the diiculties of constructing forms of allegiance and fellow-feeling outside the nation-state, which, for all its obvious diiculties, remains the most efective force yet known for generating imagined communities. Attempts to replace the nation oten seem to consist of trying to create something else that looks like the nation, but which operates on a larger scale, leaving the nation-state as, at least for now, an indispensable idea. he hegemonic presence of the standard-language narrator within the subaltern novel represents, I would suggest, a literary/aesthetic manifestation of this indispensability. Just as the heteroglossia of the novelistic form seems to have to resolve itself in the monologic voice of the narrator, so, too, divergent and alternative forms of ainity seem to need to resolve themselves into the form of the nation-state. If, as Benedict 411 CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC Anderson and many others would suggest, the rise of the novel is intimately tied up with the origins of the nation-state, and if our age indeed seeks alternatives to the nation-state, then the standardized voice of the narrator may be one of the ictions it proves hardest to do without. One need only look at exceptions to my rule about the use of non-standard language to see the force with which that rule operates. One of the earliest, and most famous, of novels that possess a narrator who speaks in non-standard language is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. While Tom Sawyer’s third-person narrator writes in an English more elevated than that of any of the characters he describes, Huck Finn narrates his own story, in a style that makes no concessions to literary pretension: 412 You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of “he Adventures of Tom Sawyer”; but that ain’t no matter. hat book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. here was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. hat is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before. (Twain 1) his dialectal narration seems principally chosen for its comic efects, particularly for the knowing ironies generated between Huck’s uneducated narrative diction and the lurking authorial persona of Mr. Mark Twain himself. We never entirely forget that this is Mr. Twain’s novel, and that one of his “stretchers” is the claim that the novel is really being narrated by its main character. he faux-naïf quality of this narration resonates with, on some level, the novel’s ultimately somewhat quietistic politics: Jim, the runaway slave, is re-captured, but freed through a plot device (Miss Watson’s will). he novel gives Jim the freedom that readerly sentiment demands, but without threatening the established order of slavery (already gone in reality, of course, by the time Twain is writing). Twain’s vernacular narration is the exception that proves the rule, and which illustrates, on the whole, the diiculties that would beset the user of such a narration for sterner political purposes. In what follows, I will examine the linguistic choices made by writers aiming at such purposes: working-class writers from England and France, and African-American writers, to explore their common avoidance of vernacular narration. Between 1842 and 1844, the noted Chartist writer and activist homas Cooper was imprisoned in Staford Gaol ater a speech of his had contributed to large-scale political riots in the Pottery Towns. Cooper was the illegitimate son of a dyer in Leicester; ater his father’s death, his mother went into that business for herself and apprenticed homas to a cobbler. homas Cooper was thus almost entirely self-educated, to the extent of learning French, Latin, and Greek, and he quit his work as a cobbler at the age of twenty-two to become a teacher and Methodist lay-preacher, becoming active in the Chartist politics of his era. he best-known work of his prison years is perhaps his long poem in ten books, he Purgatory of Suicides, which promotes Chartist ideals through a survey of famed suicides throughout history, beginning with an ALEXANDER B EECROFT | THE NARRATOR AND THE NATION -B UILDER invocation that paraphrases Cooper’s fateful address to the striking colliers: SLAVES, toil no more! Why delve, and moil, and pine, To glut the tyrant-forgers of your chain? Slaves, toil no more! Up, from the midnight mine, Summon your swarthy thousands to the plain; Beneath the bright sun marshalled, swell the strain Of Liberty; and, while the lordlings view Your banded hosts, with stricken heart and brain, Shout, as one man,—“Toil we no more renew, Until the Many cease their slavery to the Few!” (11) But at the same time that he was writing he Purgatory of Suicides, Cooper wrote a series of short stories, in his own account “a relief from the intenser thought and feeling exercised in the building-up of my prison-rhyme” (Cooper, Old i). hese stories, published under the title Old Fashioned Stories shortly ater his release from prison in 1845, are, as one might expect, also in the service of Chartist causes. For example, the story “Raven Dick, he Poacher: Or, ‘Who Scratched the Bull?’” takes as its subject the debate between a poacher and the tenant-farmer who has caught him in the act. he farmer argues that the hares caught by Raven Dick belong to the landlord, Squire Anderson, since they live by eating food grown on the Squire’s land. he poacher retorts that, since it is the farmer (Kiah Dobson) whose labor is responsible for the squire’s crops, it hardly seems fair that the squire should claim ownership of the hares who feed on the crops. he farmer is won over by the logic of this argument, but later, when the gamekeeper catches the poacher in the act, the farmer betrays him, and the poacher serves a six-month prison term. he story itself is not especially remarkable in any respect, one of dozens, or hundreds, of such stories written in the era by a series of working-class intellectuals who sought to cultivate the literary expression of their radical politics. It perfectly illustrates, however, the point I am making. he writer himself, as we have seen, is of working-class origins; his characters are uneducated rural tenant farmers and poachers. he characters’ dialogue is reported in a form that attempts to reproduce their rustic Leicestershire dialect, as in their irst exchange, though it must be said that the dialectal transcription is maintained more consistently for the naïve farmer than for the knowing poacher: “Farmer! how d’ye feel yoursen?” said Dick, striding up to Kiah Dobson, and looking him full in the face, as bold as a bull-dog. “Better than thou’lt feel, scapegrace! when thou gets thy hempen collar on!” replied the farmer, snarling as angrily as a mastif when he doesn’t like you.” (Cooper, Old 15) he narration, however, remains throughout in a standard, educated, register of English, making no concessions to the class or region of the characters, as the irst paragraphs reveal: KIAH DOBSON,—they always called him Kiah “for shortness sake,” as we used to say in Lincolnshire; but his full name was Hezekiah,—Kiah Dobson was a hearty buck of a 413 CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC farmer, who ploughed about ity acres, and fed sheep and bullocks on about ity others. He was a tenant of good old Squire Anderson, the ancestor of the Yarboroughs, who are called Lords in these new-fashioned times. Lindsey and its largest landlord presented, it need scarcely be said, very diferent features sixty years ago to those they present now. Squire Anderson kept a coach, but he had not three or four, like his successor, the peer: he had one good house at Manby, but he had not that and a much grander one at Brocklesby, another at Appuldercome, in the Isle of Wight, and another in town. he farmers of Lindsey kept each a good nag, for market service, and so forth; but it was a very, very scarce thing to ind a blood horse in their stables; and when their dames went to market, it was on the pillion-seat, behind the farmer himself, and not in the modern kickshaw gig. here were none of your strongholds of starvation, which famishing men called “Bastiles,” a few years ago; and a horn of good humming ale, and a motherly slice of bread and cheese, awaited the acceptance of any poor man who happened to be journeying, and called either at the hall of the squire or at the cottages of any of the farmers on his extensive estates. (14) he fact that the narrative voice of this story is in standard English may not strike 414 the reader (whether in 1845 or in 2015) as particularly unusual or worthy of notice, so ubiquitous is the practice of maintaining narration in standard language even when dialogue is represented in (some version of) a dialect or alternative register of the language. And yet I believe it is worth relecting on the strangeness of so doing: our narrator here speaks in very much the language of the squire, who, we are told at the end of the story, personally hears the case that sends Raven Dick to prison. he poacher and the tenant farmer, for all the tension that exists between them, share a register of English quite distinct from that of the narrator, and one can only imagine the lack of sympathy they could feel with that narrator for framing their story in terms they must have associated with their lords and masters. he earliest French-language working-class literature consists mostly of memoirs of compagnons, itinerant journeymen-workers learning their crat from their brother-workers as they travelled the France of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. he most famous of these memoirs, perhaps, is that of Agricol Perdiguier, a joiner and later member of the 1848 Constituent Assembly. Born near Avignon, and thus a native speaker of Occitan, it is nonetheless not surprising that his memoirs should be written in the standard French he mastered later in life, and which he practiced in his political life as well. Written in his later years and relecting on his earlier life, Perdiguier naturally enough expresses himself in the idiom which had by then become usual to him, rather than in the language of his youth. An earlier compagnon memoir, that of Jacques-Louis Ménétra, a glazier born in 1735 in Paris, is decidedly more casual in style, lacking punctuation or consistent orthography, and violating many of the standards of French grammar—but it was never intended for publication in this form, and only published recently on its rediscovery. Proletarian iction in French (as opposed to the sometimes lightly ictionalized memoirs discussed above, where the preponderance of text is in the voice of the autobiographical narrator), when it emerges, follows much the same pattern we have already seen in England. One of the most signiicant works of French working-class ALEXANDER B EECROFT | THE NARRATOR AND THE NATION -B UILDER iction, focused in this case on métayers, or sharecroppers, in the Auvergne, is La vie d’un simple (1904) by Émile Guillaumin. A native of the Auvergne himself, and a small-scale farmer who formed an early peasant’s union to protect métayers against their landowners, Guillaumin received little formal education. he narration in his novel is, however, consistently in standard French, if sometimes simpler in syntax and certainly humbler in content than that of many other writers of his time: Maintenant on traite les chiens comme des personnes ; on leur donne de la bonne soupe et du bon pain. Mais à cette époque on leur permettait seulement de barboter dans l’auge contenant la pâtée des cochons,—pâtée toujours fort peu riche en farine. Comme complément, on faisait sécher au four à leur intention une provision de ces âcres petites pommes que produisent les sauvageons des haies et qu’on appelle ici des croyes. (Guillaumin 16-17) [Nowadays we treat dogs as we do people: we give them good soup and good bread. But in those days we allowed them only to ilch from the trough containing the slop for the pigs—a slop always poor in lour. As a complement, we dried for their use in the oven a provision of those acrid little apples which wild hedges produce, and which are here called croyes.] he dialogue, as one might expect, includes dialectal elements, though more for show than as a consistent component of the narrative: ater a few initial uses of dialogue in Auvergnat, which is scarcely mutually intelligible with standard French, and which needs to be glossed, the novel moves to dialogue in standard French, with occasional dialect words or phrases italicized for emphasis, and with occasional narratorial observations that a character was speaking in dialect. To continue from the passage above, the narrator describes a conversation between his father and his sister concerning why their dog has refused to hunt rats that day: —Ol a donc pas rata ? Ce qui voulait dire : —Il n’a donc pas fait la chasse aux rats ? Et sur la réponse négative de ma sœur : —Voué un feignant : si ol avait évu faim, ol aurait ben rata... (C’est un fainéant : s’il avait eu faim, il aurait bien raté.) (17) [—“Ol a donc pas rata ?” Which means: —“So he didn’t hunt the rats?” And when my sister replied in the negative: —Voué un feignant : si ol avait évu faim, ol aurait ben rata... (“He’s a slacker: if he’d been hungry, he would have ratted, all right!”).]1 Perhaps because of the greater hegemonic position of standard French as a set of linguistic practices, as compared to the more loosely regulated English, the greater tendency in a writer such as Guillaumin to use standard French dialogue serves to minimize the distance between narrator and characters. While the texts of Cooper or Martin R. Delany, with their gaps between dialogue in dialect and standard-language 415 CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC narration, seem perversely to undermine the authors’ politics, the greater assimilation of Guillaumin’s story to standard French, somewhat unexpectedly, brings us closer to the characters, and minimizes the diference between them and the narrator. A similar phenomenon is found in the case of much African-American iction, from the nineteenth century to the present day: while there is a considerable use of dialogue in dialect, narrative voices tend overwhelmingly to be in standard American English. It might seem strange to juxtapose working-class iction of England and France with African-American iction, and it is certainly not my intention crassly to equate the two, nor to insist on too deep or detailed a series of parallels between these quite distinct canons, other than the particular point at issue here. Nonetheless, as a strong believer in the comparative method, I believe there is value in exploring the possible beneits of such comparison. In this regard, it is interesting to note that in his political treatise he Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852), Martin R. Delany, soon to become one of the irst 416 English-language African-American novelists, begins with an explicit comparison between the minority nationalisms of Europe and the situation of African-American slaves: hat there have been in all ages and in all countries, in every quarter of the habitable globe, especially among those nations laying the greatest claim to civilization and enlightenment, classes of people who have been deprived of equal privileges, political, religious and social, cannot be denied, and that this deprivation on the part of the ruling classes is cruel and unjust, is also equally true [....] In past ages there were many such classes, as the Israelites in Egypt, the Gladiators in Rome, and similar classes in Greece; and in the present age, the Gipsies in Italy and Greece, the Cossacs in Russia and Turkey, the Sclaves and Croats in the Germanic States, and the Welsh and Irish among the British, to say nothing of various other classes among other nations [....] Such then is the condition of various classes in Europe; yes, nations, for centuries within nations, even without the hope of redemption among those who oppress them. And however unfavorable their condition, there is none more so than that of the colored people of the United States. (Delany, Condition 11-12) Delany refers to all of these groups as “nations [...] within nations,” but to identify them as such of course raises interesting challenges. Some (the “Sclaves and Croats,” the Irish) were later to become nations in their own right, though only at the cost of considerable violence and relocation. Other groups identiied by Delany—“Gipsies,” African-Americans themselves, and the “Gladiators” (these latter presumably socioeconomic rather than ethnic categories)—are so deeply enmeshed within their national contexts that full political nationalist movements have never emerged, and (in the case of socioeconomic classes) perhaps never could. Such communities, permanently marginalized within the nations that house them, yet without the recourse or dream of their own nation-state, face a distinctive set of challenges on all sorts of levels. I submit that culture is one of these levels, and that the problem of the novelistic narrator is a particularly salient and interesting example. ALEXANDER B EECROFT | THE NARRATOR AND THE NATION -B UILDER In other words, narrators are in some sense also nation-builders (the sentence could naturally be run the other way, with nation-builders as narrators, but my purpose here is to use the political as an allegory for the aesthetic, not the more usual other way around). Founders of nations and narrators of novels alike build imaginary worlds linking disparate individuals and their actions, creating out of these materials stories that are compelling and meaningful. Nations must each be distinct from the other, and yet must share a family resemblance: no two nations can have the same language, religion, history, and geography (although nations frequently share one or more of these things), and yet they must also be built out of these same ingredients, and their structures and practices must be homologous. Similarly, each novel must be diferent from every other novel, and yet must share enough of the structure and practice of the novel to be recognizable as a participant in the form. One of those practices, it seems, is the use of narration in the standard language. A case in point is Delany’s novel Blake: Or the Huts of America (originally published in serial form in 1861-62). Published as the Civil War was raging, Delany’s novel emphasizes the complicity of Northern whites in slavery and posits a slave revolution in Cuba and the establishment of a government of ex-slaves there as the best prospect for the abolition of slavery in the United States. Delany is, in other words, a foundational igure of Black Nationalism, someone profoundly skeptical of the prospects for the peaceful coexistence of former slaves and their former masters in one nation. And yet his novel features an even more pronounced version of the narrative/dialogue diglossia we found in Cooper or Guillaumin, with the speech of the characters in a very strongly African-American dialectal register, and the narration in an elevated style. he narrator’s own stylistic register is, moreover, virtually indistinguishable from that of the (uniformly evil) white characters, establishing a strange complicity between the narrator and the characters he most despises, while leaving the narrator characterizing the thoughts and emotions of more sympathetic characters in a language they would not use and might not understand: On their arrival at the great house, those working nearest gathered around the carriage, among whom was Daddy Joe. “Wat a mautta wid missus?” was the general inquiry of the gang. “Your mistress is sick, boys,” replied the master. “Maus, whah’s Margot?” enquired the old man, on seeing the mistress carried into the house without the attendance of her favorite maidservant. “She’s in town, Joe,” replied Franks. “How’s Judy, seh?” “Judy is well.” “Tank’e seh!” politely concluded the old man, with a bow, turning away in the direction of his work—with a countenance expressive of anything but satisfaction—from the interview.” (Delany, Blake 10-11) Delany’s novel has always received a mixed reception on its literary merits (quite apart from the controversy generated by its political position), yet the multiple layers of irony in a passage such as this, achieved largely through the juxtaposition of diferent 417 CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC registers of English, are surely a considerable literary tour de force. he incongruity between the dialectal obsequiousness of “Tank’e seh!” and the conventional novelistic courtliness of “politely concluded the old man, with a bow, turning away in the direction of his work,” is pointed, and underscores the diference between the “work” done by politely bowing old men in other novels and that performed by the slave here, as well as the diference in the “politeness” of free men and of slaves. His countenance of dissatisfaction, at odds of course with the politeness of his inquiry, is hidden from the view of Franks, his master—but not from the view of the narrator, or from us. We have no doubt that the narrator sees into the minds of his black characters, and is forcefully on their side in all their travails—and yet his own language is that of the master, not of the slave. he narrator’s inely wrought ironies risk being lost altogether on the characters with whom he sympathizes, and his own high-lown novelistic style threatens to reenact the marginalization of their words. he same phenomenon is visible in many major African-American writers: while 418 dialogue may sometimes be in dialect, narration is almost invariably in standard English (or alternatively in some sort of Modernist art-language, which may borrow elements from African American Vernacular English while remaining wholly distinct from it). he exceptions are as illuminating as the rules: Zora Neale Hurston uses standard American English for the narration in her novel heir Eyes Were Watching God, but dialect narration in her folkloric writing. Even here, of course, Hurston was criticized for her use of dialect, as by Richard Wright in his 1937 review of the novel: Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that’s as far as it goes. Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the “white folks” laugh. (25) Such attitudes are common in the criticism, and speak to the dilemmas AfricanAmerican writers have oten faced: write for a primarily white audience, constructing for that audience an appealing mirror for what they consider ‘Black culture’ to be? Flatten out cultural and linguistic diferences in an efort to create a more digniied representation of African-Americans, even at the expense of assimilating to the dominant culture? Or reproduce the language of African-Americans, and be accused of folklorism or of pandering to white fantasies about the “quaintnesss” (a word Wright uses [25]) of African-Americans? With all these competing judgments, it is little wonder that writers chose the generally safer option of writing in standard English, especially in narration. Major contemporary African-American writers, such as Toni Morrison, continue to follow the now-traditional patterns of dialect dialogue and standard-language narration. In Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, for example, many of the characters speak in a version of African American Vernacular English that seems to approximate that appropriate to its mid-nineteenth century setting, but the narration itself is ALEXANDER B EECROFT | THE NARRATOR AND THE NATION -B UILDER in a fairly normative form of American written English of the late twentieth century: 124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. he women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. he grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old—as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). (3) hese famous opening lines deliberately do not aim at the expansiveness or unctuousness of a nineteenth-century narrator. he narrator’s voice makes room for the occasional colloquialism (“put up with”), even as it insists, rather conservatively, on “he” as the default pronoun for a female-dominated family of characters. he narrative continues in this register, with asides such as the following: “Winter in Ohio was especially rough if you had an appetite for color. Sky provided the only drama, and counting on a Cincinnati horizon for life’s principal joy was reckless indeed” (4). he register in which the dialogue is composed is not entirely consistent (characters wander in and out, for example, of standard English uses of the verb to be), but tend deinitely toward forms of African-American vernacular, creating something of a distance between her narrator and her characters (though a distance closer to that in Guillaumin than to that in Delany; Morrison’s characters tend to speak in a suiciently formal English to bridge the distance between them and their narrator). More representative, perhaps, of Morrison’s style is the kind of lightly punctuated streamof-consciousness modernist art-language with which she represents the interiority of her characters, occasionally possessing lashes of African-American dialect, but generally suiciently stylized as to evade racial categorization, as in this passage from her 2008 novel A Mercy: Insults had been moving back and forth to and fro for many seasons between the king of we families and the king of others. I think men thrive on insults over cattle, women, water, crops. Everything heats up and inally the men of we families burn we houses and collect those they cannot kill or ind for trade. (163) he use of “we” for “our” in this passage is its lone gesture toward African-American vernacularism, and contrasts sharply with the comparatively formal use of the relative clause “those they cannot kill or ind for trade.” he language of this interior monologue, then, evades ready racial characterization. Perhaps because of these strategic beneits, many African-American novels that do not feature simple standard American English narration feature instead some sort of art-language such as this, removed from the speech of any group. I do not mean to suggest, naturally, that we never encounter the use of non-standard language in narration on the part of a writer working from a position of class or racial subalternity, as opposed to regional identity. Beginning in the postwar era, such cases do in fact become more common, beginning perhaps with the Trinidadian-born Samuel Selvon’s he Lonely Londoners of 1956:2 419 CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC [T]he English people starting to make rab about how too much West Indians coming to the country: this was a time, when any corner you turn, is ten to one you bound to bounce up a spade. In fact, the boys all over London, it ain’t have a place where you wouldn’t ind them, and big discussion going on in Parliament about the situation, though the old Brit’n too diplomatic to clamp down on the boys or to do anything drastic like stop them from coming to the Mother Country. But big headlines in the papers every day. (2) A radical and provocative experiment of its kind, Selvon’s novel powerfully indicates the possibilities inherent in dialect narration, establishing a narrative voice that is at once credible and distinctive, readable and with the patina of authenticity. Selvon’s narrator speaks the language of his characters, and can act as one of them, establishing a solidarity quite distinct from the experience of reading Cooper or Delany. his experiment points, however, in a direction still surprisingly seldom followed. he reluctance of minority and working-class authors to use narration in dialect is sharply diferent from its considerably more frequent use in the works of writers 420 espousing a regionalist politics not speciically tied to social class (as were the examples of Cooper and Guillaumin, where regional pride was on the whole subordinated to class struggle). As a contemporary example, consider Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), narrated in a powerfully Glaswegian dialect that makes Selvon’s experiment seem tame: he sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling. Ah wis jist sitting thair, focusing oan the telly, tryin no tae notice the cunt. He wis bringing me doon. Ah tried tae keep ma attention oan the Jean-Claude Van Damme video. As happens in such movies, they started oaf wi an obligatory dramatic opening. hen the next phase ay the picture involved building up the tension through introducing the dastardly villain and sticking the weak plot thegither. Any minute now though, auld Jean-Claude’s ready tae git doon tae some serious swedgin. (3) Unlike Twain, the dialect is not simply here for comic efect, or simply to represent the naïveté of Welsh’s characters (though those motives are present); Welsh’s irst-person narration seems to suggest that there would be no other, or no other honest, means of representing this world. At the same time, and even within this short sample from the opening of the novel, the representation of dialect is far from consistent: longer and more formal words are spelled conventionally, while the more basic Anglo-Saxon vocabulary is spelled so as to relect local custom. In reality, of course, anyone who says “wis” for was and “oan” for on will surely pronounce a word such as “dastardly” or “attention” in a manner inlected by dialect as well. Likewise, a speaker who leaves of the g in “tryin” or “swedgin” will almost certainly prounounce the participles “trembling,” “lashing,” and “building” in the same way. Welsh retains these words in their standard English form, perhaps as an aid to the reader (the longer the word, the harder it is to decipher the unconventional spelling), but also, one suspects, as a means of establishing something of an ironic inconsistency in our narrator’s voice, between the harshness of his language toward his peers (“tryin no tae notice the ALEXANDER B EECROFT | THE NARRATOR AND THE NATION -B UILDER cunt”) and the mock-formality of his cinematic analysis (“the obligatory dramatic opening”). hese subtleties aside, the Glaswegian vernacular of Welsh’s novel is not unusual in the history of regional iction, particularly in the case of regions that lay some historic or aspirational claim to national status. Considerably earlier in the history of consciously national Scottish literature, for example, we ind Lewis Grassic Gibbon, whose trilogy of novels A Scots Quair deals with the life of a young woman from Kincardineshire in the early part of the twentieth century. he following passage, from the irst novel in the trilogy, Sunset Song (1932), demonstrates the lyrical register of Scots English frequently, though not absolutely consistently, found in the novel: And the second quean was Hope and she was near as unco as Faith, but had right bonny hair, red hair, though maybe you’d call it auburn, and in the winter-time the light in the morning service would come splashing through the yews in the kirkyard and into the wee hall through the red hair of Hope. And the third quean was Charity, with a lot of naked bairns at her feet and she looked a ine and decent-like woman, for all that she was tied about with such dat-like clouts. (Gibbon 8) Writers in the regional languages and patois of France, numerous as they are, have tended to concentrate their eforts in areas other than the novel: poetry, song, folkloric tales; all forms where the charms of regional language can be displayed in brief, easily digestible segments, without recourse to the questions of novelistic narration that interest me here. he equally numerous novelists writing romans du terroir in France from the early twentieth century generally wrote of their local conditions in standard language, with the exception of those writers working, for example, in Occitan (where poetry was anyway the privileged medium) or (more recently) in Caribbean creoles, with writers such as Patrick Chamoiseau. In these cases, the political and cultural consensus views these as distinct from French, as opposed to merely dialects or registers thereof. In general, the greater the acknowledged linguistic Abstand, the greater the willingness to concede narratorial authority to the linguistic register or form. Space does not permit me here to consider more complex cases, such as that of Italy, where dialectal narration is relatively common, in writers such as Andrea Camilleri (Sicilian) or the Roman dialect of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s 1957 Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana—or, for that matter, even Manzoni’s famous declaration concerning his revised edition of I promessi sposi (1840-42) that he had washed its sheets in the Arno, perfecting the Tuscan idiom of his novel at the expense of its Lombard location. Further expansion of this inquiry into still more linguistic cases would be invaluable, but remains quite outside the scope of this investigation. My conclusion here, that the use of dialectal narration is rare in the case of minority-race or working-class iction, and much more common in the case of regionalist or minority-language iction, is thus tentative. his pattern has held across a number of contexts, in both English and French, and certainly seems to warrant further consideration. he nation, so diicult to think around in so many other contexts, seems especially 421 CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC diicult to speak around in the novel, where the pressure to conform to national linguistic standards, especially in the privileged position of the narrator, seems all but irresistible. To speak a novel in anything other than the national language is, it seems, tantamount to speaking a new nation into existence. As a brief coda, I leave again the world of contemporary literary and novelistic realism, to travel to another time and place: in this case, Archaic Greece, and the uses to which dialects were put in ancient Greek literature. In Greek Old Comedy (such as Aristophanes), dialect performs much the same function it oten does in modern comedy or iction: of rendering the slightly Other contemptible, pitiable, or simply amusing. he Spartan and Boeotian women of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, for example, speak not in an authentic transcription of the (Doric) Spartan or (Aeolic) heban dialect but rather in something more like standard Athenian Greek, salted with shibboleths of their respective dialects, in much the way that contemporary Americans, seeking to imitate a Canadian or a Boston accent for comic efect, will invent reasons 422 to use the phrases out and about or park the car respectively. For most audiences used to the dominant form of the language, this is what regional dialect is: standard speech altered in a few memorable and recognizable ways, usually for comic efect. But there is another way in which the Greeks made use of dialect in literature. During the Archaic period, lyric poetry was written in a variety of dialects, with the choice of dialect oten more a question of genre than of either the poet’s or the audience’s city of origin. Elegaic and iambic metres, thus, tend to use Ionian dialect, while choral lyric is usually in a form conventionally identiied as Doric.3 In this context, dialectal forms, while somewhat stylized and adapted to metrical needs, nonetheless made it possible for a variety of forms of Greek to have literary legitimacy simultaneously. I raise Archaic Greek lyric here not to suggest that its solution is one that is viable or desirable for the modern realist novel, but rather at least to underscore what is distinctive about the novel: the fact that, for all the heteroglossia so ably documented by Mikhail Bakhtin, only one register of the language is fully acceptable for use in the novel, at least for the privileged position of the narrator. Dialectal narration, especially in dialect marked by race or class rather than by region (though to a considerable extent also in the latter case), seems to mark a text as comic, and its characters as absurd; with notable exceptions such as Selvon and Welsh, we continue to search in vain for a range of linguistic registers available for serious literary purposes that treat their speakers with equal levels of dignity. Notes 1. For the published English translation of this and the preceding quote, which, however, does not convey the style of the original, see Guillaumin, he Life 5. 2. I am grateful to the excellent discussion in a seminar on “he Desire for the Vernacular” at the 2015 meeting of the ACLA, and in particular to an excellent paper by Erik Falk of Dalarna University, for ALEXANDER B EECROFT | THE NARRATOR AND THE NATION -B UILDER my introduction to Selvon’s novel. 3. For a recent, and quite diferent, view, see Maslov. Works Cited Cooper, homas. Old Fashioned Stories. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1875. Print. ---. he Purgatory of Suicides. London: J. Watson, 1850. Print. Delany, Martin R. Blake; or, he Huts of America: Part One. New York: he AngloAfrican Magazine & he Weekly Anglo-African, 1859-61. Print. ---. he Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Philadelphia: s.n., 1852. Print. Deshpande, Madhav M. Sanskrit & Prakrit: Sociolinguistic Issues. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1993. Print. Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. A Scots Quair. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2008. Print. Guillaumin, Émile. he Life of a Simple Man. Trans. Margaret Holden. London: Selwyn & Blount, 1919. Print. ---. La vie d’un simple. Paris: Nelson, 1904. Print. Maslov, Boris. “he Dialect Basis of Choral Lyric and the History of Poetic Languages in Archaic Greece.” Symbolae Osloenses 87.1 (2013): 1-29. Print. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: New American, 1987. Print. ---. A Mercy. New York: Knopf, 2008. Print. Selvon, Samuel. he Lonely Londoners. London: Penguin, 2006. Print. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1994. Print. Welsh, Irvine. Trainspotting. New York: Norton, 1996. Print. Wright, Richard. “Between Laughter and Tears.” New Masses (5 October 1937): 22-25. Print. 423 1RYHO8WRSLD1DWLRQ$+LVWRU\RI,QWHUGHSHQGHQFH +UYRMH7XWHN Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, Volume 42, Issue 4, Décembre 2015, pp. 424-438 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\&DQDGLDQ5HYLHZRI&RPSDUDWLYH/LWHUDWXUH 5HYXH&DQDGLHQQHGH/LWW«UDWXUH&RPSDU«H For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/crc/summary/v042/42.4.tutek.html Access provided by Vienna University Library (16 Dec 2015 12:01 GMT) Novel, Utopia, Nation: A History of Interdependence Hrvoje Tutek University of Zagreb 424 From a contemporary vantage point outside of utopian studies, the long history of utopia seems a suspicious one. No matter how productive the utopian imaginary of modernity has been, how persistent a genre utopian narrative, or in how wide a range of practices echoes of the Blochian utopian impulse can be detected, the concept of utopia stands in an awkward relationship to the dominant institutions and discourses regulating the socio-political normality of the early twenty-irst century. It is the previous century, the twentieth, with its vigorous innovations in aesthetics, politics, and cruelty that is supposedly the utopian one; the twenty-irst, judging at least by the culture industry, seems to be taking a pass on utopia, and is enjoying the apocalypse instead.1 But it would be wrong to suppose that the contemporary anti-utopianism, in which dullness of the political imagination has been elevated to the level of a criterion of rationality, is a unique phenomenon. he suspicion has been around for a long time, oten justiiably so. In political-theoretical discourse, for example, utopia has been an easy target. here is usually no place for its impossible demands in the rationalist pragmatism of liberal thought.2 Many conservative positions are fundamentally wary of the anticipatory, untested alterity that utopia postulates as desirable.3 And at least the “classical” Marxist strain of letist thought condemns it on grounds of both theoretical inadequacy and political ineiciency.4 So, most of the stern charges leveled at utopian projections as a form of political practice warn against the seemingly arbitrary and misleading lights of fancy immanent to utopia’s igurational mission, and against its political impotence or passive idealism. When thus criticized, and insofar as it is taken to project both a blueprint of an alternative social order and an incentive to make the transition toward it, utopian iguration is excluded from the regimes of serious political thought as a failure of Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC 0319–051x/15/42.4/424 © Canadian Comparative Literature Association H RVOJE TUTEK | N OVEL , U TOPIA , NATION method.5 Consequently, one would be justiied to expect that it would ind a welcome place in the realm of the literary. But here, too, it has been highly suspicious: despite serious attention devoted to the venerable early modern exponents of the genre, from homas More to Tommaso Campanella and Francis Bacon, and despite the fact that literary history, perhaps most notably English literary history, has been strewn with very inluential texts, rare is the historiography that does not either segregate or exclude the utopian narrative tradition from the more noble history of the ‘novel proper.’ here are various reasons for that, ranging from the genealogical (utopian narrative can more plausibly be included in the longer parallel history of the romance) to the aesthetic (the literary value of utopia is “subject to permanent doubt” (Jameson, Archeologies xi)).6 In other words, it might be that utopia’s “neutralization, deconstruction, or deterritorialization of the ideological parameters of one social situation,” which “opens up the space for the construction of something new” (Wegner, “Here” 115), makes it diicult to incorporate utopia into historiographies aiming to construct relatively seamless 425 traditions of national cultural consolidation on an equal footing with more airmative, or at least more neutral, generic traditions. On top of that, utopian iguration escapes somewhat the jurisdiction of mimesis, modernity’s privileged representational modality. A search, for example, of the term “Utopia” in Wiley-Blackwell’s he Encyclopedia of the Novel reveals a symptomatic state of afairs: the entry “Utopian Novel” redirects to “Science Fiction/Fantasy,” but the term itself, suggesting a wide range of utopian concerns across the history of the novel, is scattered throughout the Encyclopedia, suggesting a wide distribution of utopian themes, with the densest concentration, expectedly, under entries such as “Ideology” or “Russia (20th Century)” (see Logan). According to this and similar conceptions, which are as dominantly established as to be invisible, the novel and narrative utopia live parallel but antinomic lives. But in the many cases where they do overlap, the utopian surplus detectable in the novel is relativized as a “utopian vision” (167, 448), dimension (43) or even “yearning” (333), horizontally integrated into the polyphonic structure of the novel, just one of the many structurally equivalent discourses consumed and processed by the omnivorous novelistic beast. his conception is a hierarchical one, in which utopia is relegated to the role of a more or less arbitrary supplement to the novel; the two coexist as ultimately disjunctive territories between which nothing as fateful as a structural dependence can be established. Furthermore, in this conception, their interaction is always, no matter how implicitly, a polemical one: “Each of the opposing genres may then include parodies of key works and characteristic forms of the other, parodies designed to convince readers of the untenability of the[ir] antagonistic set of assumptions” (Morson 79). As any other polemic, the one between utopia and the novel is also, in essence, hostile: the antagonism perceived by Gary Saul Morson between the two generic “sets of assumptions” is never a purely formal one, but one based on aesthetic preferences emerging from a concrete ideological environment and pro- CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC jecting a discernible ethical imperative.7 According to Audun J. Mørch’s Bakhtinian conception, which shares some of its own sets of assumptions with Morson, this is a choice between the utopian non-spatial monologue and the novel’s dialogic spatiality. Utopia is, it follows, a closed ideological form to which the novel can be an antithetical answer.8 Similarly, from his own formalistic perspective, Morson speaks of the categorical intention of utopia as opposed to the skeptical one of the novel, diferentiating between their irreconcilable pedagogies: one static and preachy, complementary to hierarchies of authoritarian social orders, the other dynamic and inquisitive, complementary to orders that are participatory and interactive.9 In our expansive democratic benevolence at the ‘End of History,’ it is of course inevitable that we choose the latter. However, when attempting to ontologize historically contingent cultural adaptations in order to justify the desirability of a speciic aesthetic regime, there is a danger of lapsing into idealizations that can easily be falsiied by raking the muck of his426 tory. As an illustration, we can take homas More’s originary text. In his analysis of More’s Utopia, Phillip Wegner relies on Stephen Greenblatt’s famous Renaissance Self-Fashioning to explain how More’s Utopia is a part of a “wider humanist practice of producing ‘carefully demarcated playgrounds,’ places wherein one could experiment with ideas that might otherwise lead to dangerous conclusions” (Imaginary 31). In Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Greenblatt further explains how More is in almost all of his writings, and we can certainly include Utopia in this group, spurred on by a motivation that is thoroughly skeptical, so that he “returns again and again to the unsettling of man’s sense of reality, of questioning of his instruments of measurement and representation, the demonstration of blind spots in his ield of vision” (24-25). Notwithstanding Greenblatt’s ahistorical use of the term man in this passage,10 it is possible to claim, against conceptions of utopia outlined above, how one of the primary reasons for the emergence of utopia as a modern genre is precisely the historical need for outlining the space of a critical dialogic possibility, relatively safe from the dangers of existing disciplinary practices. Moreover, an overview of the literary history and formal composition of the genre reveals a multitude of incorporated narrative traditions and devices, from travel narrative to the pastoral romance (all of them sedimented in one way or another in the later developments of utopian narrative), which means that Mørch’s claim about the constitutive impossibility of utopian chronotope is also rather problematic. So it seems the divide between the committed pedagogy of utopia and the antipedagogy of the novel11 is a rather narrow one, despite the suspiciously instinctive appeal of the notion of their irreconcilable diference. Nonetheless, the divide indeed remains there, at least on a formal level, if we conceptualize utopian pedagogy as didacticism, a one-way transfer of ixed epistemic arrangements—a manual or a blueprint. his is, however, impossible to sustain as a criterion for distinction between novel and utopia because the historical development of utopia demonstrates that the same distinction has been active within the utopian tradition itself (in the ot- H RVOJE TUTEK | N OVEL , U TOPIA , NATION referenced periodization by Miguel Abensour, the turning point from “systematic” to “heuristic” utopias occurred ater 1848). If we, then, instinctively take a broader and more permissive view and conceptualize pedagogy as a social development of strategies by which the conditions of possibility for cognition are established and arranged, we will, of course, reach a conclusion that utopia and the novel are both necessarily pedagogical. But instituting a cozy complementarity to bridge an antinomy is not suicient—especially taking into consideration that both forms developed in the same historical context, shared a range of formal devices, cultural references, ideological limitations, and audiences, such that it can be assumed that their multifaceted evolutionary dynamics have informed and motivated each other in various ways. It follows that some sort of a structural dependence between those aspects that they demonstrably share should be established. Without this, it remains too easy to argue for their strict separation in the name of ideological and exclusivistic aesthetics, and to use the supposed didacticism or generic limitations of utopia to conceal analogous efects of the novel. 427 So in order to move forward with this, one must reject the assumption that the novel and narrative utopia are two parallel, antinomic institutions that converge only abstractly, only as contemporaneous elements of that vast territory we call modernity, and try to write a history of their interdependence. his history, as Philip Wegner’s detailed and sophisticated Imaginary Communities demonstrates, materializes through a shared relation to that inescapable modern macro-institution called the nation. In Imaginary Communities, ater an elaboration of the structuralist project of Louis Marin’s Utopics and his theorization of utopian narrative as putting into play the ideological discourse and its system of representations, Wegner describes the function of utopia’s central semiotic mechanism, what Marin calls “Utopian iguration”: “a schematizing, or ‘preconceptual,’ way of thinking, taking the form in the utopian text of the ‘speaking picture,’ the narrative elaboration of utopian society” (Wegner, Imaginary 37). his mechanism, in Marin’s view, is an instrument of a deeply historical need: the situation where a socio-political innovation is still emergent does not ofer a possibility of properly conceptual forms of thought. So, pre-theoretical utopia, as one of the irst steps in the process of cultural adaptation in early modernity, prepares the ground as a type of vanguard for what will later be possible as theory/ science. he pre-theoretical labor of the new form of the utopian narrative presents “a narrative picture of history-in-formation rather than the theoretical description of a fully formed historical situation” (38). Departing from that, Wegner’s analysis of More’s text culminates in a conclusion that: [a]t this crucial historical juncture [...] the interchange between the imaginary community of Utopia and the “imagined community” of the nation-state works to instantiate the latter spatial practice in its distinctly modern form. Indeed, in More’s text, the nation itself is a product of the operations of utopian iguration [....] More’s Utopia helps usher CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC in the conceptual framework or representation of space of “nationness” within which the particularity of each individual nation can then be represented. (55) In a further step, the next logical conclusion is drawn: if utopia is so important to igurational but also organizational eforts of the bourgeoisie, the class efecting essential socio-political innovation in modernity, it has also appeared “to play an important role in the formation of the preconditions for the rise of the greatest literary invention of this class, the English novel, whose own subject [...] is nothing less than a transportable version of the interiorized national space” (Wegner, Imaginary 60). hus, utopia has been instrumental in creating the conceptual space, a framework of basic social and political categories, in which the later chronotopes of the novel can operate. From this perspective, utopia, in its relationship to the novel, has to be thought of as a historic necessity, a condition of possibility for the novel’s emergence. Utopia, we might say, is a kind of Australopithecus to the Homo erectus of the novel 428 and the as yet unknown sapient forms that come ater. Tracing the development of utopia ater More, Lewis Mumford observed, “[t]here is a gap in the utopian tradition between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth. Utopia, the place that must be built, faded into no-man’s land, the spot to which one might escape; and the utopias of Denis Vayrasse and Simon Berington and the other romancers of this in-between period are in the line of Robinson Crusoe rather than the Republic” (113). his observation, although not quite correct, points in the right direction. Lyman Tower Sargent (276-77) shows there have been around thirty utopias in English in the seventeenth century and over thirty in the eighteenth century. However, the seventeenth century ones are much better known and inluential. It is thus the eighteenth century that exhibits a poverty of utopia.12 In trying to explain this, we can build on the analysis of the relationship between the novel and utopia introduced above: far from being exhausted as a genre, or simply serving as the scafolding in the process of the novel’s emergence, a vanishing mediator enabling the novel’s later dialectic with the nation-form, utopia has not gone out of fashion with the rise of the novel in its early canonical, national, proto-realist mode. Instead, a closer inspection reveals what might be a process of structural integration. If we take the example of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe,13 perhaps the most famous immediate progenitor of what Benedict Anderson called “the old-fashioned novel” (25), we cannot fail to observe that it is very oten read with an emphasis on its utopian elements and what might be called its pedagogy of autopoiesis: as a “utopia of the Protestant ethic” (Parrinder, Nation 74).14 Indeed, Franco Moretti’s analysis (Bourgeois 25-66) can help us move beyond these thematic observations. As he points out, there are two Robinsons, sloppily existing as the narrative’s two formally irreconcilable poles—the oceanic adventurer, and the rational manager of outcomes of the island. he historically, ideologically, stylistically more consequential one, emerging from Moretti’s reading as a sort of narrative scandal, epochal formal breakthrough in the novel’s history, is of course the Robinson of the island. Interestingly, it is also H RVOJE TUTEK | N OVEL , U TOPIA , NATION this one—and not the adventurer—that is the utopia-making one. It is within the insular chronotope and utopian igurations of Robinson’s island, and not during his scattered oceanic adventures, that the realist style and narrative codes of the bourgeois are born.15 Viewed from the optics I suggest here, it is perhaps possible to understand Crusoe’s igure as the convergence of the utopian delineator16 and the later realist citizen-protagonist: in this restless, labor-intensive utopia, the delineator and the protagonist are merged to anticipate the class ideal of the bourgeois ‘creating a world ater his own image,’ a bourgeois utopia. Understood in this way, Defoe’s most important innovation in form, his aesthetically most interesting breakthrough, is simultaneously where he is at his most ideological. his can be used very neatly to support Fredric Jameson’s key proposition that a Marxist “positive hermeneutic”—a non-instrumental conception of culture—should be derived from the same category of class as its “negative hermeneutic.” In Jameson’s concise formula: “the efectively ideological is, at the same time, necessarily Utopian” (Political 276). Expanding the argument about the structural interdependence of utopia and 429 the novel as a consequence of their development within the socio-political frameworks of the nation-form, it can be claimed that ater More’s foundational text had enabled the ushering in of the conceptual framework of “nationness,” the task of Defoe’s bourgeois utopia was to inhabit the space thus created with the igure of the model bourgeois citizen. he degree to which Defoe’s text is not a typical systematic utopia is the degree to which the consolidation of the bourgeois ideological dominant within the emerging nation-form has been accomplished. Insofar as More’s island of Utopia is the pre-theoretical image-thinking of the future sovereign space of the nation-state, Crusoe is the pre-theoretical subject of bourgeois ethics and property laws. To illustrate this further, a similar approach can be taken in relation to another great English precursor to the realist novel, Jane Austen.17 We can build again on the systematic work of Moretti, who maps the pattern of exclusion he detects in Austen’s novels. he mapping of “Jane Austen’s Britain” (Moretti, Atlas 12, 19, 21) reveals the insularity of Austen’s chronotope(s), in which the industrializing areas and urban spaces of Great Britain are, as a consequence of the narrative (and ideological) preference for the country, completely invisible. he intercontinental traversing of space in search of wealth and adventure present in the broader framework of Robinson Crusoe is reduced here to the crossing of boundaries of neighboring counties. Austen’s narratives dramatize the functioning of the “‘National Marriage Market’” (15), which seems to allocate national resources quite successfully, as suggested by Austen’s topos of happy ending: “[H]er plots take the painful reality of territorial uprooting—when her stories open, the family abode is usually on the verge of being lost—and rewrite it as a seductive journey: prompted by desire, and crowned by happiness. hey take a local gentry [...] and join it to the national elite [...] hey take the strange, harsh novelty of the modern state—and turn it into a large, exquisite home” (18). hey, in other words, not only identify the social experience of the capitalist nation-form with CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC picturesque life-worlds of a single segment of the dominant class, but also ofer a projection (a blueprint) of frictionless intra-class relations within the national context. It should be noted that none of these two examples ofers, as utopias perhaps should, visions or hypotheses of external life that ours could then be compared to and estranged by.18 heirs is not a utopia of radical alterity, but of radical likeness. he question needs to be asked, then, about the historical conditions under which utopia can be imagined, not as what is radically diferent, but as what is radically same. A run through the British eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from which our examples stem, provides a picture of continued colonial expansion with accompanying conlicts, rapid technological advancement ater the Industrial Revolution, loosening of mercantilist doctrine by laissez-faire principles, the Napoleonic wars—in short, British imperial dominance, consolidation of the new dominant class, and, from a broader perspective, the establishment of a properly global capitalist world-economy. Despite the messiness of history, its contingent, multidirectional development and 430 complexity, perhaps a continuous tone can be extracted from that cacophony that could serve as a sketch of the shape all this could have taken when distilled into the class consciousness of the abstract bourgeois. his is Defoe’s preiguration, in 1704: “[V]ast trade, rich manufactures, mighty wealth, universal correspondence, and happy success, has been constant companions of England, and given us the title of an industrious people; and so in general we are” (Defoe 110). he above quote is taken from Defoe’s newspaper article, entitled he Problem of Poverty, which contains a pragmatic argument against state intervention in the alleviation of poverty and unemployment, and reveals the centrality of the familiar problem of uneven distribution of wealth for capitalism and the state as early as Defoe’s age. hus, Defoe’s article also reveals the extent to which the bourgeois quasiutopias mentioned above can be such insofar as they are successful in repressing what is beyond the horizon of their class perspectives. hey have an easy task of doing that, of course, as long as what is beyond those class perspectives remains pre-conceptual, in the empirical domain of individual accident. hey are utopian insofar as their blueprint incorporates a glaring structural absence in relation to the historical reality of their time; they are utopian insofar as they remain incomplete as realisms. It is on this substrate of integrated utopia and bourgeois dominance, then, that the epochal labor of the realist novel begins. he reason narrative utopia re-emerges in the nineteenth century may be precisely that the realist novel, with its unrelenting “secular ‘decoding’” (Jameson, Political 152), leaves much less room for it within the novel itself. If Utopia is conceived as a frictionless community, a community in which all possible forms of conlict are constitutively private, a community without class conlict (which does not necessarily mean it is classless), it is clear why the panoramic socio-historical imaging of developed bourgeois society and careful archaeologies of social issures characteristic for realist narrative mimesis could not accommodate utopia (except as a surplus that must be excavated hermeneutically). Lukács has famously celebrated Balzac for his ability to transcend the particular rationality of H RVOJE TUTEK | N OVEL , U TOPIA , NATION his own class position and accompanying reactionary politics, as well as privileged realism in general for possessing a generic will to totality within which there exists a unique representational possibility of portraying individual characters as social types, and from which an inference of the systemic nature of the historical process can proceed. Once this breakthrough in representation is achieved, it is no longer possible to easily identify social totality with the dynamics of individual empirical experience (although representations of this totality can of course still be inluenced in various ways by ideologemes and limitations characteristic of particular class positions). his move in relation to the proto-realist novels discussed here can, perhaps, and only provisionally, be seen as analogous to Marx’s work in relation to Hegel, in particular in his theorizing of the Hegelian rabble of paupers as the proletariat, a social class deined by its structural position within the mode of production.19 But the realization of this representational possibility is certainly not without its problems, as Terry Eagleton reminds us: For one thing, capitalist society is characterized above all by the presence on the historical scene of a new form of protagonist, the masses, of whom Zola is a leading literary champion. But an individualist culture is not accustomed to portraying collective characters, and the realist novel inds it hard to depict this formidable new agent (already invisibly present, so Benjamin has shown us, as a constant hum and buzz in the background of Baudelaire) without falling back on older reach-me-down imagery of the insensate mob, storm-tossed ocean or volcanic eruption. he masses are curiously hard not to naturalize. (125-26) Nonetheless, there are important conceptual diferences between “the masses” and “the poor,” as there is also a diference between poverty as a dynamic state (as it has been imagined and institutionalized following the post-Reformation desacralization of the poor) and as the systemic efect of proletarianization. It is precisely this awareness, registered and perhaps even strengthened by the realist narrative mode, that could in turn lead to the introduction of a new element in late nineteenth-century narrative utopia—the element of the utopian transition. In an analysis of William Morris’s News from Nowhere, Raymond Williams writes that the crucial element in Morris is the “insertion of the transition to utopia, which is not discovered, come across, or projected—not even, except at the simplest conventional level, dreamed—but fought for. Between writer or reader and this new condition is chaos, civil war, painful and slow reconstruction” (209). In other words, utopia is achieved neither by a collective rationalist epiphany upon the discovery of the correct system, nor as a natural consequence of savviness possessed by superior faraway nations, nor through technological development; instead, like history itself, it is inally revealed to be a result of class struggle. his does not mean that utopia at this point simply turns to addressing the revolutionary subject of socialist theory in an efort to motivate revolutionary transition in reality, but that the form of narrative utopia can be used, from that point on, to represent and explore a conception of history that is found neither in past utopias nor in the realist novel. 