Vincent Brown and John Wayne

Perhaps this wouldn’t have struck me as so very important not long ago: but since I just finished read Vincent Brown’s remarkable book The Reaper's Garden, I noticed when John Wayne, not a half-hour into The Searchers, shoots the eyes out of a dead Comanche’s head—because they believe such desecration will cause the spirit to wander forever, he says. This, I think, is exactly what Brown was talking about. Mortuary politics indeed.

Lewis - Main Currents

Lewis, Gordon K. Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in Its Ideological Aspects, 1492-1900. Johns Hopkins, 1983.

One can object on several counts to Lewis’s book: his willingness to speculate about how ‘they must have felt;’ his casual use of the term ‘Asiatic;’ his sweeping and sometimes forced geo-historical comparisons. His prose often betrays him—sentences will occasionally be either meaningless or nearly tautological. He gives a degree of credence to the psychological dependency complex that is, to me, mystifying. (But what do I know?). His marxisant framework is married uncomfortably to a certain kind of idealist history of ideas. Lewis’s understanding of nationalism is highly teleological. He can sensibly point out that the legacy of slavery and colonialism were important for the development of nationalism in the Caribbean, but only in contrast to “the straightforward, linear character of European nationalism” (239). More seriously, although he says, strikingly, that “in a very real sense, the history of the Caribbean slave regime is the history of the sexual exploitation of the black woman” (232), it is as an aside, “a separate and final note.” Even inside the marxisant framework of ‘ideology,’ which allows him to discuss much that falls outside the purview of conventional intellectual history, he is not yet able to put gender at the center of his analysis in the same way that he puts class and race, though he is clearly aware that he somehow should.

To my mind the greatest fault of Main Currents in Caribbean Thought is that the introduction and the conclusion give only a very impoverished sense of the empirical richness of the text. Consider the important and telling examples of abolitionism and nationalism. In his conclusion, Lewis summarizes his findings on anti-slavery as an ideology by saying that it was “intrinsically revolutionary to the degree that it was essentially an ideology of protest on the part of the Caribbean masses...against an exploitative economic and political system seeking to justify itself in terms of a pseudoscientific doctrine of race” (323). The problem with this is that he has, over 150 pages, shown that most actual resistance against slavery was in no sense a “protest” against any kind of “exploitative economic and political system.” Rather, the various modes of slave resistance were generally of much more immediate and reactive nature. Revolts occurred when labor was especially hard, punishment especially cruel. Maroon communities (and here Lewis seems to largely be following Mintz and Price) were not intrinsically anti-slavery in the abstract, but would certainly fight to bloody death to avoid themselves being re-enslaved. In Jamaica in particular, the maroons established their safety and autonomy from the plantation system in part by agreeing to hunt down runaway slaves.

Contemporary research, above all in the French context, but also the British, would have tied abolitionism into imperialism much more closely. The conclusion says nothing about this connection. But Lewis has read Eric Williams, and if he doesn’t give the kind of attention to Haiti’s republicanism that one would today, he is nonetheless perfectly aware and articulate, in his discussion of Victor Schoelcher (213-216), about the way in which abolition generally went hand-in-hand with the ideology of Empire. In the British context as well, Lewis is clear that abolitionism in now sense entailed the dissolution of imperial control. Desire for independence (cast in terms of nation or not) was at first very much a thing of the planter class. The complex interaction and interference of anti-slavery, imperialism and nationalism comes out admirably in the body of Lewis’s text—but not in his summary of the work he’s done.

In the end, the documentary richness of Main Currents of Caribbean Thought saves the book from its shortcomings and the occasional awkwardness of construction. The simple fact is that the elites of various parts of the Caribbean wrote a great deal about themselves and their place in the world. If a lower percentage of the Caribbean population was literate and articulate, this does not mean that they had no thoughts, or that their way of making sense of the world wasn’t complicated and isn’t in need of explication (to use Rancière’s dirty word). Lewis’s work has the great merit of actually discussing some of the large amount of printed material that is available, and not shying away from thinking about how the lives of those with no access to printed voice would have effected and contributed to it. He takes the Caribbean seriously as its own region, with a certain coherence based on a broadly shared experience of slavery and colonialism. He even, in a somewhat odd and melancholy way, sees hope in the Caribbean past, compared to the US one: “In American society, money ‘talks’; in Caribbean society, money ‘whitens.’ If racial democracy is to survive anywhere in the twentieth century, then, it probably stands its best chance in the Caribbean” (10).

Cesaire and postwar France

Césaire, Aimé. Discours sur le colonialisme. Présence Africaine, 1989. [1950?]

Reading Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme (1950) has affirmed my belief that products of the post-war Parisian intelligentsia need very much to be contextualized. I bought my copy of Césaire’s famous pamphlet used; they had several copies, probably it had been assigned in a class. The library has a similar edition. The original date of publication isn’t even to be found anywhere (instead we get a 1989 Présence Africaine copyright). The austerity of this edition should be compared to the more recent English-language translation, which has a flashy cover and an introduction.

This is an excellent opportunity to practice what I have recently come to think of as one of the main techniques, or perhaps the central imperative, of contextual intellectual history: to push back down into the muck of context any text that attempts to transcend the circumstances of its production and reception. One may say, generously, that it is only by assiduously contextualizing that it is possible to see the true value of any given work; the true value meaning the degree to which it is able to escape from its context. Put in more Lacaprian terms: certain texts resist the reader more than others, these are the texts to which we return, which challenge us—which are valuable. I’m a bit suspicious of this rarely-articulated valorization of transcendence and resistance.

At any rate, to Césaire. In 1950 Césaire was a member of the PCF, and this to me is the loudest voice in the Discours. His position is difficult, because he wants to demonstrate both the utter bankruptcy of European civilization, but also to save certain elements of it. This is, I think, typical both of the French-educated anti-colonialists of this period, and also for the most part of the Communists. Colonialism and racism aren’t put in a causal relationship here, as far as I can tell, but they are both barbarous; it is by way of the bridge-head of barbarism provided by colonial culture that racism enters Europe at its very heart, and leads, ultimately, to Hitler. Colonialism is a poison at the heart of European civilization, which has rendered it weak and decadent.

In a remarkable feat of historical parallelism, Césaire argues that just as Rome ultimately opened its gates to barbarians by destroying all the other civilizations around it, so Europe is failing because it has so relentlessly snuffed out the civilizations around it. I’m paraphrasing here, but the language of civilization, Europe, decadence, barbarism, poison...this is all very much Césaire’s. In the final pages, Césaire asserts that in order to save itself, Europe must put everything it has in the service of the proletariat Revolution that is in process in the areas it previously colonized. Save itself from what?

Et alors, je le demande: qu’a-t-elle fait d’autre, l’Europe bourgeoise? Elle a sapé les civilisations, détruit les patries, ruiné les nationalités, extirpé ‘la racine de diversité.’ Plus de digue. Plus de boulevard. L’heure est arrivée du Barbare. Du Barbare moderne. L’heure américaine. Violence, démesure, gaspillage, mercantilisme, bluff, grégarisme, la bêtise, la vulgarité, le désordre. (57)

That’s quite a list. So it’s the Americans, as the new avatars of capital, that must now be fought. Indeed, in the next lines we go directly from Wilson being asked what America will do now that it is about to control the world (in 1913!), to Truman’s generous offers of assistance to a ruined Europe. There’s a certain amount of controversy in the historiography right now about Truman, the Marshall plan, and American involvement in Europe in the postwar period. Did the Marshall plan really restart the European economy? In what sense? There is evidence that well before American capital began to flow into Europe, things had begun to get better—so perhaps it is hope that the US imported, before dollars? The relationship between hope and money is not, I think, likely to be understood soon, though perhaps closer attention to 1945-1955 in Europe isn’t a bad way of looking into it. This aside, it is possible to look, without much trouble, at the front pages of L’Humanité and other leftist newspapers in this period, and you’ll find plenty of anti-American vitriole. Graphs demonstrating how basic foodstuffs are becoming more expensive as a result of the Marshall plan, which was broadly accused of being a form of colonialism—after all, the story would go, we Europeans certainly know what economic domination looks like, having practiced it for long enough. So in this sense Césaire isn’t stepping very far from the PCF platform.

