Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and the Future of Critique

Critical Engagements with Benita Parry

Sharae Deckard, Rashmi Varma, Sharae Deckard, Rashmi Varma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317287797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

Using the aesthetic and political concerns of Parry's oeuvre as a touchstone, this book explores new directions for postcolonial studies, Marxist literary criticism, and world literature in the contemporary moment, seeking to re-imagine the field, and alongside it, new possibilities for left critique. It is the first volume of essays focusing on the field-defining intellectual legacy of the literary scholar Benita Parry. As a leading critic of the post-structuralist turn within postcolonial studies, Parry has not only brought Marxism and postcolonial theory into a productive, albeit tense, dialogue, but has reinvigorated the field by bringing critical questions of resistance and struggle to bear on aesthetic forms. The book's aim is two-fold: first, to evaluate Parry's formative influence within postcolonial studies and its interface with Marxist literary criticism, and second, to explore new terrains of scholarship opened up by Parry's work. It provides a critical overview of Parry's key interventions, such as her contributions to colonial discourse theory; her debate with Spivak on subaltern consciousness and representation; her critique of post-apartheid reconciliation and neoliberalism in South Africa; her materialist critique of writers such as Kipling, Conrad, and Salih; her work on liberation theory, resistance, and radical agency; as well as more recent work on the aesthetics of "peripheral modernity." The volume contains cutting-edge work on peripheral aesthetics, the world-literary system, critiques of global capitalism and capitalist modernity, and the resurgence of Marxism, communism, and liberation theory by a range of established and new scholars who represent a dissident and new school of thought within postcolonial studies more generally. It concludes with the first-ever detailed interview with Benita Parry about her activism, political commitments, and her life and work as a scholar.

Part I

Aesthetics

1 Against Modernism

Timothy Brennan

To know whether twentieth-century literary modernism was more worldly than previously thought, more politically sensitive to the outlooks and practices of non-European peoples—which so many critics now contend—we would have to think more carefully about a neglected tradition of civic letters. The background story of what I am calling “civic letters” can be found in the vernacular theories of poetic language derived from ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century, Giambattista Vico and Johann Gottfried Herder in the eighteenth, and in other figures of a lineage about which I have written at length elsewhere (Brennan 2017). Their leads, along with their many differences, branched out in acts of deliberate emulation to form artistic practices as varied as the theories of popular epic literature explored by Antonio Gramsci in his writing on the novels of Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, and Leo Tolstoy. In Gramsci’s wake, and with an identical sensibility, came his contemporary avatars in the mythic revolutionary novels of Italy’s Wu Ming collective, strangely ignored in world literature circles (Wu Ming 1 2008); and it finds expression as well in the philological avant-garde of 1940s Leningrad celebrated by Kirill Medvedev (Medvedev 2013, 77–79). The modern linguistic basis of the civic tradition is richly theorized, moreover, in the work of Valentin Voloshinov, Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, and Nikolai Marr, and forms the core ideas of early twentieth-century Marxist literary theory, which I mention here in order to suggest that that theory is often mischaracterized at present as being primarily about committed art, reflection theory, or the solution in literary form of otherwise intractable social contradictions. It is, I am saying, about something else and much older—a lineage of civic letters.

What we normally consign to the concept of realism, whether social or socialist (in Pranav Jani’s useful distinction) is more accurately conceived instead as the work of a lineage of thought emerging from civic letters (Jani 2010). The consequences of such a shift in terminology would be to take public or political art out of the historical ghetto of Marxism, seeing it as being of longer standing—as being, in fact, many centuries old—with a subtler and more enriching experience of literary form. In civic letters, the art of figural language derives not only from the vulgate, but also from the entombed memories of human pre-history. Logic in that distant time was incapable of abstractions, and so had to reason by means of the instruments of a worldly, situated, earthy myth. Invention was artistic, but not with the connotations of that term today. There is the sense that whatever seems most contemporary, individual, and of the “now” is fundamentally an improvisation on the inherited techniques of anonymous and now-forgotten precursors. Separated by vast geographical spaces unbridgeable in an ancient past lacking modern transportation, the first humans acted on their own without instruction or direction. And yet they arrived at similar laws, clearing forests, fashioning a secular notion of the sacred based on labour and their transformation of nature into culture, devising monuments to the spirit, and building the first cities. Perceived by its makers in antiquity as an anthropologic-artistic creation, the political state itself emerged at first as the brutal imposition of tyrannical families enslaving those outside their bloodlines, but gradually it developed into a medium of collective values, and was retrospectively admired as a hard-won human invention, as liminal as the invention of the wheel.

