Let me repeat this quotation from a laudatory pre-election essay on Obama from The New Republic:

Obama understands the white liberal American distaste for power as a symptom of white privilege, and he is certainly right.

Note the ease with which the term “white privilege” has migrated from the discourse of a mostly oppositional university/activist identity politics into the neoconservative lexicon, where it becomes yet another militaristic synonym for limp-wristed, effete, pacifist, girly, not-ready-for-the-dangers-of-the-world, “Old Europe” etc.

American multicultural identity politics seems destined, like all identity politics that went before it, to have begun in a just defense against the threat of complete cultural or existential dissolution and to end in an imperial exercise of a power that justifies itself with reference to a no-longer operative powerlessness.

Previous examples include: American exceptionalism, begun in the Biblical universal history of the oppressed Puritans and ending in the genocide of Native Americans and the justification of slavery and American imperialism; German nationalism, which started out as a resistance against the twin Enlightenment pincers of the English market and the French state and ended in the Holocaust; and Zionism, birthed by resistance to the anti-semitism of Europe and now responsible for the ongoing Palestinian genocide.

The phrase “white privilege” already functions as a discursive power-play belying the theory that underwrites it. Typically an exchange goes like this: person A makes an claim, usually one linking a non-race-based form of oppression to a race-based one, or else asserting the non-determinate relation between race and culture; person B replies that person A could only make such a linkage or such a statement because he or she was blinded by his or her white privilege.

Now, if this argumentative move works, it’s because the protocols of discourse surrounding the conversation valorize the non-possession of white skin; in other words, the term only takes on its discursive function in an atmosphere of the privileging of the anti-white.

Person A could of course object again that his or her claim were universally or just trivially true and not conditioned by her privilege, but this would only activate the second mechanism which makes white privilege a powerful phrase: possession of it cannot be denied, because denial of it is the leading indicator of its possession. In other words, only someone with an excess of white privilege would deny possessing it.

The most amusing conversations happen when both interlocutors are persons of color, as often happens since no two people of any skin color or any “culture” (whatever that means) will agree on everything. Then one speaks of ethnic self-hatred, internalized white privilege and everything we’re primarily familiar with from the repertoire of the defender of Israel.

Aside: “People of color” is itself a mystificatory term, serving to obscure the class difference between, for instance, the right-wing racist upper-middle class non-white person and the impoverished excluded working- or underclass non-white person, to the benefit of the former. For instance, Oprah Winfrey gets to be seen as part of an internationally oppressed culture because she is a person of color, which allows her to legitimate her colonizing actions on an African continent to which identity politics grants her a proprietary claim that, from the point of view of political analysis and ordinary morality, is wholly indefensible.

“White privilege,” for all its proponents’ talk of “intersectionality,” also tends to de-legitimate or vitiate intra-cultural or pan-cultural forms of political resistance, such as feminism and gay liberation.

For instance, in the wake of the passage of Propostion 8, for which African-American voters in California cast a non-decisive but alarming 70% of their vote, defenders of the concept “white privilege” asserted that the LGBT movement was too driven by narrow middle-class white interests (true enough) and that it did not do enough to explain its cause to African-American citizens. This too would be fair enough, except that it’s identity-politics conventional wisdom that members of minority groups should not be expected to explain why their oppression is wrong or why their group does not pose a threat. Why this double-standard for people minoritzed for reasons other than race or culture? Largely, I suspect, because racial/cultural identity politics always serve to shore up conservative tendencies within a culture as a means of maintaining a cohesion that benefits the ruling class of the oppressed group. Certain strains of feminism, LGBT liberationism, Marxism and anarchism threaten to dissolve the cohesion of all cultures in favor of a more radical egalitarianism than that which can be established between stratified identity groups.

I began with a quote from The New Republic, that bastion of neoliberal imperial ideology; let me conclude with an ambivalent quotation from an essay in its slightly more moderate counterpart The Atlantic Monthly:

Zionism may actually be the most successful national liberation movement of the 20th century.

Whatever the achievements of Zionism—

(and they are real, just as American exceptionalism produced the humane culture of abolition and Transcendentalism, German nationalism gave us some of the greatest achievements in nineteenth-century European philosophy and literature, and U.S. multiculturalism built and codified a twentieth-century literary and musical canon surpassing in genius much of anything done in the white mainstream: “every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism”)

—its morally calamitous career, which I have the right to comment on since my tax dollars fund it, should warn us against any ideology which conceives of liberation in national, racial or creedal terms.