431 CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC hus imagined, utopia cannot be a discovery, or a necessary development, but turns into a radical historical possibility, a igurational wager of sorts, a promise of some future ‘realism.’ Since this possibility can, as any historical possibility, be realized only collectively, utopia is presented with a similar representational problem as the realist novel: how to represent the masses? Morris does not solve this; he does not elaborate on the emergence of the instruments of formation of class consciousness. However, by introducing the element of historical transition and its collective protagonist into the narrative repertoire of utopia, his text goes beyond Dickensian moralism to introduce a futurity of “further labours of social construction” (Parrinder, “News” 271), rescuing class from the sentimental unity of national(ist) history and projecting an invitation for new class consciousness to materialize. Interestingly, we can detect echoes of a similar need to refashion conceptions of history and the possibility of “transition” in the modernist novel—even though it is precisely the pedagogical focus of the above invitation that is problematic from a 432 puristic modernist perspective. As heodor Adorno famously wrote, discussing and favoring Kaka and Beckett in relation to, in his reading, the much more didacticallyminded Brecht: “By dismantling appearance, they explode from within the art which committed proclamation subjugates from without, and hence only in appearance. he inescapability of their work compels the change of attitude which committed works merely demand” (191). his is a sketch of a diicult, dialectical pedagogy: it is through compulsion that the modernist novel is liberating. But whom does it liberate; for whom does it deliver its utopian promise? We can try to answer this by turning to one of the famous examples of modernist consciousness-fashioning, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. At the end of the novel, Stephen Dedalus issues his proclamation: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (Joyce, Portrait 185). Leaving behind the physical nation with its actually-existing nationalism, Dedalus departs to autonomously practice the compulsion of the aesthetic in hope of forging a new type of community: not just the nation (too petty bourgeois), not class (too technical), but “race” (suiciently organic, appropriately mythical). Here, all the tensions of the individualist20 pedagogy of compulsion appear: how is it possible to speak of a collective category, race, if its conscience still remains to be constituted as such?21 Will the “transition” be initiated by willpower and recognition alone? Will the newly-forged conscience motivate the entire race to join Dedalus and the Parisian bohemia? If so, will it not become as sufocating as the nation? Here, the new-found utopian promise of refashioning history beyond the bourgeois nation is identiied with the autonomous (“I”) and the authentic (“race”) act of expression. It is a radically optimistic, anarchist conception that implies an audaciously hopeful wager and, narratively, a chronotope of open futurity: either the newly created form will compel the transition, or so much worse for reality. If felicitous, the hero of the novel becomes a hero of Utopia, Dedalus becomes Utopus, the H RVOJE TUTEK | N OVEL , U TOPIA , NATION founder, as he is joined by the race in a mystical collective reconciliation and mutual acknowledgement compelled by the autopoietic act, outside of the belligerent pettiness of the historical nation-form, and the depressing realities of its class relations. (A famous poem by the great Yugoslav modernist poet of Croatian ethnicity, Tin Ujević, is entitled “Blood-brotherhood of Persons in the Universe.”) It is a community that is universal and, despite the organic metaphor, fully abstract. It might be that here the novel truly is beyond nation. But sadly, it cannot be beyond history, which is, for the Dedalus of Ulysses, a “nightmare” from which he is “trying to awake” (Joyce 28). As this awakening—and of this Dedalus is tragically unaware—can occur only historically/collectively, the projected transubstantiation will necessarily fail to materialize. hus it has the potential to turn into its opposite, a narcissistic disappointment with history, when it fails to meet the high standards of the modernist utopian (the later Dedalus has felt this disappointment). But let this not be an accusation. It would be too much to lay the blame for a failure of inding adequate modalities of transition on the modernist novel and its speciic historical 433 articulation of utopian possibility. Symbolic enactment of that possibility, however limited by concrete ideologies, was at least an opportunity to maintain “the fascination of the impossible” (Cioran 83) that shines on the horizon of any historical endeavor. It is with this that we inally arrive at the ‘End of History.’ It has been quite fashionable, and the beginning of this text also indulges in this fashion, to claim that the decades of postmodernity have been the age in which political utopia has outstayed its welcome. Rummaging through the literature of the US, the nation that has peerlessly dominated this period, one can ind texts that roughly mark the moment where the utopian promise of modernist pedagogy of compulsion failed to materialize. In a type of pseudo-novel that has been quite visible both in literary history and popular culture, Hunter S. hompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the following lines, answering almost directly the question of what happened to Dedalus’s utopian project, can be found: And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. here was no point in ighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave [....] So now, less than ive years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave inally broke and rolled back. (68) he atermath of this and other waves breaking, as is well known, has meant the universalization of capitalism—transnationalization of production, establishment of dense global lows of commodities including information and (to an extent) labor, systematic redistribution of wealth in favor of capital, and so on. In this context, what I referred to so far as “the novel” has been exposed to various pressures: the persistence of the nation-form—despite premature certainties of its passing—has CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC institutionally and ideologically required a seemingly anachronistic imperative of the maintenance of the national canons. Realism in its aterlife remains here the institutionally privileged narrative mode, as conirmed by the airmation, in so-called serious media, of narratives such as Jonathan Franzen’s recent realist melodramas of the emotionally wounded contemporary middle class, or by the addition of the mandatory moniker ‘magical’ to ‘realist’ novels imported from the global periphery. Simultaneously, a reconiguration of the literary ield initiated in the US and tied to commercial workshops and university programs in creative writing has been spreading internationally. his is followed by ideological reconstitution of ‘literature’ as ‘creative writing’ where the prevailing contemporary ideological demand of the literary crat is to ‘express’ what is in the so-called post-national world known as ‘identity.’ Multiple sub-national canons arise. In whatever form, the novel persists, and so does utopia. Interestingly, it is precisely as the revolutionary wave of the 1960s was breaking, and skeptical inversions of postmodern metaictions recoiled from 434 modernism’s excesses, that narrative utopia was reinvented and the speculative tradition reinvigorated in its “critical,” “ambiguous” guise irst by writers such as Marge Piercy, Ursula K. Le Guin, and later Kim Stanley Robinson, or China Miéville. Having in mind the vitality, vast global readership, as well as the noticeable recent adoption of elements from the ignobly utopian traditions of “Science Fiction/ Fantasy” by established Western novelists proper such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Michel Houellebecq, Cormac McCarthy, and others, it seems reasonable to assume that it is utopias and related forms that are today better equipped for contemporary challenges of representation. heir global inluence is perhaps a signal that today it might be the other way around, that the speculative and utopian writing is now integrating the novel as it forms canons of texts that do not rise to the status of being, but originate as transnational. his development “beyond the nation” in which the novel is caught up can therefore mean only that whatever the novel is, far from being vitally dependent on the nation-form, it is dependent, much like the nation, on that more primal force of modernity, which is capital. Notes 1. Both the “late-twentieth-century boom in cosmic-disaster stories” (Stableford) and the more recent global surge in popularity of the zombie apocalypse genre (currently in its sixth season, AMC’s record-breaking show he Walking Dead is the most watched show in the history of cable television) witness to the contemporary vitality of apocalyptic imagination. 2. Two notable exceptions are John Stuart Mill with his sympathetic treatment of Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, and more recently Richard Rorty, who happily takes over the term when discussing his liberal utopia (see Rorty 61). 3. he conservative moralist William Pfaf postulates that “the appeal made to the intellectuals and other members of the European elite in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by political romanticism and the idea of redemptive, utopian violence” led to the “loss of a code of national and personal H RVOJE TUTEK | N OVEL , U TOPIA , NATION conduct” that he refers to as “chivalry” (3). his is interesting as an example of how even the iercest anti-utopianism cannot avoid a utopian projection of its own. 4. he classical examples are criticisms of the utopian socialists in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s he Communist Manifesto and in Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientiic. But even that characteristically sober line of political thinking is not exactly arid when it comes to utopia: “Bloch reminds us of Lenin’s quotation from Pisarev on the importance of dreams that run ahead of reality. ‘If there is some connection between dreams and life then all is well.’ Lenin himself adds, ‘[O]f this kind of dreaming there is unfortunately too little in our movement’” (Levitas 295). 5. Ernst Bloch’s analytical gesture, famously, went in the opposite direction: to counter this exclusion, Bloch’s theorization of utopia in he Principle of Hope was a sustained attempt to demonstrate its universality. 6. A well-known contemporary utopian, Kim Stanley Robinson, claims in an interview: “he old attack on utopias as boring is partly a political attack, partly a result of them not being novels enough” (Szeman and Whiteman 185). 7. For William Morris’s anti-novelistic stance, see Brantlinger; for Morris’s and H.G. Wells’s response to the “break-up of the coalition of interests in mid-Victorian iction,” see Parrinder (“News” 273). 435 8. Interestingly, in Karl Mannheim’s well-known sociological theorization it is precisely utopia that is the dialectical “answer” to the closure of ruling class ideology, and thus a guarantee of the continuous possibility of the historical process: “In this sense, the relationship between utopia and the existing order turns out to be a ‘dialectical’ one. By this is meant that every age allows to arise [...] those ideas and values in which are contained in condensed form the unrealized and the unfulilled tendencies which represent the needs of each age. hese intellectual elements then become the explosive material for bursting the limits of the existing order” (Mannheim 179). 9. Such static conceptions of utopia are extremely problematic and as such criticized by continuous theoretical work on utopia and the practical development of the genre. I am using these conceptions as a starting point here because they both base their analyses on an inaugural juxtaposition between utopia and the novel. 10. “[T]he unsettling of man’s sense of reality” is dangerous precisely because it is not done to the philosophical “man,” but to the historical, political, institutional one—the man, if I may be allowed a poignant reference, to which all revolutionary periods attempt in various ways to stick it to. 11. Morson writes that in novels, each truth is “someone’s truth” (77), but never the novel’s. 12. his is also conirmed for France, where, according to Franco Moretti’s data (Atlas 53-54), the incidence of “narratives with imaginary and utopian settings” drops from 13 to 2 percent between 1750 and 1800. 13. My focus here is on Anglophone texts, but an analysis of another strain of the novel’s complex historical heritage reveals a similar centrality of utopia: Cervantes’s Don Quijote, a founding, canonical text of the modern novel form, beside epochally clipping the wings of the romance, is also actively engaged with the utopian tradition: from Quijote’s private property-less Age of Gold, to Sancho Panza’s Island of Barataria, there have been many studies excavating the juridical and political roots of Cervantes’s engagement with utopia. 14. See Fausett (Strange) for an informative study of Robinson Crusoe that attempts to reconstruct broader cultural dynamics and mutual interactions of what are taken to be separate genres—narrative utopia, novel, travelogue—as “products of an evolving bundle of themes and devices” that texts process (Fausett, Strange 20). David Fausett, helpfully, is not burdened by the habit of primarily treating Defoe’s text as foundational for the history of the novel. 15. Interestingly, there is a less well-known text that quite precisely “marks the transition” (Fausett, “Introduction” x) between the earlier literary/utopian traditions and the Robinsonade: he Mighty CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes, a Dutch text published in 1708 by Hendrik Smeeks. For a genealogy, and an analysis of sources, see Fausett, “Introduction.” 16. I am using here Morson’s term for the narrative instance that elaborates the blueprint of the utopian order. 17. Patrick Parrinder (Nation 196) notes, for example, that Austen’s Mansield Park has been called a “utopia of Tory reform.” 18. Here is Darko Suvin’s ot-quoted deinition: “Utopia is the verbal construction of a particular quasihuman community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community, this construction being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis” (30). 19. For an inluential contemporary reading of Hegel and Marx from this perspective, see Ruda. 20. In another modernist Künstlerroman, Rilke’s he Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the following paragraphs can be found: “Is it possible that in spite of inventions and progress, in spite of culture, religion, and worldly wisdom, that one has remained on the surface of life? [...] Is it possible that the past is false because one has always spoken of its masses, as if one was telling about a coming together of many people, instead of telling about the one person they were standing around, because 436 he was alien and died? Yes, it is possible [...] But, if all this is possible, has even an appearance of possibility—then for heaven’s sake something has to happen. he irst person who comes along, the one who has had this disquieting thought, must begin to accomplish some of what has been missed.” (17) 21. A similarly humanist paradox of the recognition of the unknown is anticipated by Ernst Bloch at the end of he Principle of Hope: “Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland” (1376). Works Cited Abensour, Miguel-Hervé. Les Formes de l’utopie socialiste-communiste. Paris: U de Paris 1, 1973. Print. Adorno, heodor. “Commitment.” Trans. Francis McDonagh. Aesthetics and Politics. By Ernst Bloch et al. Ed. Rodney Livingstone, Perry Anderson, and Francis Mulhern. Trans. Anya Bostock et al. London: Verso, 1980. 177-95. Print. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Revised Edition. London: Verso, 2006. Print. Bloch, Ernst. he Principle of Hope. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1995. Print. Brantlinger, Patrick. “News From Nowhere: Morris’ Socialist Anti-Novel.” Victorian Studies 19.1 (1975): 35-49. Print. Cioran, E.M. “Mechanism of Utopia.” Trans. Richard Howard. Grand Street 6.3 (1987): 83–97. Print. H RVOJE TUTEK | N OVEL , U TOPIA , NATION Defoe, Daniel. “he Problem of Poverty.” England in Johnson’s Day. Ed. M. Dorothy George. London: Methuen, 1928. 108-11. Print. Eagleton, Terry. “Capitalism and Form.” New Let Review 2.14 (2002): 119-31. Print. Fausett, David. “Introduction.” he Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes. By Hendrik Smeeks. Trans. Robert-H. Leek. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. ix–xiv. Print. ---. he Strange Surprizing Sources of Robinson Crusoe. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Print. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Print. Jameson, Fredric. Archeologies of the Future. London: Verso, 2005. Print. ---. he Political Unconscious. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981. Print. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1994. Print. ---. Ulysses. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Print. Levitas, Ruth. “Looking for the Blue: he Necessity of Utopia.” Journal of Political Ideologies 12.3 (2007): 289-306. Print. Logan, Peter Melville, ed. he Encyclopedia of the Novel. Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2011. Print. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia. Trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954. Print. Mørch, Audun J. he Novelistic Approach to the Utopian Question: Platonov’s Čevengur in the Light of Dostoevskij’s Anti-Utopian Legacy. Oslo: Scandinavian UP, 1998. Print. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900. London: Verso, 1998. Print. ---. he Bourgeois: Between History and Literature. London: Verso, 2013. Print. Morson, Gary Saul. he Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s “Diary of a Writer” and the Traditions of Literary Utopia. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1981. Print. Mumford, Lewis. he Story of Utopias. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922. Print. Parrinder, Patrick. Nation and Novel: he English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print. ---. “News from Nowhere, he Time Machine and the Break-Up of Classical Realism.” Science Fiction Studies 3.3 (1976): 265-74. Print. Pfaf, William. he Bullet’s Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. Print. Rilke, Rainer Maria. he Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Trans. Burton Pike. Chicago: Dalkey Archive P, 2008. Print. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 437 CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC Print. Ruda, Frank. Hegel’s Rabble. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Print. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “hemes in Utopian Fiction in English before Wells.” Science Fiction Studies 3.3 (1976): 275-82. Print. Stableford, Brian M. “End of the World.” he Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Eds. John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls and Graham Sleight. Gollancz, 9 Apr. 2015. Web. 16 Nov. 2015. <http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/ end_of_the_world> Suvin, Darko. Deined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction, and Political Epistemology. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. Print. Szeman, Imre, and Maria Whiteman. “Future Politics: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.” Science Fiction Studies 31.2 (2004): 177-88. Print. 438 hompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Print. Wegner, Phillip E. “Here or Nowhere: Utopia, Modernity, and Totality.” Utopia, Method, Vision. Ed. Tom Moylan and Rafaella Baccolini. Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. 113-30. Print. ---. Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. Print. Williams, Raymond. “Utopia and Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 5.3 (1978): 203-14. Print. 