Power and Literature

Strategies of Subversiveness in the Romanian Novel

Florin Oprescu

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110603057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

At the core of this book lies the relation between Power (as socio-political phenomenon) and the novel (as literary discourse). It shows that, in a society facing the excess of power in its various forms, novelistic fiction mediates knowledge about societal Power structures and uses specific strategies to subvert and denounce them.

The first part of the study is theoretical: it presents some of the most prominent theories of Power, from Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche to Weber, Dahl, Lukes, Parsons, Bourdieu or Foucault. After offering a critical approach to the concepts of Power defined in the social, political and philosophical fields, it articulates the relations of Power imprinted in literary discourse within a typology of four categories.

In the second part of the book, this taxonomy of Power is applied to four key novels in the context of Romanian "literary crossroads", showing how novelistic fiction not only assume a critical and subversive position against the excess of Power, but also unveils our fragility when experiencing History.

1 The Criticism of Ideas on Power

1.1 Theories on Power. From the Social and Philosophical Analysis to the Aporias of Literature

1.1.1 The will to power and its Ideological Foundation within the Republic of Letters

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,

Have no delight to pass away the time,

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun

And descant on mine own deformity:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,

By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,

To set my brother Clarence and the king.18

In this excerpt from the historical drama, Richard III (1592), Shakespeare describes a covert and mysterious inner tendency of Richard, the future King. Namely, a temptation that amplifies an inner call to acquire power. The powerful Richard, the pretender, dreams of a compensatory force, since, unable of being loved for what he is, he sets out to make himself loved by any means. The tragic nature of the character is emphasized by the frustration brought about by his physical deformities, by anticipating his marginal destiny, but also by challenging his Divine Right and his belief in free will.

Predestined for loneliness, unloved and suffering from a complex due to the marginal role he plays within the politics of the kingdom, Richard is dominated by this inner force to gain power, to change his destiny, even by means of Machiavellian acts of unimaginable cruelty. The desire to acquire power and, implicitly, to gain a position of power and, therefore, overcome his physical distortions and the Divine Right, is generated and fuelled by an inner authority that cancels out any of his affects. In other words, Richard as a tragic character, as a representation of human physical and psychological deformities, only changes his condition within a social and political context that amplifies his tragic nature. Even this implicit Shakespearian criticism places him within the context of an increased supremacy of Elizabethan Calvinism and of religious fatalism, when divine determinism was grounded in the fact that God punishes evil by evil.19 His image is Machiavellian, a representation of evil that often triggers homicidal instincts in man.

Through Richard, Shakespeare is testing the evolution of the need for power, which Elias Canetti called “the specific passion for power, the passion for survival”.20 But the power of individual evil, in Richard’s case, intentional and calculated, therefore rational, is not complete in the absence of a perspective on the historical context that offers a historical representation “as political power”.21 Literary history is full of numerous such examples of a representation which Nietzsche rightfully called The Will to Power.22 These representations describe the amplification and transformation of the individual will to power, as seen in the case of this Shakespearian character, to a will to power of dominant groups that, throughout human history, have imposed their own rules on the majority of people through authoritarianism.

As a continuation of this idea, again in The Will to Power, Nietzsche speaks of the concept of perspectivism, meaning the extensive potential of power, for “every centre of force-and not only man-construes all the rest of the world from its own view-point, i.e. measures, feels, forms, according to its own force”.23 This is ultimately the meaning of the Nietzschean statement:

My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (-its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (‘union’) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on-24

This Nietzschean finding is meant to remind us of the relation between individual power and group power. Essentially, individual power is the one that ­‘negotiates’ its dominant position within a certain group that often manifests its role of force through a common ideology, in turn negotiated or imposed. According to Nietzsche, individual power is the one that fuelled the theories of certain famous psychologists, such as Freud and his theory on the power and the domination of pleasure, Adler and his individual psychology based on the sensation of power or Frankl and his will of an existential meaning. Therefore, the subjective, individual, behaviourist power anchored in the subconscious becomes, according to the Nietzschean theory, political and social power justified or not on behalf of an ideology, which is an immutable historical process. As a matter of fact, in The Will to Power, Nietzsche also presents his structural vision of Machiavellian power:

On the ‘Machiavellianism’ of Power
The will to power appears
a. among the oppressed, among slaves of all kinds, as will to ‘freedom’: merely getting free seems to be the goal (religio-morally: “responsible to one’s own conscience alone”; “evangelical freedom,” etc.);
b. among a stronger kind of man, getting ready for power, as will to overpower; if it is at first unsuccessful, then it limits itself to the will to ‘justice’ i.e., to the same measure of rights as the ruling type possesses;
c. among the strongest, richest, most independent, most courageous, as “love of mankind” of ‘the people’, of the gospel, of truth, God; as sympathy; ‘self-sacrifice’, etc.; as overpowering, bearing away with oneself, taking into one’s service, as instinctive self-involvement with a great quantum of power to which one is able to give direction: the hero, the prophet, the Caesar, the savior, the shepherd; (-sexual love, too, belongs here: it desires to overpower, to take possession, and it appears as self-surrender. Fundamentally it is only love of one’s ‘instrument’, of one’s ‘steed’-the conviction that this or that belongs to one because one is in a position to use it). ‘Freedom’, ‘justice’, and ‘love’ !!!25

Therefore, the Nietzschean conception of power is associated with a Machiavellian meaning, even when connected with a ‘will for freedom’, being attributed to a selfish impulse, to a preservation instinct, in favour of the individual and not of the collectivity. But this manner of Nietzsche approaching power with a Machiavellian meaning must also be attributed to the general framework of his book, The Will to Power, where he is interested in and meditates on the idea of the nihilism of modern society, which also makes him a role model for many philosophers of the 20th century.