“White privilege” was a useful concept once, and in some circumstances it still is, but let us not overlook its oppressive underbelly, its capacity to provide rhetorical cover for those most intractable minoritarian privileges of class and empire.

The claim of the World-Spirit rises above all special claims.
—Hegel

I don’t know what it is that so disturbs me about the screaming crowds, the interminable TV coverage, the invocations of Lincoln and King, the full conscription of humane culture from pop star to poet. Lewis Lapham wrote a book called The Wish for Kings, and that—not hope, not change, not a new dawn or a dream come true—is what I sense here. A population so demoralized, so brutally cut off from the social, so immersed in totalizingly mediating technologies, yearns for a kind of Hegelian union in the state of subjective consciousness with world-spirit. When white conservatives do it, we know what to call it. But we knowers feel odd calling this by its right name due to its canny conflation with a certain teleogical version of the African-American experience.

Obama understands the white liberal American distaste for power as a symptom of white privilege, and he is certainly right.
—David Samuels

And this has been my qualm about “multiculturalism” in academe and popular culture, which would have been a good idea, but which has become a mere rainbow-hued reinscription of American nationalism. In university survey courses, for instance, multiculturalism means that you will read books by WASP Americans, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latino/a Americans, Arab-Americans and Native Americans, and what this boils down to is that you will have spent your undergraduate career reading books by Americans; diversity never looked so uniform. The conservative will complain that there’s no room for Shakespeare; my complaint is that there is no room for any language other than English, no matter how inflected with immigrant languages, and if you don’t make it far enough across the ocean to reach the literature of England, you can be damn sure that Russia and China and India and Nigeria and everywhere else remain a blank. American ideology, ever resourceful, has taught us to laugh at the Puritans, but, hey, when it comes to diversity we sure are a city on a hill. Even Toni Morrison, perhaps our greatest novelist, and one who seemed to know better, has caught the bug. Meanwhile the president-elect mulls intervention in Darfur and journalists wonder what our president of African descent will “do for” Africa, as if the concept of diaspora has convinced American ethnic bourgeoisies and their white missionary/NGO counterparts that they own the places they came from. The world can look forward to the “multicultural person’s burden.”

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind.
—Toni Morrison

But, much as the pleasant-faced, feel-good, humanitarian imperialism that the coming years promise disgust me, I cannot pose as a Leftist purist, though I am that to a certain extent. Personally I am also disgusted by this desire of my generational cohort, black and white, to melt into the television and fuse with the state. I have an anarch taste for fragmentation and drift, mess and chaos, bohemia and poetry, and our new body politic, shorn of its mangy Bush, is altogether too clean for me. Now you will be given hard stares if you mutter darkly about the state of the world, now you will be suspect if you reject the new normal—Bono and Sanjay Gupta, Save Darfur and escalate Afghanistan. America’s back and better than ever, and they’re partying in the city on the hill, and naysayers can go to the devil. Well, I suppose my party is the devil’s after all.

The realist novel’s biggest English ancestors are Defoe (whose texts were faux-memoirs written by people who had had remarkable experiences in minutely described natural or social settings—Robinson Crusoe on his island and Moll Flanders in London and imperial environs) and Richardson (whose texts also posed as real documents—letters, this time—recording minutely the goings on in bourgeois homes). Realism’s commitment to reality, at the beginning, went all the way down; no third-person narrator obtruded on the transmission of experience. Theorists from Watt to Josipovici have convincingly linked this to the ethos of the rising middle-class, Protestantism and scientism.

However, there was another tradition co-existing with this and related to it, in which the commitment to reality gets mocked all to pieces: in this genre, whose biggest English eighteenth- century exempla are Gulliver’s Travels and Tristram Shandy, documentary records of “reality” either get put in question by the impossibility of what they describe or by the writer’s own manic linguistic proliferations which both testify to and undermine writing’s referential function. This tradition is actually the root of the novel proper, beginning as it does with Don Quixote.