To see the state as born in poetry is, among other things, to be forced to see language as basically interpretable. In lieu of devotion to the cryptic or the hieratic, and in place of a meaning wilfully improvised by working on texts as though they were the inert raw material of pure invention, the idea here is rather that meaning is retrieved from texts in a laborious weighing of connotations, evaluating contexts, and considering the social scenes of their utterance. Textual evidence, rather than textual authority, is what matters. A civic hermeneutics of this sort evokes the oral performance of language: personalities in place and time, capable of physically touching one another, where language is a matter not only of inherited definitions or syntax but of bodily gestures, impromptu innovations, intonations of voice. Everything from one’s fatigue to ambient smells and the weather affect the experience of meaning in a present moment that cannot be transported elsewhere without loss, and that attaches itself to authors as part of their place-specific identities. Meaning is not targeted in advance as a sacrifice to semantic infinitude and indeterminacy. It evolves rather by way of a dialogue of those present to one another. Staking out a territory tangential to modernism, the civic tradition sees literature as an agreed-upon indirection, as the register of the conflict of constituencies wanting to be heard and seeking resolution. Language, rather than being a sacred law or a shrine to the futility of truth, is a creation that, like other civic creations (including civil law itself), is a human defence. It is not—just as in a different context the state is not—an alien master from which literature sets out to establish its own estrangement.

The Limits of Peripheral Modernism

Benita Parry is the postcolonial critic who has done most to promote the notion of “peripheral modernism” and to redefine the term to incorporate practices critical of literary modernism as it is normally understood in our graduate programs. Her discrepant attitudes express themselves in a piercing analysis of peripheral modernism and its critics in “A Departure from Modernism: Stylistic Strategies in Modern Peripheral Literatures as Symptom, Mediation and Critique of Modernity” (2018), where her achievement is to redefine the contours of modernism, reclaiming it for a sensibility that the urbane disillusion of canonical Anglo-American modernism would not easily fit.¹ The effort is to insist that modernism has been created anew in places where a history of metropolitan violence and invasion is still deeply felt and in which the articulation of one’s culture is devised as an antagonism to the imperial metropole and without the crushing burden of feeling oneself a mere borrower of others’ techniques.

From the vantage point of civic letters, peripheral modernism has, however, an important drawback. Here, once again, modernism is prioritized—if we understand by that term not an embrace of the uneven social forms of transnational community, or brave and astute experimentation per se (as most critics do, following Virginia Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” while counter-posing modernism to a ham-handed realism). Modernism, rather, from the civic point of view is understood above all not as a mode, style, or critical stance, but as an authorized list of writers etched over five decades into professorial syllabi and the mental repertoires of high profile magazine reviewers. Kafka, Borges, Woolf, and Stevens are, in this milieu, the automatic and inevitable last word in wry indirection and the sophisticated helplessness of the brave truth of modernity. There modernism constitutes a carte d’identité for entry into a system of evaluative assumptions continually reinforced in higher education, the media, and the art world. However brittle or belated Georg Lukács may appear today in the age of Twitter, he was the first to describe with philosophical precision the attitudes of this canon, to which he gave the name the “ideology of modernism” (Lukács 1995). There, he assembles a set of features that guides him in his reading with abundant textual support: an exaggerated concern with form; an elevation of the fragmentary, occasional, or temporary over anything monumental; a preference for sense data over ideas; an ontological view of man as solitary, asocial, unable to enter relationships; and a purveyor of phenomenological clichés.