Much of the Discours is taken up by quotes or critiques of various writers, from Renan to Roger Caillois. (The former more or less equals Hitler, for Césaire—I wonder if Said draws much on Césaire for his treatment of Renan in Orientalism? Probably not). The critique of Caillois is interesting for several reasons, and a nice way to discuss the smallness of the Parisian world. Caillois is exactly the same age as Césaire, and also attended the lycée Louis-le-grand, though they may not have overlapped there. Caillois, in the 1930s, was a student of the cutting edge of academic ethnography in France (Dumézil, Mauss), and also (not coincidentally) with certain offshoots of the Surrealist camp. He was involved with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris in the creation of the short-lived Collège de sociologie. He was a hard-left anti-fascist, but (especially like Bataille) strange and scary, interested in limit experiences. During the war, Caillois goes to Argentina. He becomes something of a literary power-broker after the war, and is instrumental in bringing various South American writers to the attention of Paris, most notably Borges. But he also, after the war, repudiates the Communism of his younger years. In 1951, he published a pamphlet called Description du marxisme, that attacked Marxist dogmas of various kinds, generally accused it of being incoherent and, as a description of social reality, simply rendered obsolete by more recent sociological work. The young Roland Barthes wrote two extremely negative reviews of the booklet in leftist papers. (Barthes, by the by, may actually have been at Louis-le-Grand at the same time as Césaire).

So if one asks why it is that Césaire devotes 7 pages of a 60 page pamphlet to Caillois, we can perhaps respond by putting the Discours next to the broader policy of hard-left French intellectuals in the postwar of reflexively and viciously attacking anyone who criticized Marxism as a way of understanding the world. There are shades here—not everyone is actually PCF, and people still have differing views about what things are like in the USSR, but we can divide the great mass of the French intelligentsia in the years just after the war between the harder left (Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror) for whom the historical destiny of the Soviet Union must be defended unconditionally, and the softer left, for whom, at the very least, one can safely speak of the moral equivalency of the USA and the Soviet Union (Barthes, and others). It is this last position, really, that Tony Judt, for instance, is so intent on overturning. Cesaire should really be seen in terms of this debate, and his critique of colonialism should be seen as involved, at least instrumentally, with the ‘larger’ debate about Revolution and the Proletariat (both emphatically capitalized) going at this time.

Capitalism & Slavery

Today was another classic: Capitalism & Slavery by Eric Williams. While I’ve recently started to buy and annotate for myself a number of books, there’s occasionally a certain pleasure in using a venerable old library copy. Finding annotations from other people can be irritating, but I try to imagine it as a pale successor of medieval marginal commentary. This book has notes from two clearly identifiable hands: one scrawling in Spanish, the other neat and tall in English, making careful stars and boxes, occasionally writing ‘thesis’ next to things.

I can see why people might get excited about this book. It’s a satisfyingly Marxist account of slavery without being, I think, too abstract or simplifying things. So from the right, one can object that it over-emphasizes ‘capital’ and that it denigrates the genuinely moral sources of abolitionism (I don’t think, actually, that it does either). From what I guess we should call the contemporary left, one can object that it systematically subordinates racial factors to economic ones (it does). And also that it contains sentences such as: “The ‘horrors’ of the Middle Passage have been exaggerated” (34). I myself was shocked by the degree to which Williams assimilates the indentured servitude of whites in the early phases of British colonial development and the enslavement of blacks. His argument depends on the essentially economic aspects of these two situations, which are of course juridical radically different. I doubt that today anyone would choose to compare the deceptive strategies of recruiters (spirits, they were called) in London and the slave factories of the African coast, or the poor berthing conditions of both indentured servants and slaves. I’d be better able to evaluate all this if I had more empirical knowledge. At any rate, this kind of economism (no doubt even then played up by Williams for rhetorical effect) is no longer possible now that we’ve become ‘serious’ about experience as a category of analysis.

The central argument of the book is that slavery was in every sense an essential product of the mercantilist system of the 17^th and early 18^th centuries. Slave labor was preferred to nominally free labor because in the specific place and time of the sugar islands in the later 17^th century, it turned a profit. The particular reasons are complex, and have to do with various forms of competition, but the main narrative is that these islands became, for the British, less and less profitable. Eventually, the new industrial economy developing in Britain itself came to practice and then demands the institutions of free trade. The West Indies retained great political power as a result of their spectacular wealth and so continued to enforce their monopolies long after they had ceased to be genuinely advantageous to anyone but the island planters. British capital—now invested in industry and increasingly fluid trade—attacked slavery both because this institution was more valuable to other imperial powers than to Britain, and as a way to undermine the disproportionate and anachronistic power of the West Indians. Without denying the genuine moral fervor of at least a few abolitionists, Williams can none the less assert that it was always and only when the most powerful capitalist factions found a use in it that their rhetoric had any traction in public opinion.

What is to me methodologically interesting about the way Williams put together his argument is the faith it demonstrates in the ability of larger historical trends to deliver intelligibility in the face of genuine local confusion and conflict. There is no such thing, in Williams’ book, as a single unitary ‘capital.’ There are just capitalists, all striving to make the best profit they can with whatever resources are at their disposal. That’s all the ideology anyone in his book needs. In what I suppose is classic Marxist form, the seething mess of history only takes on meaning retrospectively, and even then, much is lost or rendered insignificant. I have to wonder if there’s something about the way history is written today which simply doesn’t allow the existence of such a thing as a historiographically insignificant fact. It may be that there isn’t a place for it any particular book, but each little fragment fits, somehow, into a larger synchronic system. The message of Marxist historicism would be, then, that it’s only later on going to be possible to see what matters and what doesn’t—but that some of it will retrospectively turn out to be irrelevant. Here I wonder if I’m letting contemporary Lacanian post-Marxism sneak into my reading of the implications of Williams’ kind of work.

Greenblatt

This morning I finished Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning. I had intended to move through it fairly rapidly. Instead, I ended up reading it with some care, savoring the quotations (especially, in retrospect, Spencer) and taking way too long with the thing. The construction of the book was impressive. I suppose that it was out of the ordinary in 1980 to mention Clifford Geertz as a methodological inspiration for a book on Renaissance literature, but discounting this, Greenblatt restrains himself from ‘theory’ for the whole, wonderful, first chapter. The second chapter, ‘the word of god in the age of mechanical reproduction’ makes elegant mention of Foucault, Freud and Benjamin in the space of ten pages. (Of course, the name of the chapter is Benjamin: can it be anything but a profound coincidence that ‘word of god’ and ‘work of art’ are so sonically similar?) Later in the book we get casual references to Lacan and Deleuze. The ease of all this is pleasant. Lacan’s Rome discourse turns out to be great for reading Shakespeare, while Deleuze is only there to remind us that repetition itself is difference.

It is hard to put myself in a place where the story he tells of individuality molded and fashioned at every turn not so much by itself as by Power is a depressing or discouraging one. Perhaps it’s too familiar.

Still, the thing passes the first test for me of a good scholarly work on literature: it makes me think I should read more Elizabethan literature. Especially Spencer and Marlow. Ever since, some time ago, I read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, I’ve had in the back of my head that Foxe and some of the other early protestants would be fascinating. No doubt a crazy idea, that the texts themselves would disabuse me of fast. At any rate, I understand now why people were excited by ‘New Historicism:’ it could claim this book as its own.

Story of the New

Jameson, Frederic. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. Verso, 2002.