(I almost made the adjective “Western” modify the noun “novel,” but it’s time to stop that: Cervantes was a prisoner in Algiers for five years, where he may or may not have read the Maqamat al-Hariri. Defoe’s inspiration for Robinson Crusoe was the Philosophus Autodidactus of Ibn Tufail, also read by Locke and Liebniz. These books, which I have not read, need to become more widely known, and Franco Moretti should put some graduate students to work seeing if their influence on western literature might not call into question some of our literary historical bromides. Generally, I’ll say this: we need to enlarge our historical.geographical parameters and stop thinking of everything in terms of “modernity”—a truly pernicious concept, I’m starting to think—and even “capitalism.” Perhaps, if we must be influenced by the Christian turn in Continental Philosophy, we might adopt something like “monotheism” as our governing abstraction, if we need one. It would at least have the effect of dissolving some of the artificial separations between national literatures, between the so-called “medieval” and the so-called “modern” and between “East” and “West.”)

Anyway, third-person narratives up until this time either had a timeless, non-omniscient, fabular register, as in epics, romances and folk-tales, or had explicitly self-aware narrators who commented on their own storytelling, as in, for instance, Tom Jones.

(Full disclosure: I have never managed to finish Tom Jones or anything by Richardson; the thought of Clarissa makes me go all clammy. I asked a professor of mine once, “Did you really read the whole thing?” “Yeah,” he said, “it was on my orals.” I asked: “How was it?” He replied, “Hard on the wrist.”)

The real nineteenth-century revolution is the invisible but omniscient third-person narrator and its attendant innovation, James Wood’s beloved free indirect discourse. This technique is already developing in Jane Austen and gets taken up and really radicalized by Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot, Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and on into the present.

(These writers, psychological realists, applied free-indirect technique systematically to social realism. In that sense, both groups are realist, but the word needs a modifier to remain intelligible.)

It’s essentially a modernist technique, from which stream of consciousness develops, not a Victorian one. The Victorian writers who tried it didn’t do it consistently, and most Victorian novels are actually participating in one or another eighteenth-century tradition. Dickens, for instance, who often gets referred to as a paradigmatic Victorian realist, uses the Fielding technique of the foregrounded, chatty narrator far more than he uses free indirect discourse; so does George Eliot, so does Thackeray. Charlotte Bronte gives us faux-memoirs, her sister Emily gives us a Sternean or Swiftian collection of nested texts that certainly don’t add up to unproblematic omniscience. The Victorians don’t disguise that they’re writing fiction, but constantly make us aware of the fact that they are; say what you like about them, but they are not epistemologically naive.

Narrative reflexivity is not postmodern, but rather as old as the hills, going back to when Homer invoked the muse. It’s narrative invisibility that is new, the production of text out of seemingly thin air, and not just text, but text that makes the entire world, inner and outer, legible. It’s not just new, it’s “modern”—or modernist, rather.

If our current bête noire is the psychological realism championed by James Wood, we should pay attention to his likes and dislikes: he more or less dislikes Dickens and loathes his influence, he seems to agree with Henry James that George Eliot’s narrators are not nearly invisible enough, and all of his favorite old writers are grouped around the modernist years, 1870-1930 (Chekhov, Woolf, Lawrence, etc.).

In other words, the popular account of the modernists against the Victorians is incorrect: what we’re actually seeing is a battle between two or maybe three different tendencies within modernism.

Okay, enough for tonight, but I hope to say more later, perhaps with reference to James Joyce…

Wow, the internet has been agreeing with me recently. First we have at n+1 (whose guiding lights I don’t much admire, but which does produce some good stuff) a review of Neil Gross’s sociological account of Richard Rorty’s career, which splendidly questions the supposed omniscience of sociologies of art and intellect:

Bourdieu and Rorty thus agreed that appeals to something more enduring than certain arrangements of contingent social practices are simply the boasts of the arrogant and the future historiography of the victors. But where Rorty saw his own task as clearing away all the junk of disciplinary arrogance to show that there is nothing that everything else is really about, Bourdieu thought that the understanding of all knowledge as social entails the revelation that everything is really about jockeying for status.

Bourdieu thus saw to it that one professorial cohort emerged from the whole thing with fancier vestments: the sociologists. Bourdieu preached a “reflexive sociology” in which sociology’s instruments were to be directed back upon itself in at attempt to show that its own techniques were so powerful that even its own techniques could not resist its own techniques. Bourdieu redrew the lines of the reality/appearance distinction such that now only the sociologists, with their knowledge of status, stood in the unfiltered light of the really real. It was an invincible status grab. It is in this context, I think, that Gross’s decision to try out his new theory on Rorty is best understood: Rorty makes it difficult to take Bourdieu quite as seriously as Bourdieu took himself.