He was talking not just about a period designation or a chronological span of time, but also, as Edward Said was fond of observing, a cultural expression of “insurgent” market modernity—one that carried over into our contemporary period and is still exorbitantly on display in seminar reading lists and the implicit postures of left cultural theory. A sceptical and at times hostile take on modernism was, in fact, a constant Lukácsian theme of Said’s work, from his essays in the early 1970s to his reflections on modernism almost twenty years later in Culture and Imperialism, where Lukács again is brought centrally into the discussion. In “Arabic Prose and Prose Fiction After 1948,” for example, Said praised the didactic appeal of Sadiq Jalal al-Azm’s prose, and extolled the techniques of isnad (support, witness) and of episodic storytelling techniques recalling for Said the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht. Al-Azm, he points out, upheld the pursuit of the “exact detail of everyday life” that must involve a reviling of the political quietism of “absurdist pastiche” (Said 2000, 50, 57). The homiletic quality of this aesthetic—“homiletic” because it bears witness in public, exhorts, and calls for a secular dialogue about interpretable texts—is non- or un-modernist just as modernism is explicitly anti-homiletic.

The significance of these strands of influence to any peripheral aesthetics of anti-colonial thought has been more or less completely ignored. In the case of that vast side of world-literary criticism devoted to the digital humanities, it has been dismissed as obsolete. Whereas the euphoria of new modernism studies has looked to the global sweep and demonstrable variety of modernist artistic expression—as though that sweep were not itself a confirmation of the imperial routes of its transmission—there has been little respect paid to the substantive and formal qualms with modernism as an aesthetic ideology that we have inherited from this paradigmatic interwar discussion.² As a consequence, the focus shifts to the diverse racial and ethnic sites of modernism’s composition, to the transnational avenues of its circulation and away from its political import as a mode of expression laden with the reflexes of a disavowed political position. As in so many other areas of our discourse, by these means one moves away from ideas to bodies, which then retroactively deliver us symbolically to an ontological politics. To put this in the form of a question: what is the relationship between being against modernism (as Lukács and Said conceived of it, at any rate) and the aesthetic expression of anti-colonial thought? That is the question I pose later, by way of reading of a neglected anti-colonial masterpiece from the civic tradition of letters.

All of this would seem to speak more directly to current theory, in that critics invested in the modernist canon and professionally identified with its authors and journals have in an outpouring of articles and books over the last decade, sought to demonstrate that the postcolonial critique of modernism has seriously misrepresented its varieties and subtexts. This argument has taken different forms: (1) that modernism was never monolithic, and always included alternative traditions, including those peripheral areas of Europe (Ireland, Russia, Eastern Europe) where its earliest creativity, and even origins, can be found; (2) that modernism’s transnational circulation and translation suggest a global, not merely metropolitan, reach and appeal; and (3) that modernism challenged imperialism by creating a new vision of cosmopolitan community (Mao and Walkowitz 2008, 737–749).

From the present perspective, this collection of critical attitudes, which have lately coalesced as a highly publicized and well-funded movement with several book series dedicated to developing its arguments, seems compromised in some respects, although not all.³ The bewildering complexities of mixed agendas, combined and uneven experiences, and infinite possibilities of literary form admittedly leave many openings to those who complain that the characterization of modernism has been simplistic in the past. On the other hand, the guiding principle of inclusion has led to a persistent blurring of the lines between the avant-garde and modernism—the key distinction, perhaps, in Raymond Williams’ The Politics of Modernism—and the imprecision of suggesting that literary realism, insofar as it is found on the periphery, is eligible for entry into a now-broadened modernist fold.⁴ And so inclusivity morphs into the simply malleable, and the exact set of features identified critically by Lukács, referenced earlier, can then be repeated by the contemporary critic, without reference to this earlier tradition, as though it demonstrated only the anti-Eurocentric component of modernism. In Lukács, modernism’s formal features in ensemble reflect something rather different. They are about the logic of capital.⁵ The cultural emergent that Lukács sought to question, and that Said understood as a new dominant, has remained to this degree an almost environmental form of received opinion.