I have just finished a rather quick reading of Frederic Jameson’s A Singular Modernity (2002). Modernity and modernism aren’t terms that I’m especially committed to or that even excite me much, so it perhaps isn’t surprising that the book didn’t move me deeply. Still, it’s almost always worth reading Jameson. There are excellent commentaries here on Foucault, de Man and Althusser, as well as the relationship between Weber and Lukacs. Lots of Heidegger. Forced to summarize, I’d say that the main point of the book is that ‘modernity’ and also ‘modernism’ should be understood as narratives rather than concepts. They are also, to be sure, empirically existing historical realities. However, so many different things fall under these names that one cannot, according to Jameson, come to an empirical finding about their common traits. Rather, they are ways of narrativizing, and as such are always available. Indeed, the larger ‘political’ point seems to me that we (meaning, one supposes, progressive people of the world) should continue to fight to establish our own definitions of modernity, and consequently modernism, over and against the current hegemonic definition which revolves largely around the market.

What I appreciate about this is the effort made to conceptualize the various temporalities as mutually interdependent. The commonsense view might have it that the past determines the present to a certain degree, which itself determines the future within certain limits. Not so. Since the meaning of the past always depends on the narrative within which it is framed, and this narrative, made though it is in the present, always betrays a certain attitude towards the future, we can see that none of the temporal divisions (this can’t be the right way to say it) makes sense without the others. I find this view congenial—also, to a certain degree, commonsensical. It meshes well with the over-theorized temporalities of Gary Wilder’s talk, but seems somehow less self-concerned.

Probably this will go on my syllabus of ‘historical approaches to the literary’ because indeed it is extremely sensitive to these issues. Perhaps I’ll read some of Jameson’s more recent stuff.

stack of (mostly) caribbean books

The holidays have been a long break from writing.

I’ve completed a sort of scatter-shot primmer in Caribbean historiography. It was just as well to start with Silvio Torres-Saillant. If I’d left him for the end, I don’t think I’d ever have gotten through. After STS, I read what I should have read two years ago, C.L.R. James’ classic Black Jacobins. And I discovered that James, in 1938, said virtually every conceptually interesting thing that Torres-Saillant says in 2006. It’s true that in James they’re tucked into a page-long preface, or simply mentioned here or there. But still.

After James I sat down and read through Laurent Dubois’s A Colony of Citizens (2004), and have just now finished Gary Wilder’s The French Imperial Nation-State (2005).: two excellent and radically different books. I won’t say much here about Dubois, except that it’s basically social history. I mean by this that it is interested above all to document the lives of people-in-general, to understand the limits placed on them by their societies and times, and the possibilities they forced open. The conceptual nit-picks for me have to do with what ‘opening a possibility’ could possibly mean. If you can do something, it was possible, right? Agency is tricky. I am, broadly speaking, convinced that the French revolution would not have been the same if the slaves of San Domingue and Guadeloupe (among others) had stayed in their place. These revolutions did indeed force metropolitan politicians to take stands on racial and economic issues they’d rather have avoided. With James in 1938, with Dubois in 2004, the story of the French Revolution (here I’ll allow the majuscule) can not be told militarily, economically, politically, philosophically, without the Caribbean.

Gary Wilder’s book was not less convincing, in what I took to be its main argument. But Wilder (and this was obvious from the lecture I attended a few months ago) is a compulsive over-theorizer. He has a solid historical argument. He sets it out in a way that is recognizably ‘intellectual history’—though he rejects the term—even turning to Dominick Lacapra for what seems to me to be his most concrete and useful methodological moves. Having read the book, I’d say that my summary of his summary of it leaves out quite a lot.

The French Empire in the years after WWI had its own logic. It wasn’t a simple betrayal of some idea republicanism, rather, a complex and contradictory (but none the less functional) logic that Wilder calls colonial humanism developed as the ideology of the interwar Empire. This logic (an overused designation, I think, that almost never means more than a way of talking and explaining things to one’s self) put universalist Republicanism together with particularist ethnography. The Négritude ‘cohort’ set its cultural project in motion as an immanent critique of this discourse, and so Négritude cannot be understood apart from colonial humanism. If we see Césaire, Dumas and Senghor as (in the Lacaprian formulation) acting out and working through colonial humanism, then we can begin to asses their real failures and successes both in the interwar and after 1945. All this seems eminently reasonable to me, if a little jargon soaked.

[An aside: Clive Bell tosses off the witticism in his Proust book, that after the Great War, the Troisième République has come to seem more and more like the Troisième Empire. One of the things that bothered me the most about Wilder’s book was his assumption that some kind of specifically republican ideology must always have been governing the French during the 19^th century. Perhaps Bell’s belle-lettristic observation is not so far from the truth about the essentially imperial, rather than republican, nature of the interwar French state? At any rate, I think it would be interesting to look back at the way Sorel treats imperial holdings as a sort of exterior quarantine for metropolitan France’s old institutions—especially the church.]

I don’t especially mind cutting through the jungle of critical theory in which Wilder shrouds his actual ideas. But I’m not so happy with what kind of critical theory Négritude turns out to have been. Since it was placed in a conflicted situation, it insists on occupying various conflicting positions. Wilder argues for seeing Négritude as part of the broader trend of anti-liberal modernisms that flourishes starting in 1889—children of Bergson, really—and this seems exactly right to me. But you can’t just say that you’re going to be both universal and particular, both elite and popular, both essentialist/authentic and cosmopolitan/déraciné. It may be that individuals, historically, are forced to occupy both sides of an impossible divide. But the expression of this impossible situation does not constitute a solution, nor even a critical theory of it. I am not satisfied by saying that Césaire’s Cahier ‘enacted’ the various double-binds of the elite, educated class of ‘colonized.’ It does indeed do that, it may indeed thereby be a great poem, and may be powerful—but Wilder isn’t able, as far as I can tell, to argue that this text or any other do more than stage a certain problem. That just isn’t enough. Négritude isn’t thereby set apart from the horde of other illiberal antimodernisms that ‘solved’ the problems of modernity. It seems to me that since these problems are so great, so systemic, so integral to any posing of the question, that we’ve set the bar awfully low for solutions.

I’ve gone on long enough about this book. I’ll probably write something more substantial and official later. Before I do that, I’ll read Wilder’s article about Fanon and Césaire, in which he may talk more about this stuff. Next I think I’ll tackle another book that I’ve already read part of: Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic. I only own it because I found its whole scholarly paradigm morally repugnant when I first looked at it. Books rarely make me feel like that.

Nose back to the grindstone!

torres-saillant, pt 2

Having finished Torres-Saillant, what I can say is that I do not feel that the book is a performance of what it says ought to be done. That is, it does not, to me, demonstrate any remarkable degree of ‘epistemological independence’ from Western paradigms. Perhaps the problem is that I don’t know what these books usually look like. But it seems to me that Torres-Saillant, in the name of a practical, useful history, ties Caribbean thought entirely into reaction to European happenings. The metaphor he wishes above all the resuscitate is the link between Caliban and the ‘Caribbean mind.’ Torres-Saillant himself is tied deeply into standard Western academic discourse—even insisting on things like epistemology and ontology is already, I should think, committing oneself in this regard. Throughout he talks about the material well-being of people, economic and political dependency, this kind of thing. Yet he’s deeply concerned about what, whose, words one uses. He doesn’t, as far as I can tell, really discuss how the words fit into the material world, which is always the problem, after all.

His analysis of the fate of Caribbean-specific discourse in the academy, its subsumption into postcolonial theory, is quite interesting. But I can help finding it impressionistic and partial—in a word, under-theorized. I don’t think it’s wrong, but I would love to see a more concrete sociological analysis.

This book as anyway had the effect of getting me to sit down and start to read A Thousand Plateaus. (Torres-Saillant uses variants of ‘rhizome,’ including the hideous ‘rhizomatically’ repeatedly, despite his attacks on Deleuzianism). Having worked at ‘contemporary theory’ for a semester, I must say that at least the first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus reads brilliantly. It makes Badiou seem like a dried-up old prune. I can see why so many blogs are names after deleuzianisms. Perhaps more on this later.