Then, some evolutionary psychologists come out of the woodwork with a discourse on literature so extraordinarily seventh-grade that it hardly bears commentary:

Their research suggests that classic British novels from the 19th century not only reflect the values of Victorian society, they also shaped them. Archetypal novels from the period extolled the virtues of an egalitarian society and pitted cooperation and affability against individuals’ hunger for power and dominance. For example in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke turns her back on wealth to help the poor, while Bram Stoker’s nocturnal menace, Count Dracula, comes to represent the worst excesses of aristocratic dominance.

The team of evolutionary psychologists, led by Joseph Carroll at the University of Missouri in St Louis, applied Darwin’s theory of evolution to literature by asking 500 academics to fill in questionnaires on characters from 201 classic Victorian novels. The respondents were asked to define characters as protagonists or antagonists, rate their personality traits, and comment on their emotional response to the characters.

They found that leading characters fell into groups that mirrored the cooperative nature of a hunter-gatherer society, where individual urges for power and wealth were suppressed for the good of the community.

The effect of such moralistic literature was to uphold and instil a sense of fairness and altruism in society at large, the researchers claim in the journal Evolutionary Psychology. “By enforcing these norms, humans succeed in controlling ‘free riders’ or ‘cheaters’ and they thus make it possible for genuinely altruistic genes to survive within a social group,” they write.

Jonathan Gottschall, a co-author at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, told New Scientist magazine that in Victorian novels, dominant behaviour is stigmatised. “Bad guys and girls are just dominance machines, they are obsessed with getting ahead, they rarely have pro-social behaviours,” he said. But the more cooperative a group became, the more likely it was to survive and spread its values.

A few characters were judged to have both good and bad traits, such as Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy. The conflicts they demonstrate reflect the strains of maintaining such a cooperative social order, Carroll said.

It would be tedious to take this apart (let me direct you to Louis Menand’s immortal essay on Steven Pinker), but I’ll say that I detect one continuity between the radical demystifiers of literature who follow Bourdieu or Foucault and these plainly reactionary illiterates: both regard form, that is, literary language, as at best window dressing and at worst disguise. When you peel it away, what you find is a moral tale: it doesn’t matter that, as people point out in the comments section to the above article, George Eliot’s narrator so complicates the motivations and behaviors and thought processes of Middlemarch’s characters that it’s impossible not to see Dorothea’s idealism as naive and self-involved, or Casaubon’s arrogance and frigidity as the tragic wager against life that the would-be genius makes, or indeed the narrator’s own omniscience as fraught and uncertain in a world of ceaseless change and complication; and all this is a million miles away from something like Dracula. And Middlemarch is still at least a little bit of a moral tale…what would these people do with Bleak House or The Kreutzer Sonata or Amerika or To the Lighthouse or Sula or The Hour of the Star or Underworld or Elizabeth Costello? Language in these books doesn’t hide some “real” natural process, whether evolution or the attempt to win status. Rather, language produces sensations, induces reflection, comments upon and overrides these processes.

Scienctism will fail in the end because it refuses to recognize the autonomy of human values. I learned from Homer, not Darwin, that nature is not moral but that humans are. Our morality is a second-order process, to be sure, parasitic upon its material host, but it is not wholly determined by that host. This is what consciousness means. Scientism denies consciousness, only to bring it in through the back door of the scientist’s ability to understand it all. This is precisely what literary language, activated by consciousness and excessive of consciousness, puts in question. It doesn’t resolve the tension between the first- and second-order in our lives, but limns it.

Anyway, the headline is “Victorian novels helped us evolve into better people, say psychologists.” We’re better people? “Our” client state’s hugely powerful army just spent the last two weeks racking up a body count of 1000 in a starved, captive population made up either of non-combatants or of combatants so profoundly outnumbered and outgunned as essentially to be prisoners of war already; the political, business and intellectual class of “our” Dracula-enlightened countries mostly justified or paid for this. Hard to say that we’ve improved all that much from the time of the suppression of the Indian or Morant Bay rebellions.

What am I defending when I defend literature? (I am not, by the way, too hung up on the name: call it poetry, call it art, call it the aesthetic, whatever; nor am I hung up on any particular forms: comics can count, as can hip-hop, as can teen TV dramas, etc. etc.)