But the feeling of power, in the sense of authority and autonomy over oneself and others, is the essence of ideas on power. Even when establishing a literary canon, in terms of standardisation, selection and imposition,26 as will become apparent from this chapter, as a result of the “strong thought”27 of the authoritarian aesthetical modernity, it is still a result of exerting power as a recognised authority of literary criticism. Particularly eloquent in this regard is the status of the Romanian literary canon and which could be described as cyclically relevant to the exercise of power in the battle between politics and aesthetics. Throughout approximately 150 years, decisive for the modernity of the Romanian estate and culture, from 1859, when the Union of the Romanian Principalities took place, under the reign of Alexandru Ioan Cuza and until after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989, as part of the canonical battle for the ‘autonomy of the aesthetic’, once every 50 years, Romanian literature was under the authority of certain dominant figures. We refer here to Titu Maiorescu at the end of the 19th century, Eugen Lovinescu during the inter-war period and Nicolae Manolescu in the ’80s of the last century. It is relevant that, within this battle of literature trying to gain its autonomy from political power, the ideology of the aesthetics has been used as a form of art freedom by all these literary critics. But this battle for a literary canon has a specific meaning in the discussion on forms and the formulas of the literary authorities establishing the ‘compulsory’ hierarchies of Romanian literature. The illustration of this literary ‘battle’ will constitute a special topic within this first chapter.

Nevertheless, the forms of power moving past the relative and speculative scopes of psychology, this being one of the major debate directions of the concept in the 20th century (Freud, Adler, Frankl, Foucault, Deleuze etc.), cannot be dissociated from the structuring force of the concept: ideology. Four of the ideas mentioned by Terry Eagleton in the attempt to define another theoretically unstable concept, Ideology, helps us in the attempt to establish the operating framework for Power and, later on, the manner of its literary representation. Ideology is analysed by the leftist literary theoretician as being:

[…] (b) a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;

(c) ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;

(d) false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power; […]

(j) the conjuncture of discourse and power;28

Structured according to ideology, power becomes a concept that operates in the context of the dominant groups that thus legitimate their authoritarian decisions, starting from utopian ideas, such as the common good, absolute freedom, or a perfect society. Thus, the ideology of power entails a form of legitimating actions.

A dominant power - states Eagleton - may legitimate itself by promoting beliefs and values congenial to it; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself.29

Such an operating formula is especially characteristic, at least through its visibility, of societies subject to totalitarianism. The discursive deformation of reality in favour of the exercise of power by a single person or by a group of persons has been a generalized phenomenon, for example during the fifty years of Romanian Communism. Literature, and art in general, has been a perfect ideological instrument for representing the perfect world and the new man. Totalitarian power may be defined by transferring Max Weber’s concept of ‘economic domination’30 and adapting it to a broader concept of ‘social domination’.

In the same direction, that of the results of exerting power, speaking of “Forms of power”, Bertrand Russell aphoristically argued that “Power may be defined as the production of intended effects.”31 In other words, the concept of power has a quantitative meaning, as Russell also remarks. But Russell’s theory reveals a unidimensional perspective, analysing exclusively pressures and actions in terms of influence exerted on the individual. According to the British philosopher, the individual is influenced:

• a. by direct physical power over his body, e.g. when he is imprisoned or killed;
• b. by rewards and punishments as inducements, e. g. in giving or withholding employment;
• c. by influence on opinion, i. e. propaganda in its broadest sense.32

This theory has only quantitative or unidimensional aspects, as mentioned before, but is also purely descriptive, instrumenting the individual and reducing them to a set of automatisms that can be induced, for instance, by persevering education. In this regard, Russel offers a relevant example, namely to the way in which trained animals experience the power of education.

But the meaning of power over people is based on a certain poetics of the influences that generate, in the words of Harold Bloom, an ‘anxiety of influences’. The effects of influence on people, the intentional effects mentioned by Bertrand Russell or Talcott Parsons33 can most easily be observed through the mediation of the mediation of the work of art, which is represented by the literary text, even if most of the times indirectly, as ‘metanarratives’34 of the relationships the creator of the text has had with various social and historical ideologies that directly or indirectly determined their education. Therefore, the counterexample offered by literature is that power is also a more complex phenomenon of passive influence and sedimentation. Metanarratives and their literary recurrence are merely ideological formulas and strategies of exercising direct or indirect political power. On the other hand, what Lyotard calls postmodern ‘disbelief’ in metanarratives is not an absolute empowerment of aesthetics but rather its restructuring according to a paradigm of deconstruction and reconstruction.

Historical and legitimating metanarratives of modernity rooted in the mentality of the Enlightenment, mentioning historicized ideas, such as the advancing of history, good and absolute freedom and the power of science have been replaced in the second part of the last century with other ideologies that legitimated power as a natural part of organised society. Poststructuralist ideologies, such as ethnicity, race, class, gender, religion, which have gradually become metanarratives as well, played a determinant and strategic role in the process of selection and ‘liberation’ of art from the ‘tyranny’ of aesthetics that is no longer regarded as the only criterion of canonical selection. Gradually, this has determined genuine clashes of ideologies, between the defenders of stability a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Argument
• 1 The Criticism of Ideas on Power
• 2 The Active Power of the Subject
• 3 The Reflexive Power of the Subject
• 4 The Passivity of the Subject faced with the Power of History
• 5 The Impersonalization of Power in Contemporary Novel
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index