At any rate, An Intellectual History of the Caribbean, which ought to have been called a historiography, was frustrating and therefore stimulating. I’ll work backwards now and see what else is on offer.

torres-saillant

Here is C.A. Bayly on intellectual history, from his 2004 The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914, which I have been reading at a more or less sedate pace:

“The history of political and social thought in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is an exceptionally vibrant area of study. But is suffers from two major weaknesses. First, many intellectual historians continue to equivocate on the question of how to relate intellectual history to social and political history, for the good reason that this is an enormously difficult enterprise. Secondly, the history of political thought remains resolutely centered on Europe and North America. If the rest of the world is considered at all, historians tend to assume that there occurred a relatively simple process of diffusion in which the doctrines of Western thinkers were slowly spread across the world to those elite members of non-European societies who knew European languages.” (284-5)

His criticisms are entirely just, and I think could be extended to less ‘vibrant’ areas of study. He says historians of science tend to do a better job—I wonder which ones I should be reading. I’ve been meaning to read the issue of MIH on south asia to which he contributed, perhaps I’ll get to it soon. The problem is obvious: it’s hard enough to have responsible knowledge of one small part of the world—it’s more than twice as hard for two parts of the world. This is, of course, no excuse.

So I’m making a start: the Caribbean. I’ve started my reading somewhat arbitrarily—An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (2006) by Silvio Torres-Saillant. I chose it because it was recalled, so...time to get reading. So far I’ve finished the lengthy introduction only, but it’s good to pause and reflect.

The Caribbean may be taken as an intellectual unity as well as a geographic one, Torres-Saillant asserts, and as such it ought to be regarded as a producer of theoretical, universalizable knowledge just as much as Europe. I’m not in a position to say whether or not the Caribbean presents the observer with any kind of genuine unity, but if Europe is to be taken as a unit, it’s hard to imagine that the Caribbean shouldn’t be. Similarly, when you put it the way he does, of course Caribbean intellectuals should have discursive access to the universal. Of course it seems wrong that the Caribbean may be measured by a European yard-stick, but not the other way around. Yet, I read this book, and what am I doing? I’m comparing the ideas and tropes he writes about with those that are more familiar to me. Indeed, the claim of the particular to universal validity is something I’ve been reading a great deal about this semester—for Laclau and Rancière at least it’s a crucial part of what politics is about. So already I’m measuring the non-European according to the European, but what else can I do if the European is mostly what I know?

Now, one answer to how Torres-Saillant thinks about this is suggested by which academics he castigates. He objects that Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy are insufficiently dedicated to their roots (i’m not sure I have a better name for it) as West Indians—insufficiently committed to the project of representing their homelands accurately to the rest of the world (41-42). Now, I’ll admit to not knowing that either of these scholars was ‘from’ the West Indies. I’ll also point out that in the above paragraph, I lumped together Laclau with Rancière, even though Laclau is originally ‘from’ South America. Now he’s a European, as far as his books are concerned. Isn’t this the whole problem? That it actually is possible for these people to appear, to me for instance, simply as any other academic would? This is bad, says Torres-Saillant, for the Caribbean.

Much of the argument he presents against postcolonial theory is the same as the common critique of potstructuralism that one finds many places now—see Peter Hall’s recent piece in boundary 2—which boils down to a charge of political uselessness. Which is odd for a number of reasons. Torres-Saillant’s version of this argues that in the 1960s, the Caribbean was well represented as a source of theory in the broader world, and that now Caribbean writers must subsume themselves into a postcoloniality that is dominated by French authors—they are examples of a genuine universality, nothing more. Torres-Saillant sees this coincide with the academic study of Caribbean music. He’s fairly scathing about this: music has replaced political thought because the energy for political change is gone. The ‘Musical turn’ is a sign of political hopelessness.

Torres-Saillant’s approach concerns me in that it seems actually to be moving backwards in terms of historiography. He talks about ‘the Caribbean mind,’ and justifies his project broadly as the presentation of globally useful (inspirational) knowledge in dark times. That is, he essentializes and instrumentalizes his subject. No doubt I’m being unfair, and there is an obvious polemical purpose in these strategies.

I’ve left out important parts of his argument in the above discussion, mostly because the proof of them will be in how they play out over the remaining 200 pages of the book. It’s at any rate exciting for me to plunge into relatively new topics.

Lukacs: The Theory of the Novel

Today I read Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel. It’s a fascinating book. I’d started it some time ago in an airport (because it’s slender and light), which was a terrible idea. I always wonder, when I like one part of a book like this better than other parts, if it’s an artifact of my attentiveness or energy while reading rather than the text itself. In this case, though, I’m fairly certain that it isn’t. I like the last chapter of the first part best. It was breathtaking—dense, energetic, captivating. The first chapters were a warm-up, and the whole last part is typological, which bores me pretty badly. Of course I’m not ready to give any kind of broad summary—I don’t think it’s that kind of book. But three things to point out.

First—in the preface, written in 1961, he talks about how his “conception of social reality was at that time [circa 1914] strongly influenced by Sorel” (18). The index (which is actually pretty good) gives this as Albert Sorel. This is obviously wrong—it’s my guy, his cousin Georges. I’ve seen this before: in Compagnon’s Brunetiere book, for instance, there was a similar mistake in the index. In that case, I think it really is minor. Compagnon certainly knows the difference, it’s just a confusion on the part of whoever did the copy-editing, the reference is anyway an aside, nothing to do with the main line of discussion. (I realize I’ve fallen to quibbling over index entries) Lukacs is different. Sorel’s influence in the period was great, and if it isn’t surprising that Marxists in the 1930s and later (Sartre, say, very influentially in 1961) want to disown him—well, it’s still a politically motivated rewriting of history. Indeed, later on in The Theory of the Novel, Lukacs says things that to me echo a Sorelian understanding of the structure of description as such: “the objectivity of the novel is the mature man’s knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that, without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality” (88). I would make the argument that this is Sorel’s understanding of the relation of social description (meaning) to social reality. Lukacs, then, is translating into the literary-philosophical sphere the epistemological moves Sorel made regarding social science. Of course, even wikipedia mentions that Lukacs knew Sorel. I should get a good secondary source on Lukacs. It’s fascinating. I’ve no choice now but to read History and Class Consciousness next.

Number two very fast: Brownstein’s argument about the novel enacting the becoming of the heroine—the convergence of realism and idealism (empirical woman and feminine ideal) in the body of the heroine—finds a real precursor here, “the inner form of the novel has been understood as the process of the problematic individual’s journeying towards himself” (80). Now, it’s quite possible that B actually cites L, or more likely, that there’s a much larger critical tradition making this observation. I’ve returned her book to the library, or I’d look. Anyway, naive me was surprised.

Last, having to do with something I wish I’d put in my paper on Ranciere. David Bell, in a recent essay on Rancière, uses the word ‘tact’ to describe his ability to balance philosophical generalization and historical specificity (or something to that effect). Lukacs uses the same word—or the translator does—to describe the novel’s balancing act between various impossible completenesses. Zizek also is obsessed with politesse, which is almost the same thing as tact. I guess it’s interesting because it is a widespread, totally common phenomenon of a code of behavior with sometimes strict enforcement methods, which absolutely cannot be expressed or codified. It’s a sub-legal legal order. I suppose Norbert Elias would have a thing or two to say about manners—but tact is a bit different. Hmm. To consider, at any rate.

becoming a heroine

Brownstein, Rachel. Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. [1982]

Since I’m apparently engaged in trying to bring it back, I thought it would be good to read some ‘personal criticism.’ To that end: Rachel Brownstein’s Becoming a Heroine which is more or less the same age as I am. Brownstein’s basic argument is that the English novel ‘in the Richardsonian tradition’ takes the form of an empirical female struggling to become the ideal woman—a heroine. In Clarissa, a foundational case for Browstein, there is a long (very long) struggle, which ends in death, sealing Clarissa into her idealized status. More often, the story ends with a perfect marriage—but it’s the same story. Brownstein’s point is that ‘we’ can learn about the crippling dynamic of ideal and reality that makes up the ideology of gender (she doesn’t put it quite like that) in the contemporary world, by indulging ourselves and reading these novels. Indeed, the point is to take seriously the desire that many women apparently have to read these ‘serious’ novels. What do these novels do? They teach the reader about how to live up to—or at least struggle toward—the ideal. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is a privileged example for Brownstein because in her reading of the final lines, there is an explicit disavowal of the narrativized ideal—Dorothea does not achieve apotheosis, but rather splits like a river at its delta, and allows her influence to reach the wider social world in a thousand small ways. She escapes the fate of the heroine, suggests Brownstein, and becomes a human. Brownstein’s book is large, so I’ve just picked out a few examples. Virginia Woolf’s Ms. Dalloway also has a special status for her—the tradition meditating on itself.