1HRPHGLHYDOLVPLQ7KUHH&RQWHPSRUDU\&LW\1RYHOV 7REDU$GLFKLH/HH &DUHQ,UU Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, Volume 42, Issue 4, Décembre 2015, pp. 439-453 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\&DQDGLDQ5HYLHZRI&RPSDUDWLYH/LWHUDWXUH 5HYXH&DQDGLHQQHGH/LWW«UDWXUH&RPSDU«H For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/crc/summary/v042/42.4.irr.html Access provided by Vienna University Library (16 Dec 2015 12:01 GMT) Neomedievalism in Three Contemporary City Novels: Tobar, Adichie, Lee Caren Irr Brandeis University In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson famously asserted that “[t]he idea of a 439 sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation” (26). He imagined national communities organically cohering in the shared textual experiences of simultaneity provided by modern forms such as the newspaper and the realist novel. his nationalist experience of time and text emerges out of and largely replaces a pre-national medieval sensibility premised on heterogeneous populations, porous borders, and patchworks of geographical speciicities. Building on Erich Auerbach’s account of the medieval focus on the eternal and “omnitemporal,” Anderson describes “simultaneity-alongtime” (24) as a pre-modern spatialized perspective overwritten by the modern, nationalist “meanwhile”—or simultaneity in time. In the more than three decades since Anderson’s inluential study appeared, the discourses and social restructuring associated with neoliberal globalization have assaulted the vision of the coherent nation-states that is so crucial to Imagined Communities. Many discussants have debated the thesis that national sovereignty has been eroded in favor of global ‘lows,’ scouring literary, ilmic, and other representational works for igures that express a global imaginary. While this quest for emergent geopolitical aesthetics oten stimulates vital readings of the structure and efects of social units larger than the nation-state, the accelerated and futurological tendencies of such mapping projects sometimes also obscure an inverse tendency— the revival of certain medieval igures that provide another sort of friction with a nation-state imaginary. he contemporary medievalism traced in this essay revolves around an ideological fantasy, not a historical revival. Authenticity is not its concern, and for this reason it is best described by Umberto Eco’s neologism “neomedievalism” (61-72). As Eco Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC 0319–051x/15/42.4/439 © Canadian Comparative Literature Association CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC reminds us, images of the Middle Ages serve many purposes in hyperreal conditions, including anchoring tenuous national identities in a moment of “national grandeur” or lost purity (70). he proto-national imaginary associated with the medieval model of the city-state in particular creates an ideologically forceful fantasy space in narratives of modern national decline. For Eco, the postmodern bricoleur’s reuse of materials from the past is continuous with medieval practice, regardless of the speciic political vision ofered by medievalisms. Recycling medieval tropes can unsettle the developmental logic of the time-stamped national Bildungsroman. In both content and form, then, neomedieval narratives can generate friction with the homogeneous empty time of Anderson’s national imaginary. Recently, a few scholars in international relations, such as Bruce W. Holsinger, have taken up Eco’s concept, arguing that the rise of non-state actors such as NGOs, corporate militias, and terrorist organizations signals a neomedieval tendency in world afairs. Others, such as David Graeber, identify neomedievalism as a response 440 to the emergence of an ultra-rapid hyperbourgeoisie in postcolonial and post-Communist environments of state collapse. Neomedieval accounts position these mobile networked igures in a highly fortiied, discontinuous, and heterogeneous geography of city-states. Parag Khanna briely describes the forty city-regions that account for two-thirds of the world economy, asserting that in this highly urbanized environment super-entrepreneurs or local sovereigns may have more inluence than national actors. While retaining a healthy skepticism about the demise of the nation-state, Jürgen Neyer makes a similar argument about the inability of national systems to ensure domestic safety in concentrated urban areas and tracks the corresponding rise of private security irms as well as occasional interventions into urban afairs by supra-national entities. Neomedieval elements appear, in other words, not only in the built environment of the contemporary city-state (such as the castle-like Trump Tower), but also in the juridical, military, and economic roles imagined for the city as its rulers assert their position in imperial and/or regional projects. Cities are thus crucial to the neomedieval discussion. Historians of the Middle Ages distinguish the city-state from the commune by its rule over hinterlands; a city-state had, in essence, a foreign policy and a military as well as the capacity to extract taxes or tributes. Whether oligarchic or dynastic in their forms of internal rule, medieval urban elites were deined by their relations to rural aristocrats and the increasingly dispossessed peasantry of the hinterlands.1 Tom Scott argues that the most enduring and successful city-states ultimately transformed trade networks into administrative and juridical units through regional leagues and confederations. It was, in Scott’s view, not the proto-democratic extension of citizenship rights to people of the hinterlands that made late medieval city-states the germ of the modern nation-state, but rather the institutional networks arising out of the regional integration of the capitalist economy. he confederation of medieval city-states preigures, then, our contemporary global system of diferentiated regional rights and proitable trade imbalances. In the neomedieval fantasy, at least, the city-state’s local C AREN I RR | N EOMEDIEVALISM IN THREE CONTEMPORARY CITY N OVELS fortiications as well as its distributed networks enhance its concentrated power over economically polarized urban populations, largely bypassing the ideologies of egalitarian citizenship we might associate with the most utopian versions of the modern nation-state. he medieval city-state anticipates the inequalities of the global city described by Saskia Sassen. Whatever its historical or geographical limitations,2 this city-state imaginary has proved magnetic for contemporary American urban iction. Many recent novels of the metropolis imagine the city as a site of social struggle—even catastrophe—and highlight the needs of an exploited urban population that are not met by the nationstate.3 Displacing depictions of the modernist city as a site of aesthetic and personal liberation through lânerie or inter-ethnic contact, these novels envision a condition of extreme social crisis that coheres around certain neomedieval relations, even though the costuming and characterization do not evoke the knights and princesses familiar in more recognizable forms of neomedieval fantasy. he remainder of this essay examines the central tropes of this sensibility in three celebrated works of 441 urban iction: Héctor Tobar’s he Tattooed Soldier (1998), Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2013), and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014). Although varied in their political commitments, regional ailiations, and generic practices, these three novels share spatial and social patterns derived from a neomedieval vision of the city-state. Neomedieval Spaces I: Walls and Gates In a classic essay on the medieval city, Robert Lopez identiies its two deining igures as the crossroads and the wall; these come together in early hieroglyphs for the city that place a cross within a circle. Of these two igures, however, twenty-irst-century neomedievalism has been most interested in the circle or the wall. Fortiications loom large in contemporary accounts of the city, as do the keys, controls, and gates that mark passage through the walls. Medieval gates, such as London’s Newgate or Ludgate, oten also housed prisons, and following the plague years of the later middle ages, areas adjacent to the walls were oten cleared to increase visibility and create space for environmentally or socially undesirable activities (see Nicholas 75-77). Surrounded on the outside by moats or wooden palisades as well as a one-mile cleared area (the suburban ban mile or banlieu), ringed on the inside by the poorest housing or workplaces, and punctuated by sites of risk and policing, the wall of the medieval city was a symbolic as well as a spatial force. It radiated danger, anxiety, and vulnerability. In the twenty-irst-century urban imagination, many of these functions have retained or gained power. Although American cities were not built on the architectural foundation of medieval cities and register little of this precedent in their physical environment (see Elkins and McKitrick 184), even US-based literature of CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC the city has been drawn to the medieval symbolism of the walled city. Lee’s On Such a Full Sea is particularly direct in its utilization of the wall motif. Lee’s near-future dystopia begins in B-Mor, an amalgamated social space created by transplanting elements of a Chinese factory that Lee observed during the writing process to contemporary Baltimore (see Leyshon). he novel literalizes this fusion through a migration process. As described by the irst-person plural narrator, the transplantation involved the “clearing and emptying” of a largely dead city and the construction of “the irst truly uncontaminated grow beds—and the parallel complex of ish tanks”; this process of remapping the city—pulling the moats, as it were, inside the city walls—proceeded smoothly, as “there was very little to encounter by way of an indigenous population”—only “pockets of residents on the outskirts of what is now the heart of B-Mor” (Lee 21). Ater an undescribed plague or civil conlict, B-Mor’s urban renewal project standardized the interior of the city, shunting the bythen “indigenous” descendents of African slaves, Central American immigrants, and 442 urban hipsters to the less desirable periphery. he moral and social risks associated with the walls around B-Mor are accentuated when Fan, the legendary heroine of the novel, leaves through the main gate. he we-narrator describes “the video archives of the feed at the main gate the day she departed,” zooming in on the image of Fan “viewed slightly from above and in three-quarter proile, a small backpack slung over one shoulder, an umbrella in hand, and dressed in a bulky dark-hued counties style, so unlike the colorful loose-itting pajama-type outits B-Mors usually wear [...] you could see the rain coming down in drenching curtains” (37). his surveillance at the gate reminds both the residents and the rebel of the policing that encloses the city socially, as Fan moves from a realm of color and order into darkness and unpredictable storms. Beyond city walls, the social world of Lee’s novel consists of violent, primitive counties and palatial suburban communities populated by the ruling Charters. he industrial order and cheap commercial pleasures of B-Mor ofer a haven from the terror of the former and the competitive pressures of the latter. Nonetheless, the system is not entirely satisfactory; inexplicable tensions arise—a frenzy of littering, occasional bursts of song, and graiti honoring Fan and her disappeared multiracial boyfriend Reg. Echoed in several treatments of writing and self-airming drawing that decorate imprisoning walls later in the novel, this graiti recodes the city’s fortiications from the inside. Whether spelled out in bodies on the street or anonymous writing inscribed on the wall itself, the slogans “FREE ME, REG” and “I MISS REG” make the infrastructure of Lee’s neomedieval city particularly apparent (340). he lingering genetic trace of B-Mor’s “indigenous population” manifested by Reg’s Afro also turns this graiti into a sign of the multicultural diversity repressed by the occupation and industrialization of the city. he city’s walls become the space for the oblique recognition of the sacriice of heterogeneity associated with hypermodernity. Urban fortiications also feature prominently in he Tattooed Soldier, although from a diferent vantage point. Set primarily in Los Angeles in the weeks leading C AREN I RR | N EOMEDIEVALISM IN THREE CONTEMPORARY CITY N OVELS up to the 1992 riots, Tobar’s novel tracks the vengeance that Antonio Bernal, an undocumented and homeless Guatemalan refugee, exacts on the titular soldier, in retribution for the murder of Antonio’s wife and child during the Guatemalan civil war. Antonio is irst pressed up against urban walls as a middle-class literature student in Guatemala. With his future wife, Elena, he joins a garbage workers’ strike that proceeds through narrow streets of the Guatemala City to “the broad plaza of the Parque Central, within sight of the National Palace” (Tobar 93-94). In this crucial scene, the palace guards storm the crowd, and the strikers lee through the narrow streets. A death squad arrives to secure the plaza and remove a fallen worker, leading Elena to imagine a day when there would be “iron cages for the ape soldiers who grabbed people from the street in broad daylight,” a time that has clearly not yet arrived (95). Being held inside the walled urban space and shoved to its perimeter is highly dangerous in this novel, both in this scene of public violence and in the brutal bedroom shooting scene that provides its familial counterpart. Finally, as in On Such a Full Sea, murals and graiti draw attention to the wall itself as an ambivalent sig- 443 niier—especially the inspiring Che Guevara slogan that is repeated throughout the novel: “he revolutionary is guided in all his actions by great feelings of love” (90). Once more, the walls serve as signs of violent repression and illicit longing. he danger of being entrapped by urban walls in these lashbacks to Guatemala is partially reversed in the Los Angeles portions of the narrative. he novel opens with a dangerous passage through the gates of the city, when Antonio and his roommate are evicted from their apartment and go to sleep under the freeway. Homelessness makes Antonio especially attentive to walls, as he constructs shelter out of blankets and cardboard. he overpasses, alleys, chain-link fences, and tunnels comprising the freeway system provide this novel with crucial igures for an urban fortiication system. hey divide the everyday life of legitimate work and commerce from the “negative spaces” (Song 48) of the city reserved for its migrant and racialized underclasses.4 “Scampering across the freeway with this impossibly heavy plastic bag,” Antonio feels inauthentic and invisible, “like some Mexican comedy act, Cantinlas or Tin Tan” (Tobar 11). Crossing the threshold, he becomes a non-self forced by the city structure itself to obscure his Central American self in a Mexican masquerade that Arturo Arias describes as a form of powerlessness that makes working through the traumas of the isthmus’s civil wars that much more diicult (see Arias). Passing through the gate and over the moat-like freeway into the depopulated space of the intra-urban banlieu puts Antonio at risk, much as being pressed up against the walls themselves signals danger of death, torture, and imprisonment. Walls, gates, and moats have a somewhat less central place in the urban imaginary of Adichie’s Americanah, but they are still present and provide an important counterpart to the related neomedieval motif of the road. Movement across borders and through the threshold of the gates is deinitely of interest in Adichie’s update to the migration novel. Both the primary protagonist, Ifemelu, and the secondary hero, Ifemelu’s love interest Obinze, pass through gates (here, of airports), risking CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC imprisonment due to false identities assumed at the perimeter. Ifemelu travels from Lagos to Philadelphia, and Obinze to London, before they reunite in Lagos. he inal scene of the novel leaves the couple hovering in a doorway until, in the novel’s closing words, Ifemelu invites Obinze to come in. Yet, despite these familiar scenes satirizing the legal protections surrounding Anglo-American nations, US and English urban environments feel perilously permeable in Americanah. During their sojourns abroad, Ifemelu’s and Obinze’s plots both turn on moments of deep shame resulting from their wrongful interpellations as a sex worker and toilet bowl cleaner, respectively. hese out-of-place migrants ind insuicient shelter and asylum in a city that is fortiied against rather than around them. By contrast, the walled city motif is more fully and enthusiastically employed in Adichie’s depictions of upper-class life in Lagos. Americanah describes the guarded and gated homes of the city’s elites as well as the middle-class heroine’s entry into these circles. On returning from her American sojourn, for example, Ifemelu passes 444 through the sensory overload of the Lagos streets, arriving at her friend’s home in “a cavalcade of large houses encircled by high walls”; welcomed back by the “gateman,” she aches “with an almost unbearable emotion that she could not name,” as she begins to experience herself for the irst time as an Americanah, a returnee (Adichie 478). Entering the city, she adopts not a new national identity but a new class status within the local pantheon. his self-transformation at the fortiied gate repeats the neomedieval motif, at the same time that it is here extenuated by chains of association and lateral movements along the roads that link the walled environment to its riskier exterior. Neomedieval Spaces II: The Road In neomedieval fantasies, the motif of the walled city provides a igure for self-transformation—oten the emergence of a second protective yet potentially imprisoning self at the threshold of exposure to a wider world. he complementary motif of the road by which travelers arrive or depart has also acquired a psychological valence in neomedieval iction. Medieval travel narratives—whether dedicated to trade or pilgrimage—oten stressed the physical hardships of a voyage by cart or pack-horse, as well as the exposure to thet, tolls, and harsh taxation posed by an overland route. Travelers moving through territories ruled by various sovereigns as well as through spaces lacking the protection of any legitimate ruler (oten igured as woods) could be subjected to unpredictable local rules over the course of a journey, and the diiculties involved in maintaining the safety of one’s goods and person on the road oten feature prominently in historical accounts of medieval travel (see Reuter). Of course, some of the same features of heterogeneous rule and spatial diferentiation could also function as beneits for socially marginal travelers (beggars, entertainers, thieves, refugees, and vagabonds) who took to the road, partially in hopes of disguising iden- C AREN I RR | N EOMEDIEVALISM IN THREE CONTEMPORARY CITY N OVELS tities or simply seeking new audiences or clientele.5 Legends such as Robin Hood keep both facets of the medieval narrative of endangerment on the road in circulation. In contemporary neomedieval novels, however, the risks of the road are less oten pecuniary than social. he road remains a space of unpredictable encounters and heterogeneous temporality, but the space’s greatest menace is the threat of bodily absorption into a community other than the city-state of origin. he brigands of the neomedieval road, in short, rob travelers of symbolic goods, such as self-respect and citizenship, rather than their bags of gold. In On Such a Full Sea, for example, the journey into the counties brings the heroine into contact with several distinct communities—groups that seem largely unaware of each other’s existence and operate without regard for a national rule of order, legality, or punishment (hence their “simultaneity-along-time”). Whether in an explanatory lashback or episodes organizing the novel’s forward movement, taking refuge with strangers means risking absorption into their world—be it a hotel reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread cottage, a slum-like hospital, a woodland commune, 445 a suburban family, or a neotraditional simulation of the original ethnic collective. In each encounter, Fan (who is, by profession, a diver skilled at full-body immersion) is invited, then coerced, into allegiance with her hosts. She moves from admiring the ancient canopied live oak that shelters a troupe of acrobats she meets, for example, to being welcomed into their family as yet another adopted child. “And if I don’t want to stay? Fan asked. But we know you do,” another child exclaims (Lee 178). his risk of incorporation via adoption acquires particular horror because it is premised on the transformation of Fan’s fellow travelers into meat for guard dogs who “were silently poised, their maws slick and drooling, the muscles of their shoulders and hindquarters pulsing with anticipation” (179). he shadow of this aggressive