If we find here the aporias of an inherited (and wholly expected) English-studies formalism and canonicity, other challenges arise in the very counter-movement against such tendencies, for in its recent avatar, world literature has been characterized not by new modernism studies’ stress on the fertile varieties of world-literary expression or the transnational location of its experimentalism, but by a surprising return to sociology. In the wake of many decades of a deconstructive and discursive euphoria that seemed to preclude it, there is a bending of the stick in favour of diagnostic flow charts and structural determinations. As a more or less brutal riposte to discourse theories, the work of Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova (not unlike the much earlier work of Arnold Hauser) has undertaken broad, institutional, market-driven, macro-projects in which there is little room for individual authors and almost none for traditions that are chosen or concepts forged by artists and intellectual working against the grain (Moretti 2005; Casanova 2004; Hauser 1999). Paradoxically, then, although they emphatically disrupt deconstruction’s and discourse theory’s reverent textualisms, they powerfully reinforce their disarticulation of subjects. As they present it, history itself is not very different from the patterned outlines of the impervious langue that it wished to replace. And so, from the point of view of the tradition of civic letters, there is an impediment to the geographical mapping aspects of the world-system matrix as adopted from Immanuel Wallerstein (one of Franco Moretti’s points of departure, for instance, as well as the Warwick Research Collective’s). In its original revulsion towards philology, history, and the world of expressive letters (Moretti derives his approach from the explicitly anti-Gramscian scientism of Galvano Della Volpe), “distant reading” eradicates human actors in the purported name of a proper materialism (Moretti 2005, 1). As such, it carries on the emphasis strongly present in the Althusserian borrowings of Fredric Jameson, which in turn is thoroughly worked out as a principle in the theory of commodity logic in Moishe Postone—all of them committed to jettisoning from their inquiries living agents who read, feel, and conceptualize in actual sites and in varied times in favour of larger macro-determinants of the social field.⁶ The ambitious reformist energies of world literature, at least among its leading literary sociologists, desacralize the canon of modernism only to reassert modernity as a discourse of the material sciences divorced from the vagaries of taste, ideology, or invention.

Moretti’s is perhaps the most telling move of this sort, because of its self-understanding as a grounded social theory hostile to the poses of post-structuralist discourse, and as the definitive Marxist riposte to an ambient culturalism. His appeals to the Annales school of historiography is similar to his endorsement of Wallerstein as a model for literary study. Yet his analogies are, in both cases, troubled by the lack of a real point of contact—one that involves specious analogies between genres of writing and thinking. His admiration for the Annales historians, for example, rests on his claim that individual cases (in his analogy, a single novel) remain conjectural and of doubtful significance whereas broad patterns (for the Annales group, this meant the meticulous and even tedious assembling of data on the everyday practices of common people over the longue durée of history) are more scientific. But this would not, as he assumes, lead necessarily to a study based on quantitative approaches—his “computational stylistics” and “thematic databases” (Moretti 2005, 4). In other words, there is a vast space between “individual” and “computational,” the latter being the use of a technology that can “read” quantities and little else, and therefore must be re-narrated afterward according to an unexamined personal calculus, since quantitative searches have no discernment and must be told by the critic-as-agent what to count: what bits are to be reconstituted as Moretti’s whole.

A more logical conclusion than the one he draws might have been to read more novels and in that way avoid settling for “individual cases.” It may be that Krzysztof Pomian and Lucien Febvre (one of the Annales historians whom he discusses) tend in their project not to concentrate on singular events, but rather on “units in a series, which reveal conjunctural variations” (Moretti 2005, 27). But these units are, after all, composed of events, not raw quantities. His methods and Febvre’s are not analogous, since in the latter’s method we can still logically talk about actors, conjunctions, causes, underlying relationships, settings—all the colour and complexity of the real—rather than the purification of that reality now distilled into numerical units in which causes and relationships are slipped in ex post facto by conjectures violently superimposed on data.

There are, then, problems with the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Against the Grain: An Introduction to Benita Parry’s Intellectual Itinerary
• PART I Aesthetics
• PART II Politics
• PART III Interlocutions
• Notes on Contributors
• Bibliography of Benita Parry’s Works
• Index