I enjoyed reading Becoming a Heroine. The early 1980s really were a different time. The book should be filed under reader-response as well as personal criticism. The problem is that the reader—and I know this is a trite objection—really is only Rachel Brownstein. If we allow Brownstein’s ‘women’ any larger meaning, then to my mind it becomes essentializing and useless very quickly. (Today, it seems to me, we’re suspicious of attempts to speak for others, even housewives). However, as an analysis of a person reading, I think there’s really not a great deal to object to. In a way it’s more honest than, for instance, Iser’s phenomenological analysis. One of my colleagues has been talking a great deal recently about ‘the dialogic mode’ of criticism—it seems a perfect way of differentiating Brownstein and Iser. She is dialogic, that is, she asks: I read it like this, do you read it this way too? Iser has no such questions.

Also, and no doubt there are good ideological reasons for this, I can’t help but be surprised that Brownstein isn’t more focused on professional self-awareness. She is so careful (it’s a bit too clean for me, actually) about setting out how her father’s ideal of womanhood influenced her choice of career—why not more reflexivity about graduate school? I can see many problems there. Not least that Brownstein positions herself as non-academic.

I’m glad to have looked at this book, though I need not to get caught in the 1980s. Perhaps they could be a small specialty of mine? One of my sub-subfields?

Prendergast on Sainte-Beuve

C. Prendergast, The classic : Sainte-Beuve and the nineteenth-century culture wars, (Oxford ; New York, 2007).

Christopher Prendergast’s exploration of Sainte-Beuve’s defense of ‘the classic’ (le classique) meanders across the whole middle of the 19^th century in an attempt to provide a genuine multi-layered contextualization of its subject—in a certain sense a single essay from October of 1850, “Qu’est-ce qu’un classique?” Prendergast’s ‘provocations’ are first Marcel Proust, whose famous essay makes it difficult these days to take Sainte-Beuve’s side in anything, and Renée Welleck’s somewhat remarkable claim in his History of Criticism that Sainte-Beuve has a crucial position in not just the history of literary criticism, but intellectual history in general.

Prendergast takes a broadly thematic approach in his contextualization, with chapters on comparative philology, Goethean cosmopolitanism, Romantic historiography, mass culture, and then various issues around interpretations of antiquity and the middle ages in 19^th century culture. On any of these issues, he is fascinating and informative. His pages on Renan, for instance, are genuinely useful and remarkable. The scholarship is impressive and sustained, but to my eye oddly lopsided.

On the question of Proust, Prendergast is wonderful and understated. Proust’s engagement with Sainte-Beuve [which i’m tired of writing—hereafter: SB] is not the subject of the book, but by the end, I at least, came to feel that Proust’s antipathy for the earlier critic may have been the result of proximity—that is, a factional battle rather than an inter-party one. I’ll be honest and admit to having only flipped through Contre Sainte-Beuve. But I’ve heard the arguments presented several times, and the novel I know a little bit. Proust sounds just like Sainte-Beuve! Proust condemns him for his obsession with literary mediocrity, yet one of the most attractive things about Proust’s own work is the intensity with which he observes and renders metaphysical the most mundane and ordinary objects. That is, just as SB makes the médiocre the measure of a period, so for Proust the ordinary object unlocks, or triggers, the most important parts of spiritual life. Prendergast leaves all this unsaid, but I think he must be aware of it. For instance, he comes back several times to SB’s somewhat odd references to literary works and military battles as though they were both oeuvres in the same way. The narrator of the Recherche has a very similar attitude. (As an aside, I should look in Tadié and Compagnon, to see if these passages around Doncières are pre-WWI, and if this changes).

Prendergast supplements Welleck’s assertion about the importance of Sainte-Beuve in intellectual history, but specifies that it is the intellectual history of the cultural-racist right—of Barrès and Maurras, eventually T.S. Eliot and Brassillach. The afterward is concerned with this right-wing appropriation of SB’s legacy. This has a lot to do with the politics of Latin and Latinité, which I know from working on Maurras was really important. Prendergast has contextualized it nicely in terms of the nationalistic implications of the philological work coming from Germany.

From the very first pages, though, it seemed to me that Prendergast was missing a crucial contextual element. Prendergast organizes his book around the idea of ‘the classic,’ and the 1850 essay. Most of his citations come either from the 1840s, or after—indeed, it is part of the point of the argument that SB’s doctrine of the classic was a way of dealing with the social chaos (that is, democracy) apparently unleashed of 1848. This means that not much attention is paid to SB’s early years. This is important because Sainte-Beuve was associated with a group of young liberals during the Restoration who thought very hard about the relation of literary culture to politics, and what the best political forms might be.

Prendergast refers to le Globe a few times as a Saint-Simonist journal, which it was, but only after 1830. Not only does Prendergast not take the Saint-Simonists seriously, but he completely ignores the liberal, entirely non-socialist milieu in which SB moved before 1830. My knowledge about this comes largely from the massive La jeune France libérale by Jean-Jacque Goblot (1995). These people were associated loosely with some of the doctrinaires (Guizot was an actionnaire of the journal), but were less concerned with day to day politics. They were students of Cousinaian eclecticism, and for them the spiritual basis of society was a crucial literary concern. Indeed, they practiced a remarkably modern-seeming kind of cultural-literary criticism. Sainte-Beuve was there as a young man (quite young), and not a negligible member of the group. The whole story of Sainte-Beuve’s political engagements and cultural politics looks different if it is seen in this light.

It isn’t that what Prendergast says is not compatible with this, but rather that his story would have been more interesting and coherent with it. For instance, he points out that it was important that SB as a critic was a sort of popularizer, between scientific discourses of various kinds (not least literary) and a general reading public (see pg 17, for instance). This was a major characteristic of the role of le Globe in the cultural field of the Restoration. More pointedly, Prendergast is simply at a loss when SB begins to talk about a sort of correspondence or harmony between society and literature as a mark of health (64-5). To Prendergast this kind of talk rapidly becomes meaningless. Would it remain so if put next to the ideas Guizot elaborated about liberal government as not so much a direction as an expression of society? There seem to be some real rhymes here to me, but Prendergast, for whatever reason, has not explored this context.

There are other moments when I think a more broad-minded contextualization would have been useful—and by broad-minded I mean one that escapes from lettered culture as such, into politics proper (Guizot), or into contemporary historiography on the period. For instance Judith Lyon-Caen’s book on the uses of the novel in the 1830s and 1840s would have made a fascinating comparison with all the talk SB engages in about what literature, and especially classics, are supposed to do for you. For SB (and this is not something Prendergast thematizes) it seems always to have to do with making the reader feel better, more at peace with themselves and the world. Lyon-Caen makes the strong argument that many people really did use Balzac and Sue (both of whom SB railed against) to understand the rapidly changing world around them.