Let me quote a sentence from another contemporary academic literary critic (I don’t quote these critics by name because 1. my quibble is not with a specific argument but with a climate of opinion and 2. the “democracy” of the internet might allow the self-googling powerful to harass the powerless who wish to discuss them at a distance from the exercise of their power). At any rate, onward with my quotation: “Let’s let ‘lyric’ [i.e., lyric poetry as opposed to all other forms] dissolve into literature and ‘literature’ into culture.”

The critic here takes issue with the privileging of lyric as that genre of literature which, because it is farthest from the prosaics of social description, political declamation or philosophical system-building, can best encapsulate what differentiates literary discourse from all other types of discourse. Instead, the critic implies, discourse is discourse is discourse: all are equally socially-constructed, thus all equally express cultural solutions to cultural problems; ergo, to privilege one as somehow transcendent is to flee the cultural.

What could be wrong with this? There are mundane objections that don’t interest me (e.g., from a pedagogical perspective, it helps students arrive at an understanding of a text if they understand what tradition the text places itself in, which means that you cannot merely discard these categories as if they were last season’s fashions), but I want to focus on the claim that literature should be dissolved into culture.

This claim will be read by anyone schooled in the last thirty years of academic literary criticism as left-wing, that is, on the side of the oppressed and against constituted authority. But if literary theory has taught us anything (and I would never argue that it has not), it’s taught us that all discourses persuade by making their assumptions seem natural. The assumption underlying the claim under discussion seems to be left-wing because to privilege any discourse is 1. elitist, since not all people will, because of class or cultural barriers, have or not wish to have access to privileged discourse, and 2. conservative in that it assumes a realm apart from the cultural struggles wherein the marginalized work to gain their fair place.

We regard as natural the assumption that elevating any one discourse necessarily excludes and marginalizes and that attempting to flee from the field of the political is conservative. But these assumptions only seem natural because they conceal their dubious foundation, which is the idea that liberation is essentially collective and that it can only come about through politics (which means through the bullet and through the state, or, to reduce further, through coercion).

What does the word “culture” mean, anyway? Don’t we just use it as a polite term for religion, or, more properly, for internalized theocracy? The benighted liberal who hasn’t studied literary theory says, when confronted with a strange cultural practice, “Well, they just do that because of their culture,” i.e., they, whoever they are, have collectively chosen to submit themselves to some totalizing body of doctrine which they mindlessly enact, and so we cannot judge them for that. The wised-up liberal who has his or her Foucault by heart, knows that we, whoever we are, are no better than they, and mindlessly enact our own subjection to fictive totalities.

The purpose of coming to this realization was, initially, to distance ourselves from our “culture,” to attain mind, in the old Hegelo-Marxist logic to make of ourselves the object of our reflection and thus achieve immanent self-transcendence, which may just be a myth, but, hell, it’s a great one.

We’ve arrived now, though, at a mere conservative cynicism that still manages to disguise itself as progressive: discourse is discourse is discourse, culture is culture is culture, that’s just the way it is, some things don’t ever change. There’s no escape. And not only is there no escape, but the elaborate explanations of the logic of no-escape still called for by a quietly science-envying academic establishment will have the delightfully paradoxical effect of inviting into the socially-constructivist redoubt of the embattled English department who else but the sociobiologists and cognitive scientists. If we want to know how it all works, they will surely tell us better than a gaggle of amateur sociologists. No escape, say the social Darwinists, for race actually exists and women think math is hard; no escape, say the cognitive scientists, for the mind is an illusory projection of the cruddy grey brain. And I am sure I will live to see the historicists and the sociologists of literature agreeing with them: no escape.

And that, ultimately, is what I’m defending: escape. Literature cannot be equal to culture because culture is the totalizing system that wants to claim us, that wants to make us alike, that wants us to worship it. Culture (and here I will offend people by saying that I don’t care which culture, whether that of the oppressor or of the oppressed, who will change places in the long run anyway, which is the lesson, if we must have a lesson, of Zionism) is difference expressed collectively, over the heads and over the voices of those it would organize.

But literature, or art, or poetry, or the aesthetic, is the snake in culture’s garden. It points the way out by reminding us that difference meaningfully exists at the level of the individual, not the individual human person, for that too is a totalizing and culturally-constructed category, but of the individual word, sentence, paragraph or utterance. And liberation will consist of allowing people the means to access this difference, because literature dissolved into culture is nothing other than achieved totalitarianism, whether of a religious clerisy or a scientistic elite, literature dissolved into culture will dissolve the fragile materials by which a self, or a relationship, or a feeling is constructed.

