Showing papers in "Contemporary Literature in 1981"

Marxism and Deconstruction

Abstract: In discovering that "men make history,"' the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie kicked out from under themselves the very transcendental signifiers they needed to legitimate that history ideologically. But this damage could be contained by a simple fact: in pulling the metaphysical carpet out from under themselves, they pulled it out in the same stroke from under their opponents. Do we find the latest rehearsal of this maneuver in the confrontation between deconstructionism and Marxism?

An Interview With Nadine Gordimer

Abstract: This interview took place on the mellow afternoon of 8 April 1980, during the South African autumn, at Nadine Gordimer's home of many years in Parktown, a lush, old residential suburb of Johannesburg. The setting is familiar to many South African writers, for, although Gordimer avoids coverage of her very private life, her house is always open to those blacks and whites who have a little magazine to launch, a new manuscript to prepare for print, a practitioner's problem to solve. Gordimer is the doyenne of South African English letters. Her concern has always been that the literature should flourish despite the climate of repression that has created a daily struggle with censorship, bannings of books and people, police intervention, and financial hardships. For three decades, now, her firm support of the notion of freedom of expression in literature, a notion alien to the apartheid society, has been an inspirational touchstone to many. Although to her countrymen at large she might seem a remote figure-an intellectual stylist who has accumulated an international reputation, one who brings back home the big prizes no South African has won before-to the few peers she has within the country of her birth, she is reliably at the center of the tender and beleaguered literary scene, on call, ready with a strategy or a statement. A slight and elegant person, a grandmother at 57, Gordimer has in recent years had her inscrutable privacy invaded by the publicity following her joint winning of the Booker Prize for The Conservationist (1974) and the promotional hype attendant on the appearance of her Burger's Daughter in 1979. After a promotional tour for Jonathan Cape and for Viking-she appeared even on the Tonight Show-she was off again, this time to Belgium, to receive an hon-

Franz Kafka and Animals

Abstract: "I am separated from all things by a hollow space," Kafka wrote in his diary in 1911, "and I do not even reach to its boundaries."' And in another entry of 1913: "Everything appears to me constructed ... I am chasing after constructions. I enter a room, and I find them in a corner, a white tangle."2 Such strange (yet vaguely familiar) moments are faithfully recorded in the Diaries, which Kafka clung to as a mode of self-rescue; for he experienced the present as a "phantom state" in which the self, flickering and unknowable, forever merged into its opposite under the exigencies of living. Sensing that this instability cursed his relationships with bad faith or the danger of merging into the other, Kafka was to renounce them out of love.3 And as a writer, his discovery that language might pursue the self but never reach it led him to envision this failure to reach the goal of self-knowledge as our common fate, and to posit an "indestructible" self permanently hidden from us as his only article of faith.4 "What one is," he wrote, "one cannot express, for one is just that; one can

An Interview with John Barth

Abstract: J. B. et la creation romanesque| influence recue de la forme epistolaire du 18 siecle| imitation des documents de la vie. Le post-modernisme et la fin du roman? Langage et mythopoetique...

Technology and Culture in Habermas and Baudrillard

Abstract: Since the Second World War Marxist theory has confronted a conjuncture that has proven increasingly recalcitrant to its categories and analysis. Although the mode of production has remained capitalist, and therefore amenable to the critique of political economy, the locus of revolution and social protest has shifted further and further away from the labor process within the most advanced capitalist nations. In the period 1840 to 1880, when Marx searched the world panorama for signs of emancipatory stirrings, his eyes fixed on the English, French, and German factory workers, the proletariat that resisted the harsh discipline of the new labor process. His hopes for the transformation of civil society lay with a class that was becoming or was sure to become the most numerous, the most downtrodden, the most exploited but at the same time the most necessary to modern capitalism. Marx tended to overlook or at least downplay the more ambiguous features of the situation. The most militant rebels came from

Antonio Gramsci's Sociology of Literature

Abstract: Until 1975, with the publication of Valentino Gerratana's critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's Quaderni del carcere (prison notebooks), there was no authoritative text with which to assess Gramsci's notes on literature and culture in general. The Einaudi volume entitled Letteratura e vita nazionale was first published in 1950 and for twenty-five years this "popular" edition, which arbitrarily isolated Gramsci's reflections on literature and related topics from their original context, served as the basis of scholarly investigations on Gramsci's contribution to the sociology of literature.'

Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting: Beyond Literary Cubism

Abstract: Plaidoyer en faveur de la lisibilite du sens et partant de la non-abstraction de l'ecriture steinienne: qui ne saurait donc, selon l'A., etre apparentee au cubisme litteraire.