Most disappointing, though, is what Prendergast looses at the end of his book by not even speculating on a liberal-doctrinaire heritage for Sainte-Beuve’s cultural politics. The last chapter is on Maurras and his ilk, if it was really the case that Sainte-Beuve carried the banner of the doctrinaires into the Second Empire then his adoption by the far right during the 1880s and 1890s would suggest the need to rethink the whole dynamic of liberal cultural politics in the 19^th century.

This is all very sketchy. And I’ll say straight out that I’m not at all familiar with other scholarship on Sainte-Beuve (P seems mostly to be writing against Wolf Lepenies here). And naturally I want more context, that’s why I’m an historian. And I should say again, after the lines of objections, that the book is really quite good. I've for the most part left the central points aside here, and they're untouched by my complaints.

Franco on form

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. (London: Verson, 2005.)

Graphs, Maps, Trees seems significantly more interesting and worthwhile to me now than it did a year and a half ago when I first looked at it. I guess that means the education is working. I came across it in the process of writing on a Barthes essay on literature and literary history from which, incidentally, Moretti pulls a sentence or two to comment on one of the graphs in the first chapter. At the time I thought it was sort of hare-brained. What has happened since then? I’ve spent a further one and a half years in graduate school, read up on my Marxist literary criticism and (this is the sort of thing to which I’d like to pay attention) heard Moretti’s work briefly discussed at the AHA round-table in honor of Roger Chartier. So now he has the approval of the professional organization to which, one day, I will probably be obliged to belong. More important, I have a pretty good idea of what tradition he means to evoke when he says, at the end of his little, pumice-polished book,

“Were I to name a common denominator for all these attempts, I would probably choose: a materialist conception of form.” Is this reminiscent of the Marxist ‘60s and ‘70s? “Yes and no. Yes because the great idea of that critical season—form as the most profoundly social aspect of literature: form as force, as I put it in the close to my previous chapter—remains for me as valid as ever. And no, because I no longer believe that a single explanatory framework may account for the many levels of literary production and their multiple links with the larger social system...” (92)

Certainly, Moretti is Marxist-inflected. Happily, I’m hearing about Marx on Tuesday and Thursday mornings from Fred Jameson this semester, so when I read Moretti: “As long as a hegemonic form [of genre] has not lost its ‘artistic usefulness’, there is not much a rival form can do” (17), I hear an echo: “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed...” (426, Early Writings). This points to a major theoretical issue that I have with Moretti, which I suppose he, Marxist-inflected as he is, does not think is a problem. I mean that he takes for established fact that the role of literature (or, prose fiction, anyway) is to help its readers somehow ‘think’ society. From a footnote on the same page as the above quote: “a genre exhausts its potentialities...when its inner form is no longer capable of representing the most significant aspects of contemporary reality” (17). The representative quality of the novel is crucial because he invokes the troubled idea of the ‘generation’ in order to explain his data about the life-cycle (usually 20-25 years) of the genre: “if what attracts readers is the drama of the day, then, once the day is over, so is the novel” (30). No doubt this question is worked out elsewhere. But it rankles for Moretti to be so cavalier about this when scholars like Lyon-Caen (see previous post) take such trouble to demonstrate the particular historical conditions under which it is indeed the case the people use the novel to read their social world. Moretti needs a more sociological explanation.

Which is odd, because his project is largely to bring sociology to literary history. He describes, on the very first page, his project this, “Within that old area territory [literary history], a new object of study: instead of concrete, individual works, a trio of artificial constructs [graphs, maps, and trees]...in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction. ‘Distant reading’...where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection”(1).

Then again at the end:

“Three chapters; three models; three distinct ‘sections’ of the literary field. First, the system of novelistic genres as a whole; then, ‘the road from birth to death’ of a specific chronotype; and now, the microlevel of stylistic mutations. But despite the differences of scale, some aspects of the argument remain constant. Fist of all, a somewhat pragmatic view of theoretical knowledge...In the second place, the models I have presented share a clear preference for explanation over interpretation...” (91)

This is all very sociological. Indeed, I found myself turning back to Randall Collins in the later part of the book, during Moretti’s discussion of Sherlock Holmes. Moretti is attempting to arrive at an evolutionary chart for a particular genre—in this case, the detective story, through treatment of the clue, as presumably, today, a determining feature of the genre.

(I might as well say here—I also find it odd that Moretti discusses collections of stories and novels proper as though they were indistinguishable. A central problem of any quantitative history is the definition of terms—where does Moretti draw the line? What about history-as-literature, which it was most of the way through the 19^th century—indeed, ‘non-fiction’ titles still sometimes outsell fiction, right? Where would I get numbers about this?).

This is fine, and tries to take in to account readership and market forces (pgs 72-77). It seems to me, though, that Collins’s idea of ‘attention space’ would be quite useful here. Perhaps Moretti feels that ‘market’ implies ‘attention space.’ Survival in the market means commanding a certain share of it, certainly—but I would think that especially where literary sub-genres are the subject, a sufficiently full attention-space could, in a manner of speaking, split, and spawn new niche markets. That is, perhaps Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories were good enough that other writers, who treated the material differently to a sufficient degree, were pushed out of this market, and into another? That doesn’t sound so good, but I’d like more of a treatment of this sort of question from Moretti.

‘Graphs’ is polemic about the 99% of novels written that critics ignore (must, by simple numbers), but it’s downhill after that. ‘Maps’ manages to squeeze a bit more ideology out of what you might call the virtual geography of certain village stories, but forgets his own sensible advice from the previous chapter to find questions to which he hasn’t already got the answer. The last chapter, ‘Trees,’ is unconvincing with Sherlock Holmes, and then, when we get to free indirect discourse, it sounds to me simply like old-fashioned (good, mind you, but still old-fashioned) literary history. A few books, here and there, which typify a way of writing, through time.

The interesting thing about Moretti’s three ‘models’ is that they are all tied to physiological life processes. He himself refuses to believe “that a single explanatory framework may account for the many levels of literary production and their multiple links with the larger social system,” and he does not use any such framework. Yet the analysis of his graphs turn on generations of readership, that is, human life-times. His maps are also of vectors of human movement, and take, for the most part, a comfortable walk as a basic measure. ‘Trees’ assumes genealogy for novels as clear as that for living beings. The very model is deeply biological, even if he tries to hide it behind technology. So is it all about the body? Is not the individual human body the only possible locus for a genuine cultural materialism? Or do I only think this because I read the first part of Fiction of a Thinkable World?

guillory - cultural capital (1993)

Cultural Capital is very much a product of its times; I’m not sure how much of what Guillory says remains relevant (never mind true) in 2007. The book appeared in 1993, and is essentially a Bourdieusian intervention in the debate on the canon. The starting point is the reasonable observation that it is extremely problematic, in terms both of theory and practice, to talk about representation in the ‘canon’ in the same way one discusses political representation. Indeed, Guillory thinks that to do so is both nonsensical and politically pernicious. He seems to regard this move as a symptom of the total political defeat of the left in Reagan-era America. (As an aside, I think it might be very interesting, very productive, to think about what really has changed in the past 15 years. Everything or nothing? Were the Clinton years just a hiatus? What would have happened if the Twin Towers had fallen the first time they were bombed?)

There’s much business in the middle of this big fat book. He makes and then takes back a number of interesting comparisons. For instance, the idea that the syllabus is the constitutive element of the canon, that really the canon is an imagined totality, never realized, impossible to realize—I want to elaborate, to say that no doubt a canon cannot be some mythical aggregate of all syllabi, that there must always be a remainder, an missing something...

The strong point seems to me to be that it is indeed theoretically incoherent and (therefore) politically destructive to insist on ‘representative’ canon formation. Think instead about syllabi. Rather than being concerned about inclusion or exclusion from a mythical canon, think rather about the distribution of ‘objectively’ measurable cultural capital.