consumption then hangs over subsequent scenes of absorption into a new family unit, rendering each coercive invitation to stay the social and symbolic equivalent of this near-cannibal encounter. As in Cormac McCarthy’s he Road, Lee’s neomedieval travelers risk not the missed connections or delays that plague travel organized according to modern simultaneous clock-time, but rather becoming fuel for a hungry and hostile social organism. It is their ailiation to self-generated projects and destinations that thieves aim to steal from neomedieval travelers. In Tobar’s and Adichie’s novels, the road also creates biosocial hazards, although the reader’s empathy is drawn toward the sensibilities of the killer and the bystander respectively. In he Tattooed Soldier, the streets of Los Angeles serve simultaneously as Antonio’s road outside the walled cities of Guatemala and as the fortiications of the American metropolis. his eerie overdetermination explodes during the apocalyptic riots that provide cover for Antonio’s assassination of Guillermo, the titular soldier. he novel irst describes the riots through a mediated lens, as Guillermo watches a “picture so bright it seemed it might burn a hole in the [television] screen”; he observes cars, teens, looters, and “a circle dance of young men around a kneeling woman, forearms and biceps spitting rocks at her back. An ancient ritual, a public CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC stone” (Tobar 271). his “ancient” scene soon swells up to absorb Guillermo in a series of involuntary lashbacks to scenes of war. Although the riot sequence begins with statements about the events being most relevant to “the blacks,” Guillermo almost immediately feels he has been overtaken by “a battle bigger than anything [he] had ever seen,” a battle “being fought all over the city, by huge crowds, masses of people” (272). Hence, Antonio’s pursuit and attack on Guillermo is not simply occasioned by the chaos of the street but also enabled by it. he street is the site for ancient rituals, honor killings, and retributive justice because the violence of the street (or road) creates absorbent collectives. Guillermo feels this movement as a menace, but when the novel’s point of view shits conclusively to Antonio, it is described as “a collective spirit” (281), “a street fair” (282), “a day without submissiveness” (283), and “the municipal day of vendettas” when the police stay home (284). Seen from the point of view of the homeless vagabond, the risks of the road create a hole in time, a carnivalesque inversion of order, and liberation from homogeneous national rule. 446 In Americanah, the road motif morphs into railways. A crucial turning point in the novel occurs on a Northeast Corridor train, when Ifemelu encounters Blaine, the sophisticated African-American professor who becomes her lover and opens a new window into American race relations for her. In their irst meeting, she uses her “Mr. Agbo Voice,” and her smalltalk follows British rather than American conventions; privately observing Blaine, Ifemelu’s internal monologue describes him as “tall. A man with skin the color of gingerbread and the kind of lean, proportioned body that was perfect for a uniform, any uniform” (Adichie 217). He is the raw material of collectivity, and Ifemelu uses her recently acquired social categories to place him: “She knew right away that he was African-American. Not Caribbean, not African, not a child of immigrants from either place” (217). While Blaine immediately describes Ifemelu in modern national and class terms (“bourgie Nigerian”), she positions him in cultural terms, remarking inwardly on his use of “the kind of American English that she had just given up, the kind that made race pollsters on the telephone assume that you were white and educated” (218). She sees Blaine, in short, as assimilated, dominated not only by whiteness but also by an American black-white racial binary that aggressively insists on its own priority. Although the crisis in their relationship emerges considerably later, when Ifemelu refuses to endorse Blaine’s solidarity with a working-class African-American man at Yale, the seeds of her rejection of panracial identiication are already evident in this irst encounter. Unlike Guillermo in he Tattooed Soldier, Ifemelu rejects absorption into the American mass; from their irst encounter in transit, Blaine’s uniform-ready body and collectivist sensibility are igured as “modes of conscription, not consent,” to use Louis Chude-Sokei’s (57) description of solidarity and diaspora in Dinaw Mengestu’s 2007 novel he Beautiful hings that Heaven Bears. Americanah presents this intransigence irst as principled self-airmation but also, in a familial subplot, as a more diicult and unresolved possible failure on Ifemelu’s part. Her refusal of solidarity with African-Americans, especially African-American men, blinds her to her young cousin’s desperate needs. C AREN I RR | N EOMEDIEVALISM IN THREE CONTEMPORARY CITY N OVELS “‘His depression is because of his experience,’” she guiltily lectures her aunt, ater the boy attempts suicide; “Dike would not have swallowed those pills if she had been more diligent, more awake [...] she wondered how much they had masked with all that laughter. She should have worried more,” Ifemelu concludes (Adichie 471). But, this willingness to connect, to empathize, to join the community forged on the road comes too late in the day, and it makes little impact. Rather than remaining in the US in solidarity with African or Afro-Caribbean immigrants and/or AfricanAmericans, Ifemelu returns to Lagos, and the novel suggests a brief visit to Nigeria is suicient to heal a suicidal young man traumatized by American race relations. Adichie’s novel elects to swerve away from racial solidarity, iguring that absorption as involuntary conscription into an American army on a death march; the excitement of encounters on the road soon fades in comparison to the appeal of the home city. In all three novels, then, the road is unpoliced. he rule of law is explicitly suspended, and impossibly constant vigilance is required from the traveler. Consequently, another more “ancient ritual” pertains; vendettas, clan-like ailiations, and inter- 447 group warfare predominate. he result is either a horrifying landscape of terror or a liberatory anarchistic collective, depending on your point of view. However, either way, its spatial pattern is readily distinguished from the igure of the modern national road familiar, say, from Jack Kerouac—where speed, distance, money, and other forms of standardized measurement play such a powerful role. In the neomedieval imaginary, the uneasy, spiritual vortex of the gate to the city is complemented by the risks of stops along the traveler’s road, any one of which may become involuntarily permanent. he dialectical relation between the risks taken in the city’s interior and exterior deines this neomedieval sensibility—spatially and socially. Neomedieval Social Structures Historians of the medieval city have long stressed the dialectical interdependence of cities and the surrounding countryside. hey have traced the dependence of cities on food grown outside the walls, the impact of migrants, refugees, and landless peasants seeking protection within cities, as well as the outlow of wealthier citizens buying empty estates and constructing new palaces in the countryside ater the plague years, thus bolstering the power and economic might of the rural aristocracy.6 hey have also emphasized the signiicance of pockets of foreigners within the cities to the maintenance of networks of trade, and highlighted the protective efects of extending citizenship to the proto-middle class burghers of the countryside. A common model of medieval social structure thus concentrates on contests between urban and rural elites, two groups whose authority was slowly redeined by their own strategic eforts to protect trade routes through regional leagues and confederations. he neomedieval ictions examined here are organized around essentially the same social positions and, as demonstrated, largely retain the related spatial CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC imaginary. However, they reroute the democratization narrative. Each of the three novelists considered refuses a diferent piece of this script, and together all three suggest that one of the primary functions of the neomedieval city-state narrative is to short-circuit self-congratulatory conidence about the necessary emergence of modernizing nation-state initiatives. Ideologically, these texts suggest that we might view citizenship and increasingly egalitarian rights discourses of the modern era as a historical exception rather than an inevitable destination or process. hey do not all applaud this narrative, but they sketch its parameters nonetheless in their rethinking of nation-state priorities. he social structure of On Such a Full Sea, for example, is clearly divided among the urban denizens, the elite suburban Charters, and the lawless people of the counties. here is no question that the Charters have the upper hand. heir culinary tastes and health fads determine the economic activities of B-Mor; they set policies for educational testing that allows a tiny fraction of urban citizens upward mobility, and 448 they hold the reigns of the shadowy directorate whose planning organizes the world Lee has envisioned. While the people of B-Mor experience the directorate largely in terms of policing or regulations, the Charters (especially Fan’s assimilated brother Oliver) have access to directorate information, knowledge of the research protocols that govern important facilities, and social connections to this neocorporate ruling body. While they may not function as an unchecked authority within the novel’s social world and do experience inancial anxiety of the sort that drives Oliver’s inal betrayal, they clearly represent a kind of wealth, power, and mobility that far exceeds that of B-Mor, and one of their functions in the social system Lee imagines is to stimulate envy among B-Mor residents, even while their own villages reproduce simulations of the urban communalism they have renounced. he novel, in short, imagines sustained but uneven competition between urban citizens and a rural aristocracy as a productive, functional process in its own terms. his is not a process that needs to mutate into anything else. he people of the unincorporated counties do not function as a threat to this dyad, nor are they in the process of being included in greater circles of democratic solidarity. he peasantry are essentially irrelevant to the system Lee imagines, except as a waste bucket into which less functional members of the ruling group might be dumped and as a stimulus to the fear of falling among the B-Mor residents. he world of On Such a Full Sea is ultimately a static dystopia with many internal moving parts. Fan’s inal light from the Charters and the legend of her reunion with Reg do not signal the apocalyptic destruction of the city; instead, as in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it is the persistence and reproducibility of Lee’s world that completes its somewhat banal ominousness. “Stay put for now. We’ll ind a way. You need not come back for us,” reads the narrator’s inal exhortation (Lee 407). No rising middle class or disruptive individualism seems likely to emerge from this condition; the emergence of a modern nation-state is not “a way” out of the city in this novel. Instead, Lee’s novel establishes a complex homeostasis that foresees no C AREN I RR | N EOMEDIEVALISM IN THREE CONTEMPORARY CITY N OVELS particular disruptions or transformations in the future. By contrast, Tobar’s Tattooed Soldier places revolutionary sentiments in a much more central role, closing as it does with Antonio’s meditation on his dead wife’s possible reactions to the riots: “It was absurd to mistake rock throwing and looting for an act of love, but Antonio was willing to allow for the possibility. If only Elena were here, in Los Angeles. Elena would know, she would be able to give him a deinite yes or no [...] If she were alive, Elena would put her arms around him and whisper all the answers in his ear” (307). But, of course, this man-whisperer has been killed, and her evaluations remain inaudible. he novel inds no collective consequence in the brief assertion of freedom in the riots, and certainly it imagines no path to citizenship for Antonio or its other refugees and migrants. Its universe is so deeply stratiied that the white ruling classes are only visible to the central characters through media representations and objects, such as the American house, “room ater room illed with televisions and toys, closets packed with more clothes than anyone could wear in a lifetime, a cornucopia of gadgets and appliances” that amaze the young Guillermo 449 when he watches E.T. (34). Antonio, too, “had an electric idea of Los Angeles. It was a place of vibrant promises, with suntanned women in bikinis and men carrying ice chests brimming with beer” (41). Neither Guillermo nor Antonio maintains any illusion that they are or will be welcomed into a democratic embrace with these fantasy citizens in the novel. Any competition among elites is also irrelevant to them, because the primary social experience guiding the novel is the city’s failure to incorporate its hinterland and thus to feed itself. Consequently, the hunger and longings of the city’s residents are underscored repeatedly during the riot scenes—most notably when Guillermo witnesses the looting of a supermarket in the inal moments before returning to his cinderblock apartment. “he place was about to collapse on these people,” he notes; “they were going to kill themselves. And for what? For steak and chicken, oranges and fabric sotener? [...] Hamburger Helper, cornlakes” (291). Tobar’s city is a collapsing structure, one that fails to maintain the balance between country and city, citizens and peasants. Hence, it releases a vengeful starving peasantry rather than buying them of with limited privileges and the promise of upward mobility and legal status. As noted above, Adichie’s Americanah refuses incorporation, too. Here, however, it is the foreigner who refuses to join the city, that is, to extend the diaspora and keep trade routes among cities open. Ater her return to Lagos, Ifemelu spends time with the Nigerpolitan Club, a collection of self-consciously hip returnees, and while she shares some of their tastes, “this was what she hoped she had not become but feared she had” (Adichie 503). Satirizing the same elite food faddism that so interests Lee, Adichie reserves her more positive associations for “the new middle class that our democracy created” (531). Prosperous, fat, local, and happily uncool, this class is imagined as “forward-looking,” and liking new things “because our best is still ahead” (539). he source of this middle-class sensibility is the “real enterprise” demonstrated by a “fried plantain hawker” Ifemelu and Obinze meet on a roadway. CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC “‘She’s selling what she makes. She’s not selling her location or the source of her oil or the name of the person that ground the beans. She’s simply selling what she makes,’” Ifemelu gushes (547). his vision of local authenticity acquires value to the extent that it symbolizes resistance to the farther lung trade networks and consumption practices of Nigerpolitans and African-Americans, such as Blaine, who operate in a cultural and economic environment dominated by self-satisied white hipsters. he explicitly middle-class entrepreneurialism endorsed in Americanah is hence concerned with restricting or redirecting allegiance with both the cosmopolitan urban elites and the rural aristocrats of the surrounding hinterlands (such as the wealthy white suburbanites who are depicted as always being in search of a middle-class black friend to show of). Adichie’s heroine prizes instead her status within an unconfederated city-state, and the novel happily concludes with a reunion that consolidates a middle-class position within a territorially limited city-state democracy. Any hints of south-south networking are swamped by the the failure of allegiance and a principled 450 refusal to participate in clan networks, the two moves that generate the novel’s happy ending. he future of this “forward-looking” urban middle class, Adichie’s novel strongly suggests, lies not in solidarity across classes, nations, races, or locations but rather in inward-looking self-pride and recovery from self-hatred and shame. So, of the three novels considered here, Adichie’s neomedieval imaginary embraces the fortiied city-state most unambiguously, inding in it a reprieve from the destabilizing claims on empathy and taste required by Anderson’s modern homogeneity. The Space-Time Vision of Neomedievalism he three city-novels discussed in this essay all turn away from a teleological progress narrative that celebrates the emergence and expansion of democratic citizenship toward universalizing norms. In that sense, they are not only anti-national but also anti-global. Migrant iction (and all of these novels are of course engaged to varying degrees with the social meaning of migration) need not be transnational in its ethic, simply because crossing national borders is a condition of possibility for the narrative. Instead, as these neomedieval ictions imply, there are other alternatives to the spatial and social logic of the nation available beyond the ultra-rapid accelerated smooth spaces and satellite eye of the global. What we see in the neomedieval novel is a patchwork of city-states, sometimes with overlapping and porous borders. Adichie, in particular, imagines simultaneous migrations through the metropolis from several directions. he resulting geography recalls Fredric Jameson’s important assertion that “today everything is about land” (130-31). While stressing the inescapable centrality of space and land in contemporary political struggles, Jameson also underlines the neo- elements in what is here called neomedievalism. “[T]his seeming reversion to a feudal mode of production is then mirrored in the experimentation of the economic theorists with a return to C AREN I RR | N EOMEDIEVALISM IN THREE CONTEMPORARY CITY N OVELS doctrines of rent in connection with contemporary inance capital. But feudalism did not include the kind of temporal acceleration at the heart of today’s reduction to the present,” he writes (130). Jameson links the neofeudal politics of land to a technologically assisted acceleration to the point of near simultaneity; these are the time-space coordinates of his ontology of the present. For Jameson, this acceleration peaks in the experience of a lash: the instantaneous lash mob as well as the stock market ‘lash crash’ of 6 May 2010. his simultaneity fundamentally difers from Anderson’s; it momentarily grasps the globe emerging out of its discontinuous patchwork into a possibly terrifying condition in which each deracinated subject is one among “billions of anonymous equals” (130), before receding into defensive tribalisms and pseudo-collectivities or, potentially, releasing a new “Jubilee” (132). Jameson’s radical acceleration to the point of singularity has a presence in each of these novels. Adichie is certainly interested in a far-reaching community of bloggers and blog readers who engage with the story Ifemelu narrates virtually on the basis of the realist action narrated in the novel. Lee’s narration also features the video 451 technology of surveillance and even a fascination with swarms and mobs that form and disperse inexplicably at several points in the novel. And Tobar unites these two igures in his highly mediated descriptions of the experience of the riots. An instantaneous simulcast of collective disruptions is necessary for each of these works. his moment briely illuminates the social and architectural structures that each novel imagines. he fact that none of these narratives fully commits to the exhilarating new globalism that Jameson imagines, collapsing instead into melancholic regret, longing, and localism, reveals the ideological limits to neomedievalism of this type. By provincializing and historicizing national progress narratives, these narratives run the risk of renouncing one of the most utopian (though obviously unfulilled) promises of the national project—its vision of universal enfranchisement and an absolute political and social equality. Finding a narrative form adequate to that desire and simultaneously resistant to the well-documented failures of the national romance remains an urgent task for twenty-irst-century writing. Notes 1. hanks to my colleague Mary Campbell for pointing out that the city-state was more signiicant in Greece and Italy during the Middle Ages and played a smaller role in England and France. 2. he mixed reaction to Saskia Sassen’s thesis about the rise of “global cities” suggests there are important questions to ask about the applicability of the city-state model to twenty-irst-century conditions. For a summary of criticisms of Sassen’s concept, see Mould. 3. For a handy overview of contemporary urban iction, see Keunen. 4. Min Hyoung Song explores the “negative space” (48) igure in maps of pre-riot Los Angeles. 