I was googling António Lobo Antunes, just to find some stuff out because I don’t have time to read his books right now (though perhaps if one googled less…o information age!), and I saw this:

Like Faulkner in his great novels of the ’30s, Antunes deploys idiot monologues, garrulous, colloquial voices, superheated atmospherics and dismembered narratives that exalt not-knowing as a prime literary excitement.

To Antunes’s credit, he refuses to take for granted the novel as a form. He writes as if it were a fresh invention, as if the many innovations of the last century – stream of consciousness, for one – were his for the taking. At liberty to annotate his own story’s composition, Paulo praises the nib of his pen: “Clearer and clearer, the scribbling as the metal gets rid of a piece of dirt . . . and the piece of dirt is imprisoned in a blue strain, another way of writing, telling a story . . . what story? Mine too maybe mine or the reverse of mine.”

Does Antunes risk what the critic Harold Bloom calls “belatedness,” that sense that what he’s doing has already been done – and quite well – before? Most likely. It is impossible not to read his dense, difficult prose in the light of his illustrious predecessors. But then most things have been done well before, and that’s hardly reason to stop doing them. The hunt for originality as a virtue in its own right often results in anxious palaver.

What interests me here is that only certain kinds of writing get tagged as belated or derivative, generally speaking. Given that there’s nothing new under the sun and that historical rupture is mostly a myth, people writing today or any other day are doing something somebody else did before. The modernists themselves acknowledged their predecessors and only someone who hadn’t been paying attention could see the innovations of the 1920s as a radical break; pages of Austen’s 1818 Persuasion sound eerily like Woolf’s 1925 Mrs Dalloway, and neither Dickens nor Tolstoy nor George Eliot are as staid as people misremember.

But somehow it’s only adumbrations of high modernist technique that get called out for being unoriginal. Reviews of Jhumpa Lahiri don’t hinge on her belated indebtedness to a century’s perfection of the realist art story, and who worries about Zadie Smith’s belatedness when she carries on in the manner of Forster, or of Forster writing a screenplay anyway? It’s not originality as such that concerns people, because nobody really believes in originality as such; it’s rather the sense that certain representational strategies and artistic visions are superannuated, swept like socialism and Gregor Samsa into the dustbin of history. My point, repeating Z. Smith herself: if you write more or less in the tradition of Chekhov on a boring day (and nothing against Chekhov, I revere Chekhov, go read “In the Ravine” if you can stand it), you will be seen as well within a norm and perpetuating a legitimate style, but if you write in the tradition of Joyce or Woolf or Faulkner at their most outrageous, you will be seen as nostalgic, backward-looking, foolishly out of time.

À propos of this, at Contra James Wood:

Contra Wood, The Savage Detectives articulates the stubborn persistence of a utopia of poetry (poetry in its broadest sense, not just verse but the subversive transformation of daily life by the “marvelous”) in the face of history’s sharpest disappointments. This utopia persists precisely to the extent that it has not appeared; it is the “absent center” of the novel itself. Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima are the trägers, the bearers, of “poetry” for young Juan Garcia Madero and many the novel’s other characters, just as, in a kind of infinite regression, Cesárea Tinajero of the original “Visceral Realist” generation is poetry’s träger for Lima and Belano. Yet the pair’s rediscovery of Tinajero leads to her demise, and Belano and Lima themselves fade away. Nobody therefore really occupies “the place of poetry,” but it is this very fact which keeps poetry alive as a radical possibility, as – to switch to a different idiom – une promesse de bonheur. At another level, the death of Tinajero and the play of Bolaño-Belano in the context of the absence from the novel of the alter-ego’s point of view all suggest an effacing of author-as-authority. Could “the author,” even a nominally radical author, really be a kind of caudillo that needs to be displaced? If this is the case, then if anything perishes in the course of the novel it is the elitism that was such a prominent if problematic feature of much twentieth-century aesthetic and political vanguardism, here giving way not to restorationist ‘maturity’ but to an ostensibly more radically democratic and indigenous aesthetic, “from below.” And in fact we can see precisely this sort of working-out of a historical and cultural dialectic in the very form of The Savage Detectives. On the one hand, the novel’s comprehensive, epic ambitions – it is nothing less than the life-cycle of a generation – and its carnivalesque juggling of voices and chronologies call to mind the great ‘high modernist’ novels of El Boom – of Marquez and Cortazar, Vargas Llosa and Fuentes. These novels were the products of a period of Latin American optimism and self-assertion in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. Yet Savage Detective’s most fundamental structuring device is the testimonio, the first-person testimonial-style narrative that came to occupy an important place in Latin American prose in the period after the Boom.[3] This was the period not of revolution and self-assertion but of reaction and retrenchment, of dictatorships and death-squads, and its predominant literary mode is correspondingly both more chastened and more populist – a bedrock of fugitive resistance. The Savage Detectives, then, may be read as a Boom novel filtered through, and revised by, the post-Boom testimonial, in the service of creating a new form that includes its own prehistory. It’s a feat of insurgent literary zapatismo.