The conclusion of the book was, for me, quite unsatisfying. Having established, I think convincingly, that Bourdieu’s general perspective is best, Guillory seems to have no larger point to make—no solutions to offer, or even directions in which to move. After a lightly critical account of Bourdieu’s ideas on the relative autonomy of cultural production, Guillory, all innocence and wide-eyes, introduces a thought experiment. What if there was only cultural capital? Happily, this exact thought-experiment was performed by Marx in The German Ideology. The world after the revolution will not have designated intellectuals of any kind, because ‘intellectual’ and its variants are positions in the social field determined by a special intersection of cultural and material capital. That is, to be an intellectual today is (generally) also to be of a privileged social class. The thrust of the argument is that since it is theoretically impossible either to disconnect cultural from material capital, or to do away with differences in the distribution of cultural capital, the least we can do is the relatively simple job of eliminating the uneven distribution of material capital. Oh, if that’s what literary critics are supposed to be doing.

I’m no doubt not doing justice to Guillory. He makes a number of good points. But the conclusion of the book, if it can even be called a conclusion, is a shot off into the wild blue, and doesn’t match the hard-headedness of the earlier sections. Also, as is I suppose inevitable, he has constructed quite a straw man in the simplistic ‘representationalist’ view of canon formation. Surely there’s more to it? Surely more of an effort could have been made to tie the actual social world in to the debate, since he is perfectly willing to throw the ‘politically ineffective’ stone at his opponents. He quotes Henry Louis Gates Jr. on previously excluded minorities who hear no voice they recognize in ‘canonical’ literature—and no doubt it is better to say that these people have been excluded from the means of cultural production, no doubt worthwhile to point out that in practice, class only rarely enters the picture (race and gender are easier to essentialize)—but it isn’t a response. Guillory may be right, probably is right, that ultimately the solution to certain ailments of the academy are really much larger than the academy. Still, don’t blame us isn’t a great message.

Also, and for a number of reasons, I’d like to commit myself right now to being very, very careful in my use of the word ‘precisely.’ One should be especially wary of the ever-alluring ‘it is precisely not...’ construction, because it rarely is.

The Political Unconscious

Here is a somewhat extended quote to explain what I like about Fred Jameson:

“Our presupposition, in the analyses that follow, will be that only a genuine philosophy of history is capable of respecting the specificity and radical difference of the social and cultural past while disclosing the solidarity of its polemics and passions, its forms, structures, experiences, and struggles, with those of the present day...My position here is that only Marxism offers a philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling resolution to the dilemma of historicism...Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it. This mystery can be reenacted only if the human adventure is one; only thus—and not through the hobbies of antiquarianism or the projections of the modernists—can we glimpse the vital claims upon us of such long-dead issues as the seasonal alteration of the economy of a primitive tribe, the passionate disputes about the nature of the Trinity, the conflicting models of the polis or the universal Empire, or, apparently closer to us in time, the dusty parliamentary and journalistic polemics of the nineteenth-century nation states. These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story; only if, in however disguised and symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme—for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity; only if they are grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot...” (18-20)

And cut to a quote from the Communist Manifesto. “The history of all hitherto existing societies...” In Jameson’s class on Sartre, at least in its most recent incarnation, the first reading assignment is selections from Pascal’s Pensées. At several points in The Political Unconscious Jameson mentions the frequent comparisons between various religions and Marxism, saying that the comparison may be just, but should certainly not be to the denigration of the latter. Indeed, he courts such comparisons by, entirely unnecessarily, positioning his Marxist (Freudian) hermeneutic as the successor, the next, indeed, the only real change since, medieval theological hermeneutics. He begins with the four levels of medieval Biblical hermeneutics not just in relation to Northrop Frye, but essentially because his critical practice, if not a religion proper, is certainly a faith. So perhaps assigning Pascal is a nod in the direction of his own faith.

Sartrean philosophy does not, in my opinion, leave much room for the past (even the ‘cultural past’), except as individuals ‘know’ it. Any kind of collective history is impressionistic at best. The Critique (in 1960) did indeed try to rectify this, and to treat totality rigorously from both an existentialist and a Marxist perspective. Although it is perhaps unfair, it is exactly at this juncture that I am inclined to locate the Jamesonian leap of faith. Sartre’s attempt to bring his phenomenology in line with a Marxist philosophy of the collectivity failed. I am inclined to say the Critique is a failure not so much because the book is unreadable as because as far as I can tell, Jameson, who is very persuasive, has failed to get anyone to pretend to have read it.

So from my perspective, Jameson’s insistence that not just the text, but History (emphatically, for this reason, capitalized)—which is not itself text, but can only ever be approached textually—makes a meaningful whole represents his primal leap of faith, without which the rest of his critical practice would not be possible. Conceiving of history as the Lacanian Real (or, what I know even less about, the Althusserian/Leibnizian ‘absent cause’) does not solve the problem. Lacan does not take one into a realm of genuine collectivity, never mind totality, any more than Sartre. It is possible that Jameson would describe this ‘leap of faith’ as one of the Utopian goals of his project, or a Utopia inscribed into its process. This is acceptable to me, I suppose, though I don’t share it.

Moreover, I don’t see the reason for it. Neuroscientists claim that the brain is greater than the sum of its parts. There is, I understand, a whole field of research built around ideas of irreducible complexity, critical mass of connectivity, or whatever. I should know more about them, probably. This sort of claim is far from what Jameson is doing. Really, his claims to totality—as he makes clear—are a necessary gesture of critical foreclosure. One must somehow delimit the field of study, the lines are arbitrary, and will line up only with some sort of radical original choice. Jameson’s is Marxism. After this, with great critical dexterity he divides the task of totalizing criticism into three overlapping phases, or levels. All the different critical idioms are contained, on one of the three levels, within the Marxist one (this is the point of the smaller, more soberly formulated 1976 essay, “Criticism in History”).

There are a few further issues that I would like to signal, but about which I haven’t made up my mind. The first is Jameson’s explicitly interpretive, that is, hermeneutic, stance. He mentions Gadamer once, in a footnote, to say that the contextual horizons for interpretation he, Jameson, is setting out here are not like Gadamer’s horizons of interpretation. I suppose that this is Jameson’s way of being anti-Barthesian. There is a hard kernel of the Real in every text, and the critic ought not try to ignore it in the name of jouissance. Politics, all the moral imperatives of Marxism, get in the way.

This interpretation must happen within, as suggested above, certain contexts. Different contexts for different sorts of interpretation; though I think a more detailed comparison of Jameson’s three levels of interpretive context with LaCapra’s (also from the early 1980s) long list of contexts for each text. No doubt the difference may be explained disciplinarily—that is, LaCapra is, in the end, an historian, Jameson a literary critic. So LaCapra goes very willingly outside the text, while Jameson goes so far as to say, “the symbolic act [that is, the text] therefore begins by generating and producing its own context in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back from it” (81). I’m not sure what the distinction between generation and producing is supposed to be, but the model is an interesting one. Too flat, though. Any given text certainly might be a symbolic act, and most can be read in that way, but this depends on the context of production. The author-function, I should think, still allows this. Perhaps the issue is that for Jameson one always goes into the past through the text one is investigating, and in this sense, it does indeed create its own context. In the end, though, I can’t agree. To say that the text produces its own context is to allow the critic to find whatever she is looking for in it. Jameson solves this dilemma by turning to totalizing interpretation—that is, the text means only in relation to other structures, other texts—but the totality is, as I said above, really just an act of faith, its content prescribed in some sense from before the book is opened.