5. See Geremek for the function of travel of the poor; Wigelsworth for the variable toll and taxation prac- CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC tices; and Munby for an account of the vehicles used in medieval overland travel. 6. hese are central themes in Edith Ennen’s classic study he Medieval Town. Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. New York: Anchor, 2014. Print. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Revised Edition. London: Verso, 2006. Print. Arias, Arturo. “Central American-Americans.” Latino Studies 1.1 (2003): 168-87. Print. Chude-Sokei, Louis. “he Newly Black Americans.” Transition 113 (2014): 52-71. Print. 452 Eco, Umberto. “Dreaming the Middle Ages.” Travels in Hyperreality. Trans. William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt, 1986. 61-72. Print. Elkins, Stanley, and Eric McKitrick. he Age of Federalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print. Ennen, Edith. he Medieval Town. Trans. Natalie Fryde. Amsterdam: NorthHolland, 1979. Print. Geremek, Bronisław. he Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris. Trans. Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Print. Graeber, David. “he Anthropology of Globalization.” American Anthropologist 104.4 (2002): 1222-27. Print. Holsinger, Bruce W. Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm P, 2007. Print. Jameson, Fredric. “he Aesthetics of Singularity.” New Let Review 2.92 (2015): 10132. Print. Keunen, Bart. “he Decline of the City as Modernist Symbol.” he Urban Condition. Ed. Ghent Urban Studies Team. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1999. 359-77. Print. Khanna, Parag. “Neomedievalism: he World is Fragmenting, Badly.” Foreign Policy 17 September 2009. Print. Lee, Chang-rae. On Such a Full Sea. New York: Riverhead Books, 2014. Print. Leyshon, Cressida. “he Chorus of ‘We’: An Interview with Chang-rae Lee.” New Yorker 6 January 2014. Web. 29 March 2015. <http://www.newyorker.com/books/ page-turner/the-chorus-of-we-an-interview-with-chang-rae-lee> Lopez, Robert. “he Crossroads within the Wall.” he Historian and the City. Ed. Oscar Handlin and John Burchard. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1963. 27-43. Print. C AREN I RR | N EOMEDIEVALISM IN THREE CONTEMPORARY CITY N OVELS Mould, Oli. “he Cultural Dimension.” Global City Challenges. Ed. Michele Acuto and Wendy Steele. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 140-54. Print. Munby, Julian. “From Carriage to Coach.” he Art, Science, and Technology of Medieval Travel. Ed. Robert Bork and Andrea Kann. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 41-54. Print. Neyer, Jürgen. “Neo-Medievalism, Local Actors, and Foreign Policy.” Civilizing World Politics. Ed. Mathias Albert, Lothar Brock, and Klaus Dieter Wolf. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleield, 2000. 179-97. Print. Nicholas, David. he Later Medieval City, 1300-1500. London: Longman, 1997. Print. Reuter, Timothy. “he Insecurity of Travel in the Early and High Middle Ages.” Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities. Ed. Janet L. Nelson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. 38-71. Print. Sassen, Saskia. he Global City. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. Print. Scott, Tom. he City-State in Europe, 1000-1600. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Print. Song, Min Hyoung. Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005. Print. Tobar, Héctor. he Tattooed Soldier. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000. Print. Wigelsworth, Jefrey R. Science and Technology in Medieval European Life. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 2006. Print. 453 &ULVLVRIWKH1RYHODQGWKH1RYHORI&ULVLV 6XPDQ*XSWD Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, Volume 42, Issue 4, Décembre 2015, pp. 454-467 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\&DQDGLDQ5HYLHZRI&RPSDUDWLYH/LWHUDWXUH 5HYXH&DQDGLHQQHGH/LWW«UDWXUH&RPSDU«H For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/crc/summary/v042/42.4.gupta.html Access provided by Vienna University Library (16 Dec 2015 12:02 GMT) Crisis of the Novel and the Novel of Crisis* Suman Gupta Open University 454 his essay has three more or less discrete parts; that is, no irm linear argument is developed across them. Each part informs the next, but the arguments taken up in each could also be contemplated separately. he irst responds to the thrust of this special issue, and considers the relationship of the novel to the nation; the second focuses on a worldly concern of the present, the 2007-08 inancial crisis, and how it features in the contemporary novel; and the third moves toward a possible project of exploring the contemporary novel in terms of the prevailing neoliberal lifeworld. Together, these parts try to accentuate some of the general features of the contemporary novel. Nation Insofar as the unwritten agreement between general readers (interpretive communities) and producers (authors, editors, publishers) go, or insofar as the structuring principles of book circulations/markets go, it is doubtful whether there was ever a necessary relationship between the novel as genre and the concept of nation. No doubt social consensus on national community, and its co-optation into professional practices and state apparatuses, has meant that novel and nation have oten been evoked together. Novels have sometimes been archived or shelved according to national grids; equally, at times they have not, and have blurred or neglected such grids instead. In professional criticism, the political economy of novels is habitually ledgered in nation-state account books (to use René Wellek’s metaphor; see Wellek 153); but that is more due to the predisposition of the account book than to the substance of the novel. None of this has constituted a necessary relationship between Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC 0319–051x/15/42.4/454 © Canadian Comparative Literature Association SUMAN G UPTA | CRISIS OF THE N OVEL AND THE N OVEL OF CRISIS novel and nation. Undeniably, though, philologists and latter day humanities critics have occasionally presumed that such a necessary—or at least deep—relationship exists, and the institutional setup of academia still presumes it. he general philological approach can be quickly described (and put aside) by recourse to Franco Moretti’s strategy of examining the nineteenth-century European novel via geographical mappings. From the philological perspective, dominant through the nineteenth century and especially in Europe, the domains of human (racial), cultural, linguistic, physical, and political geography had an inextricable cohesiveness—an organic togetherness (this rationale of organicity is laid out cogently in Part I in Cheah). he cohesion was derived from traces of origins through the historical process, and the concept of the nation was grounded in the overlaps within these descriptors of geographical domain. he novel was accordingly understood as a manifestation of the nation thus conceived. In fact, little could escape national grounding once the philological approach was accepted. hat idea of cohesion is now untenable, as much as a historicist conception of the nation as one that 455 applies to the present (especially in the present). hat each geographical descriptor for a putative national domain slips against others, and destabilizes presumptions of cohesion, is largely regarded as a foregone conclusion. he prevailing understanding is that nations have been conceived and constructed according to (oten recent) historical and political contingency, which naturally releases cultural artefacts of all kinds, including the novel, from any necessary national predicate. Nonetheless, this might appear to be a somewhat summary way of putting philological scholarship aside, and no doubt the growing numbers of returners to philology nowadays will quibble with it (I have discussed this elsewhere: see Chapter 2 in Gupta). his is so especially since philology undergirded the institutional structure of modern humanities, so that the study of literature—and novels—is pre-organized as national: literary history, canons, curricula, archival records, university departments, research centers, and so on are still largely ordered according to given national categories. Consequently, the nation as a categorical predicate for literary scholarship has proven to be remarkably sticky. No amount of reconceptualizing literary history in terms of world literature, colonialism/postcolonialism, irst/second/third worlds, directional geopolitics (Orient-Occident, East-West, North-South), globalization, trans- or post-nationality, planetary literature, world republic of letters, area studies, translation zones, and so on has quite dislodged the habit of predicating literary study on nation. It yet seems meaningful to ask what happens beyond the point where everything is predicated on the nation, which in a way reiterates the nation’s pre-ascribed philological eminence and ongoing consequence. Moretti’s atlas itself was obviously circumspect in this regard, and when Moretti observed that “the nation-state [...] found the novel. And vice versa: the novel found the nation-state” (17), he marked a historical contingency, a convenience of (geographical and literary) imagining, and an ideological conluence (“found,” not “founded”) in which the genre is not predicated on the nation. Moretti’s atlas is exem- CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC plary in analyzing the novel according to the constructedness of nation, and also of province and city, of empire and colony, of book circulation territories—indeed, of the various dimensions of geography itself. But there is that stickiness of nation as predicate for humanistic study, and scholars contemplating the novel have seized eagerly upon conceptions of nations, while fully cognizant of imagined communities and imaginary geographies, as if it has a superlative signiicance—as if the nation did have a necessary relationship to the emergence and existence of the genre, even though it evidently does not now. he nation still seems an eternal point of departure for, and oten a condition-setting trope in thinking about, the novel. hus, against all odds, Fredric Jameson gave the nation a new lease of life for conceptualizing the novel—by translating the politics of irst world/third world, and of east/west, and of colony/postcolony into the following breath-taking generalization (while adjoining caution about generalizing): “All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very speciic way: they are to be read as what I will call national 456 allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel” (Jameson 69)—though, virtuously, in order to expose “the primordial crime of capitalism” in “displacing older forms of collective life” (84), and to befuddle “irst world” and particularly American complacence. he contradictions in this argument have been strenuously criticized (notably in Ahmad) and need not be regurgitated. But the characterization of nation as “allegory” ofers an opportunity (without conceding to philology) for bringing it back as predicate (so nonetheless philological albeit with a postmodern sensibility) for thinking about the novel—at least all those nonwestern and not-irst-world novels—and for pinning the novel down. Unsurprisingly, Caren Irr inds this ploy being returned in reverse: “in the early twenty-irst century, a revival of the political novel has begun in the US,” and “[t]his irst-world version of the political novel—or, more properly, the geopolitical novel—draws directly on the tradition of the national allegory at least as completely as the more cosmopolitan postcolonial writing subverted that form” (“Postmodernism” 517). But this presents a contradiction with which Irr struggles valiantly in her longer treatment of the matter: the contradiction of wedding the luidity of “geopolitical novel” with the speciicity of “US iction.” Her gloss over this lies in deciding: “More important than biographical markers for my purposes is an explicit efort to address a North American audience. I view internal evidence such as voice, style, and narrative frame as more reliable indicators of a particular work’s having an American reference point than authorial biography” (Irr, Toward 11). he caution about not grounding the US in the biography of the author is really caution about philological conceptions, about presuming that the nation authors the author by birth and that the author thereby authors the nation in his or her iction. But caution is thrown to the winds in presuming that the North American audience is necessarily addressed simply by evoking a voice, style, narrative frame—that is, that referring to North America is the same as addressing North Americans—which ofers a basis for characterizing ‘US iction’ as SUMAN G UPTA | CRISIS OF THE N OVEL AND THE N OVEL OF CRISIS coterminous with its irst-world national allegory. Somewhat more challenging contradictions appear when Benedict Anderson’s study of nation formation—the most inluential formulation of the nation’s constructedness and politico-historical contingency—is recruited to suggest a deep erstwhile relation to the novel. I mention this because the opening lines of the introduction to this special issue seem to gesture in that direction (referencing Chapter 1 of Anderson, Imagined): According to Benedict Anderson [...], the national community is imagined by two forms: the novel and the newspaper. he novel turns the pre-modern cyclical time into the Benjaminian empty, homogenous time of the calendar (Anderson 24), which means that newspapers are novels without plot, “one-day best-sellers” (35) [....] However, while nationalism is being increasingly replaced by post-nationalist identity politics, the novel is not being sublated by any new form. his provocation to consider the matter, for which I am grateful, is merely relective of an over-determination of the novel in Anderson’s schema that is familiar in liter- 457 ary critical circles. It is a line glibly drawn in, for example, a passing observation such as: “Novels not only mirror the Bildung of nations but also have a direct causal role in mapping their social spaces. For Anderson, the novel is an analogue of the nation and represents synchronically its bounded, intrahistorical, and emergent society” (Mukherjee 550—summarising Pheng Cheah, who did not quite say that: see Cheah). It’s a simple matter of replacing Anderson’s “book” with “novel” (newspapers are like a gigantic one-day bestseller book, not novel; the book and the newspaper, not the novel and the newspaper); and of generalizing Anderson’s carefully chosen references to nationalist novels describing reading practices at speciic historical junctures as “the novel” per se, the genre itself. But the replacement of “book” with “novel,” and certain chosen novels by “the novel,” undermines the rationale of Anderson’s argument. he materiality of the “book” rather than the immateriality of the “novel” is material to his argument; the logic of print circulations is not speciically novelistic in Anderson’s reasoning; the “logic of seriality” (as Anderson put it in Spectre 29-45) that materializes nationalism is with regard to text in print (newspapers are Anderson’s preferred example) rather than a speciic literary genre (all print partakes of that seriality, including the novel). Possibly, even the focus on print culture ascribed to Anderson’s argument within literary critical circles is an over-determination: linguistic philology (vernacularization and setting vernaculars as oicial standards), the existence of colonial administrative units, and the ideological co-optations of emerging secular states in Europe have their unavoidable and determinative place in this picture. And, along with the book and newspapers in print culture, also demography, cartography, and museography (albeit only as an aterthought in Chapter 10 of Anderson, Imagined)—all themselves rooted in philological scholarship (as Turner shows)—and other spaces of “bound seriality” (see Anderson, Spectre 29-45) are all inextricably woven together. All of which is to say that Anderson’s argument, at any rate, ofers no basis for any deep historical relationship between speciically the novel CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC and the nation to be mooted. But Anderson did at every point remind the reader that national solidarities and discourses are extremely sticky. hat was the impetus for formulating “imagined communities” by way of historicist exploration: the shock of the China-Vietnam War of 1979, the irst “world-historical” conlict (as Anderson saw it: Imagined 1) arising from persistent nationalism within revolutionary socialism. Perhaps, the literary critical tendency to over-determine the historical relation between novel and nation is a manifestation of that stickiness. If there has never been a necessary relation between the novel and the nation, then there is no meaningful question to be answered about the novel beyond the nation. he novel does not need to be transformed from its inside, in its formal genetics, if political and cultural discourses shited away from being nation-centered in the way they have been through much of the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. It is questionable whether such a shit is really taking place now in the twenty-irst—and it is arguable that the nation is ideologically as centered as ever, perhaps increasingly so. 458 Equally, it is arguable that concepts and even experiences of cosmopolitanism and universal humanism have been constantly in circulation through the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. he questions that arise, then, are somewhat diferent from what happens to the novel beyond the nation. hese could be: What discourses other than those centered on nation are of moment now? How does the novel negotiate its passages apropos them? Does that bring the genre into question in any way? Crisis Insofar as the unwritten agreement between general readers and producers go, or insofar as the structuring principles of book markets/circulations go, it is doubtful whether the novel has ever faced a crisis—whether it has ever really been expedient to write obituaries of the genre. However, the idea has a certain sensationalist appeal and has been repeatedly proposed, inluentially for a postmodernist ethos by John Barth. In a way, the shock of the idea—still—testiies to how habituated readers are with the novel as always in the present, relexive and constitutive of the present (and the past of the present). Barth’s 1967 account of this seems to have a renewed currency of late: “Whether historically the novel expires or persists as a major art form seems immaterial to me; if enough writers and critics feel apocalyptic about it, their feeling becomes a considerable cultural fact, like feeling that Western civilization, or the world, is going to end rather soon” (72). It is a testament, as I have said, to the habituation of the idea of the novel as world; but also that this state of exhaustion, this crisis and apprehension of imminent demise, rest in an inward turn in novelistic representation and its critical analysis: the Borgesian turn when “characters in a work of iction become readers or authors of the iction they’re in,” so that “we’re reminded of the ictitious aspect of our own existence” (73). he imminent death of the novel SUMAN G UPTA | CRISIS OF THE N OVEL AND THE N OVEL OF CRISIS is still being revolved, and I do not mean because the electronic book has arrived (book, not novel, so all genres are in mortal danger from that perspective). What I have in mind is that the death or end of the novel, the trope of a crisis of the novel, is in Barth’s sense a resonant “cultural fact,” and more: it is a cultural fact that spawns its own sub-genre of the novel, novels about the end of the novel, while knowing that the novel is but perpetuating itself thereby. So, the death or end of the novel rumbles on, pondered in essays occasionally by novelists (such as Young or Self), and given its due by literary critics. A most fulsome treatment appears in Pieter Vermeulen’s study, whose approach to the matter sums the situation succinctly: hese [post-2000 or contemporary] novels ascribe to the novel (as) genre the now obsolete power to choreograph the distribution of modern life into individuals, families, communities, nations, and empires; their declarations of the demise of that cultural power serve as so many scafolds for their explorations of diferent forms of afect and life and for their interrogation of the ethics and politics of form. By evoking a particular understanding of the novel genre in order to measure their diference from it, these ictions in a sense conspire with criticism and theory of the novel to construct a genre they declare defunct. (4) Concern about this inward turn is at the same time anxiety about the novel’s relationship with the world (wherein the nation is but one erstwhile way of distributing modern life). he inward turn is both a putative lack of a relationship and a relexive relationship itself: in Barth’s words, it reminds us of “the ictitious aspect of our own existence.” here are moments when Irr’s account of the contemporary political (geopolitical) novel chimes with Vermeulen’s account of novels bouncing of the end of the novel. And that leads me to wonder, apropos the questions raised above, how the novel and world (including the nation, despite the nation) negotiate with each other now, with regard to some concrete manifestation of worldliness and worldly concern in the present (I do have Edward Said’s sense of worldliness in mind). Perhaps it is simply fortuitous that the ongoing crisis of the novel (the end of the genre as a novelistic trope) is being pondered amidst worldly concerns about a (recent or ongoing, depending where one is) inancial crisis—the so-called 2007-08 inancial crisis—and its results—austerity policies. One wonders whether the one crisis is antithetical to the other: whether the inward turn that is the crisis (as trope) of the novel has worked against the novel’s engagement with the worldly crisis. Or has this conjunction of crises perhaps rejuvenated the worldliness of the novel (as a novelistic trope, too) beyond the end of the novel (a now foregone trope). Either the contemporary novel is securely enmeshed in its own ictional crisis, or it apprehends the worldly crisis within itself—or some interesting version of both: very diferent political commitments are involved in these positions. hese diferent positions are unlikely to be uniformly awash in the lukewarm sort of authorial commitment that Caren Irr describes: “authors of geopolitical iction tend to support pro-global ideals in combination with liberal individualism or moderate collectivism in political action” (Toward 22). But then, how the novel negotiates through the worldly crisis is 459 CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC possibly not a matter of what authors think they are doing; perhaps it is about what readers ind in novels, what interpretive strategies are deployed in the receptive ield. However fortuitous the connection between ictional and worldly crises, it seems to have some mileage for thinking about the contemporary novel. he 2007-08 inancial crisis has to be one of the most intensively narrativized and verbally mediated ‘events’ in this age of information and communication. In print alone, the indicative numbers are daunting: a keyword search with “inancial crisis” in late 2014 on the British Library’s online catalogue yielded well over 10,000 possibly relevant entries: for the period 2007-08: 972 items; 2009-10: 4020; 2011-13: 5285; January-October 2014: 1088. hat excludes newspaper reports, broadcasts, and online publications. With the preceding part in mind and by way of an impressionistic observation: the inancial crisis as a ield naturally has a geopolitical dimension. On the one hand, the ield is denoted as a global one—consistent with the character of contemporary capitalism—so a global inancial crisis. It was, of course, imme460 diately understood that the global inancial crisis had not really been particularly manifested, for example, in China, India, Canada, Australia, and some other states, and that crises in the so-called Asian Tiger Economies and in Mexico, Argentina, Japan, and a few other states pre-dated this one, but those were not ‘global.’ he inancial crisis in this instance has mainly concerned the USA and EU member states, and it is their geopolitical centrality in the current capitalist—neoimperialist—order that confers a global air to this one. On the other hand, and at the same time, within crisis-struck zones the evidence, responsibilities, and solutions were relentlessly tracked state-by-state, especially within the transnational EU. And in the latter especially that sticky discourse of nationalism, at the blurred conjunction of nation-state, surfaced. his was not so much to do with a boost to various far-right nationalist formations (of course that has happened); rather, it was to do with the structuring of narrative—with the rhetorical strategies of exposition. National stereotyping in news coverage of, for example, the crisis in Spain (see Soto), Iceland (see Chartier), Greece (much here; see, for example, Tzogopoulos; Touri and Rogers; Kaitatzi-Whitlock), and other countries have received some academic attention. Nationalist prickliness simmers strongly here; as one commentator put it regarding media coverage of Greece: “Representations of the Greek crisis constitute particular cases of an institutional ‘intra-European racism’” (Kaitatzi-Whitlock 35). he question that this discussion faces then is: where does the novel it into this enormous and burgeoning low of worldly narratives and communicative mediations of the 2007-08 inancial crisis? his seems a very natural question to raise, and not merely because we habitually anticipate a relation between novel and world, and are still taken aback by the possibility that it does not exist and that the genre has consequently become defunct. he prevailing political economy of texts, of books, automatically suggests this question: the novel, like all areas of cultural production, is hostage to market drives. Superlative production of news narratives about an ‘event’ spurs book production alluding to that ‘event’—it makes good market sense, and SUMAN G UPTA | CRISIS OF THE N OVEL AND THE N OVEL OF CRISIS producers of novels could be expected to capitalize on it. It is as natural to anticipate the ‘inancial crisis novel’ as to anticipate the ‘9/11 novel,’ the ‘Iraq invasion novel,’ or the ‘Arab Spring novel.’ he answer to the above question is, interestingly, that the novel has made indiferent inroads into print productions about the inancial crisis. Indiferent inroads, but still some alleyways have been laid out. A tracking of novels in English that have been packaged and marketed or reviewed and received as ‘crisis novels’ include the following authors: Geraint Anderson (thrillers featuring ruthless bankers: Just Business, 2011, and Payback Time, 2012); Sebastian Faulks (on sundry London characters including a hedge-fund manager in late 2007: A Week in December, 2009); Cyrus Moore (City of hieves, 2009: a thriller about an investment banker who inds himself implicated in an insider-trading ring); Jess Walter (on the travails of a inancial journalist ater the Great Crash: he Financial Lives of Poets, 2009); Tilly Bagshawe (shadowing another bestselling author in Sidney Sheldon’s Ater the Darkness, 2010, a story about intrigues and revelations following a hedgefund manager’s demise); Jonathan Dee (on the family life of an aluent private equity 461 fund manager: he Privileges, 2010); Ben Elton (on a group of friends in London during the crash: Meltdown, 2010); Adam Haslett (Union Atlantic, 2010, with a successful Wall Street banker as a main protagonist); Sophie Kinsella (Mini Shopaholic, 2010: part of a light-hearted chicklit series featuring a mother and daughter during the recession, who, to put it mildly, like shopping); Alexandra Lebenthal (on the schemes of a hedge-fund manager and a Lehman Brothers investment banker: he Recessionistas, 2010); Alex Preston (on traders in the City on the eve of the crisis: his Bleeding City, 2010); Justin Cartwright (Other People’s Money, 2011, set around the collapse of a British merchant bank); Felix Riley (thrillers featuring a maverick US secret service agent talking about corrupt bankers: he Set Up, 2011, and Inside Job, 2012); Robert Harris (he Fear Index, 2011: a CERN physicist sets up a hedgefund with a program to manipulate markets and gets into trouble); Cristina Alger (on the dodgy inancial dealings of elite New Yorkers: he Darlings, 2012); Dave Eggers (on an American businessman in Saudi Arabia during the crisis: A Hologram for the King, 2012); John Gapper (A Fatal Debt, 2012, a murder mystery involving investment bankers and Wall Street intrigues); John Lanchester (following sundry characters in London, including an aluent banker made redundant as the crisis hits: Capital, 2012); and Darin Bradley (Chimpanzee, 2014: a dystopian fantasy set in a near-future Great Depression America). his is a modest list of novels that refer explicitly to the inancial crisis, produced and received as ‘crisis novels,’ and no doubt a few more could be added—but not many more. Highbrow literary critics would struggle to allow some of these into the sacralized (canonized) precincts of ‘the novel,’ and would consign them to the non-committal category of ‘iction,’ but that says more about critical norms than about the objects of analysis. However, such qualms give a useful sense of territorial prerogatives: many of these texts have their relevance to the inancial crisis foregrounded—their status as ‘crisis novels’ claimed—through market imperatives CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC (topicality, publicity, ‘genre iction’ formulae, and so on) in which critics have little purchase. And literary critics have generally expressed very little interest in such crisis novels: apart from a few review essays, three useful essays in Kirk Boyle and Daniel Mrozowski’s edited volume (see Chapters 4-6 in Boyle and Mrozowski) come to mind, which also deal with novels implicated in more tangential readings of crisis. Insofar as the above list goes, a few immediate observations are relevant to the preceding discussion. First, in terms of unpacking thematic concerns à la the 20072008 crisis, these concerns present zeitgeist pictures, which are only circumstantially related to this crisis; in other words, they reiterate the features of a considerable lineage already—recalling William Gaddis’ JR (1975), Arthur Hayley’s Moneychangers (1975), Tom Wolfe’s Bonire of the Vanities (1987), Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), and numerous more or less sensational accounts of insider-experiences and exposés and formulaic ‘genre iction,’ and their modernist and Victorian predecessors (for a useful listing, see Davies). Second, the novels listed above largely bypass attention to 462 national integrities or, for that matter, inter-national boundaries, and tend to draw a line from vividly evoked localities (oices, homes, cities) to hazily or abstractly grasped global determinations and repercussions. he impression they make is of strong localization of narrative, accentuated by concerns that radiate seamlessly away from and outside (perfunctorily registered) nation-states. hird, the inancial crisis is largely presented in terms of key agents (especially those involved in inancial operations and institutions) and predominantly pinned upon a speciic class (broadly the so-called high-net-worth individuals, the top 1% against which the Occupy Movement deined itself, the so-called super-rich and their functionaries, along with political elites). his is apt to place such novels as coterminous with the framing and scapegoating that was widely evidenced in reportage on the crisis (see, for example, Davidson; Kelsey; O’Flynn, Monaghan, and Power). If this modest list of novels with narratological and ideological structures that replicate/reiterate numerous predecessors, and the above (dearth of) literary criticism addressed to them, were all one could refer to then there might be a good case for anticipating the death of the novel. he tenuous thread that links this worldly crisis with the novel may then become another stitch in the crisis of the novel. However, it seems to me that this approach to the matter is debilitatingly limiting; the problem is in the critical approach rather than in the novel as an object and ield. A diferent approach may be proposed, one that is likely to be productive for exploring the relation of world and novel now—the relation of such “events” as the 2007-08 inancial crisis to contemporary novelistic practice. he remainder of this essay briely makes the proposal, but does not lesh it out: leshing it out would be a large project. SUMAN G UPTA | CRISIS OF THE N OVEL AND THE N OVEL OF CRISIS Neoliberal Lifeworld What I have in mind is akin to Emily Horton’s approach to her study of “crisis ictions,” exempliied by the novels of Graham Swit, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro: [My] focus is on contemporary crisis, not, or not primarily, in the form of a breakdown of linguistic signiication as witnessed by postmodernism, but perhaps more centrally in a mode of everyday social anxiety and unease emphasised in these novels in relation to a context of global neoliberalism. hus, integral to these ictions is a critique of neoliberal politics and society, which igures the genre of crisis as aesthetically crucial. (3) As context, Horton delineates the crisis in a broad way in post-consensus Britain, especially concretized around hatcherism, and the novelists and their work are then presented as active vehicles of dissent contributing “to examining the lie of neoliberal progress and the supposed democracy of free market government, instead putting forward a more critical understanding of cosmopolitan society and politics” (9). he 463 impetus of Horton’s project is of our time, with the 2007-08 crisis in the backdrop, but it makes sparing reference to that. hat is understandable: this crisis is but a symptom of a larger crisis, and speaks to and of something larger. And yet, the speciicity of this crisis is also that it actuates energetic engagement with that something larger, and that push is imbued in the critical moment as in the novelistic moment and calls for some relection. Such relection is, however, deterred by the literary critical habit (of philological provenance) of locating its object of analysis irmly in texts and authors—of secluding the critical thrust behind meditations on fetishized texts and iconized authors, the ostensible sources and authorities of critical thought. he world is then presumptively sieved through those, as conditional on their pre-eminence, and that move oten renders the connection between world and novel a small thing. I have been doing this myself in a particularly narrow way above in looking for explicit announcements of the 2007-08 crisis within the novel and its circuits. Horton does much better than that; but still, her deference to particular novels and novelists as authors and authorizers of socio-political critique is an unnecessary restriction. he consideration of world and novel is opened up if the processes of writing and reading are centered as embedded in the socio-political structures of literary production and circulation and reception, and as construed within the ideological ield of intellection and critique itself. As noted above, the 2007-08 crisis has generated a profusion of texts that chart its symptoms, seek to explain it, and ofer remedies. Importantly, in their midst an increasingly coherent articulation has emerged of the ruling ideology, which is now available as the history of the present, is symptomatized in this crisis (and recent and coming crises), and is also paradoxically reiied, and crystallized, by this crisis. In other words, the 2007-08 crisis and the intellectual verbosity surrounding it have clariied the pervasive condition that produced it. Arguably, for this efort of clariication to be undertaken in a concerted and cohesive fashion the context of the inancial CRCL DECEMBER 2015 DÉCEMBRE RCLC crisis and austerity are enabling conditions. his is so because the embedded ruling ideology of the present, in its general embrace, is not clearly laid out through consistent economic and political reasoning, and not represented by particular agents and institutions. It has its ideologues, but the ideologues are themselves dispersed across quite diferent ideological formations and contexts; its tenets work through accretion and co-optation in practice more oten than through the application of a irm line of reasoning; its coherence is as much in its decentered character as in its institutional centerings, as much in what is implied and what is concealed or misrepresented as in what is stated. Because of this pervasive difusion of the neoliberal ideology, the struggle to articulate it is not merely in what is regarded as political and economic common-sense and pragmatism, but within the very grain of subjectivity and selfformation and in penetrating the profusion of acts, perceptions, communications, and afects that constitute everyday life. For want of a better phrase, I think of this intellectual efort as attempting to put into relief the neoliberal lifeworld of the pres464 ent (with an explicitly political inlection on the Husserlian Lebenswelt, a totality of perception, experience, and expression)—which seems so natural and obvious as to be nearly impervious to coherent articulation, only amenable to piecemeal and fragmented noting. By its foregrounding of startling contradictions and disafections, this crisis has enabled—perhaps only momentarily—the possibility of saying and listening in which some articulation of the coherence of our neoliberal lifeworld seems incumbent. It will not be long before all of it is irmly dismissed as wistful academicism, another narrowly letist game of intellectuals building castles in the air, clever auto-perpetuation of critical discourse structures; perhaps it is all already being thus dismissed in various circles. Of course, the 2007-08 crisis and consequent austerity regimes and disinvestments have not been singularly focalized for such articulation; that would be an over-determination of this crisis and an under-determination of both the neoliberal lifeworld and critical perspicacity. But in this context, various prior formulations of the neoliberal lifeworld have seemed to come together. Classical precepts of self and property from Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche have been linked to relatively recent relections on the difusion of neoliberalism à la the crisis—calling upon, for example, the situationists’ and especially Henri Lefebvre’s characterization of everyday life and the need to transform it; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, a study of structuring psychoanalysis for capitalist conformity; Michel Foucault’s 1978-79 lectures on neoliberal governmentality, which are also a history of the crisis of liberalism; Christian Marazzi’s work from the 1990s on communicative manipulation as the bedrock of inancialization; or Randy Martin’s observations on inancialization infused into domestic economies of daily life. With the 2007-08 inancial crisis and austerity measures in view, a range of relections on various aspects of the neoliberal lifeworld that draw upon those and, importantly, speak to each other have appeared; stitching together the fragmentary, and the difuse, and the unspoken, and the misdirected to—gradually and intercommunicatively, through the compressed SUMAN G UPTA | CRISIS OF THE N OVEL AND THE N OVEL OF CRISIS undertaking from various directions—express the coherence of this lifeworld. he efort of articulation is found in the cross-currents between, rather than simply in the discrete formulations of, such studies as Mark Fisher’s weaving through numerous cultural products that naturalize an account of capitalist realism; Maurizio Lazzarato’s exploration of an ethics of indebtedness that moulds subjectivity and intersubjectivity; Frédéric Lordon on concepts of desire and fulillment systematized to make subjects of capitalism compliant; Philip Mirowski’s description of a plethora of everyday life experiences that serve four broad neoliberal tenets (see Chapter 3); Max Haiven’s depiction of the manner in which the inancial sector is now woven into the informal sphere of social and cultural life; Marnie Holborow on the presence of neoliberalism in various levels of language usage rather than as a coherent discourse—to mention but a tiny number, which I happen to have recently read, amidst an oceanic low of such analyses. If these studies are not dismissed as auto-constructions of empty intellectual discourse, castles in the air, but are instead viewed as searching articulations of the 465 contemporary world with worldly concern, then the novel cannot be outside their remit. If these are valid apprehensions radiating out of the 2007-08 inancial crisis, in some sense ‘crisis thinking’ amidst a neoliberal lifeworld, then all novels of our time and within this world are ‘crisis iction’—instead of speaking of the contemporary novel we might as well speak of the crisis novel. We do not need to look for the crisis being mentioned directly or tangentially in novels. he infusion of neoliberalism in the contemporary lifeworld, within the grain of subjectivity and everyday life, within ordinary language usage and mediated narrative structures, leaves the contemporary novel with no outside—no more than the critical putting-into-perspective of the neoliberal lifeworld can claim to be outside. he very practice of writing and reading, the very structures of production and circulation, the very themes and issues that can be identiied as of-this-world in novels are within the embrace of neoliberalism—and the novel is found within or against its grain. his would mean not looking to the novel to tell us about the crisis, but placing the novel within the matrix of the neoliberal lifeworld—by attention to the novel’s production and circulation and reception, its textual and paratextual content as well as its textual associations, its assimilations from and manifestation within linguistic and translational ields, its commodity form and its inward turns. 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