(This makes me want to finish The Savage Detectives, which I unfortunately never did.)

But the utopian potential of poetry can hardly be thought through by an extant form of criticism (and the supposedly most liberatory forms of criticism are often the worst at it) because poetry is that usage of language which evades verbal categorization and description even as experience itself does. Literary language is an experience, it is performative, it does not describe something but rather is that something. But it is something I would like to bring into the world, to bring about in the world…

Five years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I had a class on modernist literature that frustrated me and this is what I wrote and on this I rest my case:

Every Monday night we have the same discussion. Is it hopeful or bleak, optimistic or pessimistic? What is (Joyce Eliot Woolf) saying here about life? How do you feel after reading these works as works? is the question we avoid. If we analyze them as texts, certainly we can piece out some meaning, some statement, some prescription. But how do we feel after we read them? Better, does the ending of King Lear leave you desolate, hopeless, disconsolate? I tend to doubt it. I feel exhilarated at the end of King Lear, The Dead, The Waste Land, Mrs. Dalloway, and the thrill hasn’t got a thing to do with any supposed pronouncement on the writers’ parts about the perfidy or the splendor of existence. Listen: “She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him{the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He had made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.” We move into a region where hope and despair are a little irrelevant, where we are free to move about in the world that feels exactly like the world we live in when we’re not thinking about putting on our clothes, talking to the people we talk to, doing the work we have to do. The world inside that is not sole or inviolable, but all that has the ability to connect, over the talk and the signals and that makes the talk and the signals possible. When language goes on holiday: when it stops functioning smooth and workaday, when it bewitches the intellect that is only froth on the surface of an ocean: when everything—philosophy and religion and anti-philosophy at once—fails, everything but the burning certain knowledge that there is a world where we live and cannot talk about, where we share but cannot touch. Is it optimistic or pessimistic? But it’s just life, the life we know best, the one that is present at every second but can’t show its face directly. No, that’s not it, that won’t do. There isn’t a word; at best there are words, but not at their everyday posts, no, there are words only in their best holiday array, and if it’s their very best, tears will fall from our eyes but the taste or touch of them won’t tell us if we’re happy or sad.

“The payoff was considerable.”

I find this sentence in the midst of an academic work examining how modernist writers sought legitimacy and accreditation of their work in the changing social context of capitalism’s shift to a metropolitan consumer culture for which the old bourgeois ideals were no longer useful. The payoff was considerable, then, for not writing Victorian novels in a climate that no longer had any use for them.

Leaving aside the rightness or wrongness of this theory, I want to note that, despite the author’s stated Foucauldian and Bourdieuian commitments to the critique of Enlightenment reason and capitalist ideology, the allegorical hero of Enlightenment capitalism, homo economicus, the rational agent who keeps society afloat by pursuing his material interests, occurs here in the figure of the writer.

Such anti-capitalist critiques tell us that capitalist ideology’s picture of human nature is wrong in all respects—with the exception of writers of imaginative literature, who, for all their own commitments to resisting the absolutist encroachments of an all-commodifying materialism, nevertheless, when you get past all that fussy poetry, represent no values higher than the calculation of their own payoff.

On the occasion of the fall of the Berlin Wall, John Berger claimed that it was Marxism’s adoption of materialism (capitalist anti-metaphysics) that lead to communism’s practical and moral failure in the twentieth century. A parable for the materialist critic.

Other materialisms exist, of course, ones prematurely swept into the dustbin of history by the triumph of capitalism and its mainstream left-wing heresies. These philosophies find immanent within the material that which cannot be reduced to the material though it cannot be embodied (i.e., cannot exist) in any other way. Viewing literary texts as such material objects would deal a blow to the critic’s shrinking place of power in the university panopticon, but it would have the benefit of doing honor to a more generous vision of our lives than so many “liberatory” theories have allowed for.