Finally, there is the question of allegory. Jameson’s use of historical allegory is sensitive and multi-layered, but my fur is up about this. Michael Sprinker’s 1994 book on Proust purported to be historical materialist in orientation but didn’t seem ever, or hardly ever, to rise above the level of class allegory. As though Sprinker had read a few books about the class structure of the time, and then found homologous structures within the Recherche; he declares an allegory and goes home. For instance, he seems to have decided that the proletariat was a negligible political force in the fin-de-siècle and up until the popular front, even. The real struggle continues to be, according to him, between aristocrats and the bourgeoisie. This is foolishness. It comes from taking the Action Française at its word, and hunting for French fascists in every literary corner. The Recherche certainly is incisive social critique, among other things. But it is not a model of French society as a whole, it is a very peculiar view of a peculiar part of this society. Even this view might be said to be underpinned by the lower-classes, excluded, certainly, but not ignored. This is the content of the scene in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs at Balbec, where the wealthy eat in the gas-lit glass box of the restaurant, while the poor stand in the dark outside, invisible from within, their faces pressed against the glass. Sprinker’s ham-handedness and vulgar allegory has made me suspicious of Jameson in this regard. I’ll have to read more.

Perhaps next I’ll try Vico out. All this talk of philosophy of history has me itching for it. Also, it will be useful when I go back to Sorel.

small freud

Civilization and its Discontents

The quick version is that ‘civilization,’ by which Freud means any social unit above the family, is intimately tied in to the repression of various instinctual drives. He finally arrives at what I take to be the crucial formula near the end of the book (pg 97, in my edition). Our instincts may be divided into libidinal and aggressive types, that is, the love and death drives, Eros and Thanatos (though Freud doesn’t use the name in this text). Entrance into society, civilization in the broadest sense, is the repression of these drives. Libidinal drives survive repression in the form of symptoms; the repression of aggressive instincts, the death drive, on the other hand, results in guilt. Man (that is, humans, but especially men) in civilization are thus marked by neurotic symptoms, and also a sense of all-pervasive guilt, which is sometimes plainly manifest, but more often disguised as a generalized malaise, ‘discontent,’ or, in the german title, das Unbehagen.

The above is a simplification, though I hope not too much of a distortion. All I want to notice about this now is what a good teaching text it would be. Enough Freud for a class that isn’t specifically about psychoanalysis; a fascinating document of the moment just before the second world war; and of course the way in to Marcuse and a whole slew of 50s and 60s radical theory. It’s short, but I think you could trim the first two sections without loosing terribly much, so that it’s a total of about 70 pages.

Judith Lyon-Caen

Lyon-Caen, Judith. La Lecture et la Vie: Les usages du roman au temps de Balzac. Tallandier: Paris, 2006.

In her introduction, Lyon-Caen positions her project through reference to two of the leading lights of French intellectual history—Pierre Rosanvallon and Roger Chartier. Chartier, who was on the examination committee for the thèse from which the present volume developed, ‘justifies’ the history of reading. It seems to me that her engagement with Rosanvallon is more ambiguous. On one level it is clear enough: anyone working on the political-cultural universe of France between the first and second Empires must take up some position in regard to his work. Lyon-Caen at least rhetorically begins her investigations from a remark Rosanvallon makes in Le Peuple introuvable about how during the July Monarchy, the novel served the same function as the discipline of sociology later would. La Lecture et la Vie is presented as an extended gloss on this quip. (Is it, indeed, the fate of the historian to spend a decade testing and giving nuance to the casual bon mot of the great thinker? I hope not.) The conclusions of her book, however, at least in my reading, suggest a politics that takes the perception of successful self-representation a great deal more seriously than it is my impression that Rosanvallon does. All this should be taken with the caveat that I don’t know the work of either senior scholar well enough, really, to be justified in what I say.

At any rate, the book is excellent. The ambitious goal is to recover something of how readers read novels in the 1830s and ‘40s, that is, in the subtitle, to understand the usages of Balzac’s novels. This is done in a number of ways, but above all by close reading of archives of letters sent by ‘average’ readers to writers, in particular Balzac and Eugene Sue. Lyon-Caen is well aware of the partial, pre-selected nature of her archive, and supplements it with extensive critical reading, historical background from the secondary literature, and theoretical finesse. Her central argument is that readers of Balzac and Sue used the novels to decipher the social confusion and dislocation brought on by industrialization, juridical equality, and any number of other socio-political changes over the previous generation. The letters, she demonstrates, should be read as attempts to carry through the projects of social description, social comprehension, initiated by the novelists. The reader reads, and makes the language his, or more often her, own. Such were the usages of the novel. (Page 153 has an especially nice summation of this position, but it is reiterated throughout).

The book marches along at a stately pace, unfolding in a leisurely, somewhat repetitive manner. The first chapter reconstructs debates and polemics around the novel, and especially the roman feuilleton among critics of the period. The next three chapters dive into the archive of letters, approaching it from different angles—in contrast to earlier, Rousseauian reader-to-writer letters, in terms of the reader’s evaluation of the truth-value of novels in describing the social world, and finally, the effect of novels on reader’s experiences of their own location in that world. The final chapter concerns itself first with the aspirations of, or provoked by, the novel in the social world and second with the controversy ignited by Eugene Sue’s Mystères de Paris.

Indeed Lyon-Caen puts forward this book as a privileged ‘moment’ in the period. According to her, there is a long-durée history of the ‘romantic’ novel, in which the reader has an intimate and intense relationship to the text and author, and regards the text as a sort of mirror. The ‘30s and ‘40s are a special period in which the author is perceived to hold the mirror of the novel not to the face of the reader, as did Rousseau, but rather to a social universe which seemed more complex and inscrutable, more dangerous and unstable, than ever before. That is, in these years readers read in order to understand society and their place in it—in order to think society, and their place in it—in a way usually applied to the individual. The novel did indeed, as Rosanvallon said, have the place sociology would take. Mystères is special, Lyon-Caen says, because Sue integrated the responses of his readers, their aspirations and visions, into this novel in a particular way. It had an ‘authentically pluralist’ political message. Although I am convinced that Lyon-Caen is correct in her general argument about the mimetic function of the novel for its readers, her claims for Mystères seem somewhat overblown.

There were temporal limits to this form of novelistic experience. The Restoration was too aggressive about censoring the press to allow for the kinds of stories told by the roman feuilleton. Further, of course, a certain form of print culture—nascent mass culture, cheap newspapers—was necessary. With 1848, things changed radically. During the open period of the 3^rd Republic, all the newspapers printed explicitly political material. The censorship of the 2^nd Empire and the advent of the penny-press effectively split literature into entertainment and art, forever putting an end to the kind of reader-writer interaction Lyon-Caen investigates.

As I have said, I am essentially convinced by Lyon-Caen’s central argument. In the last part of the book, and in the conclusion, she pushes the further view that the novels of Balzac and Sue (among other less important writers) were avenues for the otherwise frustrated democratic aspirations of the great mass of people who remained more or less excluded from the political process. This seems to me to be a conceptual leap, and one that is connected to an argument she makes about women reading Balzac (see in particular pgs 228-230). She says, with much evidence, that women who read Balzac found characters with whom they could identify, and thereby ways to articulate their particular experiences, that is, being a widow, a precipitous drop in rank, supporting a family...this sort of thing. Lyon-Caen insists, for reasons that probably have to do with polemics within Balzac scholarship of which I’m unaware, that the form of this was an appreciation or validation of individual experience through identification with a type; it was not, by any means, the subsumption of each woman’s experience into a universal ‘feminine condition.’

This stand is relevant to the larger issue of the social-political use of the novel because it relies on the idea of type as a way to articulate individuality. Rosanvallon’s treatment of Guizot and the doctrinaires, in Le Moment Guizot, suggests that those who dominated the July Monarchy would have been quite comfortable with this formulation. Society is an organism; therefore individuals may be—ought to be—classified according to their function. This is extremely provisional. I should go back and look at Rosanvallon. This is an avenue, however, to explore further. Types, certainly, are literary. Function, on the other hand, sounds quite sociological to me. How would Guizot have expressed it? No doubt he disapproved of these novels, though I seem to remember her citing Royer-Collard, somewhere, in favor of the roman feuilleton.

A final objection, then, to La Lecture et la Vie: it lacks any sort of index.