Olaf Stapledon and the Novel about the Future

Abstract: While novels about the future are popular these days as they were not a century ago, it can be argued that most of them treat the future the same way conventional novels have always treated the past; that the change in subject, while it has generated a new set of images, has not led to any significant formal change or innovation. To make us experience the future as something other than a bizarre version of the past demands the creation of a special form that, while coherent, will be both surprising and disconcerting. One author who has confronted this problem directly is Olaf Stapledon whose work, while much admired for its "ideas," has been neglected as art, in part because the nature of the aesthetic problem he solves has not been appreciated.' Stapledon developed a form that is unique in literature, one that manages to engage the future without defusing its potential for the unforeseen. We see elements of this form in a

"Straight" and "Secret" History in Vietnam War Literature

Abstract: Graham Greene concludes the dedicatory letter to R6n6 and Phuong that prefaces The Quiet American (1955) this way: "This is a story and not a piece of history, and I hope that as a story about a few imaginary characters it will pass for both of you one hot Saigon evening."' But despite Greene's ironic disclaimer, readers have understood that the novel is a history of the early fate of Americans in Vietnam. "Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina," Michael Herr writes in Dispatches (1977), "when Alden Pyle's body washed up under the bridge at Dakao, his lungs all full of mud. .. ."2 And readers have recognized that the novel is a visionary or proleptic history of what would happen to Americans in Vietnam. "He had always understood what was going to happen there," Gloria Emerson writes in her account of an interview with Greene, "and in that small and quiet novel, told us nearly everything.'"3 Greene's remark notwithstanding, The Quiet American is a sort of history, a fiction of the actual past and the real future, a "story" in the place of "history." The collapse of the distinction between these two terms occurs in much of the literature of the American war

Notes on Marxism and the Lyric

Abstract: Marxist literary criticism has been largely concerned with drama and the novel since the days when Marx planned his unwritten work on Balzac's Comidie humaine. Lyric poetry, with its traditional preoccupation with love, death, nature, and transcendence, has seemed resistant to critical methods seeking to discover in the literary work the reflection of specific social conflicts and historical conjunctures; it has seemed more amenable to purely formalist approaches. The New Criticism, the triumphant countercurrent to the Marxist criticism of the twenties and thirties, developed its power most convincingly in close and subtle readings of lyric poems that Marxism seemed powerless to confront as deeply. Marxists who have undertaken the analysis of lyric poetry have often attempted to import the techniques of novel and drama theory to the realm of the lyric and sought to find in individual poems the reflection of sociohistoric forces and conflicts. In what follows, I will examine the pitfalls of this procedure and then counterpose what I believe is a more fruitful Marxist approach to the lyric. A good illustration of what might be termed the "novelistic" or "realist" approach to poetry is Norman Rudich's article, "Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan': His Anti-Political Vision," which argues that Coleridge's celebrated lyric-often taken as an early example of symbolist podsie pure-is actually "an adequate expression of Coleridge's estimate of his relation to his time."' Through the association of Kubla Khan with Napoleon-a link that Rudich attempts to

Structuralism and Its Successors

Abstract: There exists a great ideological distance between Marxism and structural linguistics. This is primarily a consequence of the origin of European structural linguistics in the general anti-materialist and anti-Marxist movement of the late nineteenth century, and also a consequence of the subsequent. influence which spiritualistic ideologies (founded on mathematical Platonism or finalistic biology) have had on particular currents of structuralism itself. When Cassirer, in a famous lecture given in 1945 shortly before his death, hailed the advent of structural linguistics as a victory of the "friends of Ideas" over the "supporters of matter" (referring to a famous passage in Plato's Sophist),' he was too familiar with both modern philosophy and linguistics to be mistaken. This shows how superficial and ill-conceived are certain "ideological unifications" of Marxism and structural linguistics which are apparently taking place in the Soviet Union. On the other hand, however, structural linguistics, like many other scientific approaches born of the "crisis of fundamentals" of the late nineteenth century, can lay claim to scientific achievements which it would be absurd to reject in a Zhdanovist spirit. For example, it would be absurd to deny the importance of synchronic descriptions of linguistic states, or the utility of the notion of a phoneme (once it has been purged of the subjectivist and anti-naturalistic strains with which it first emerged). Furthermore,

On "The Aesthetic Dimension": A Conversation with Herbert Marcuse

Abstract: A. This criticism, of course, I knew beforehand. And the book was written intentionally in a provocative way to reply exactly to that accusation. In the first place, I don't care what label is being given me; nothing could be of less interest to me. Secondly, I quote old man Marx himself, who said, "Moi je ne suis pas Marxiste. " In English: "I myself am not a Marxist." So, if you look at many of the people who today call themselves Marxists, I don't mind if I don't belong to the same group and don't have the same label. To be a little more serious about it, I do claim to be a Marxist. I do believe that his analysis of the capitalist society and the basic mechanisms which keep it going are still, today, more valid than ever before. As you may know, there is no such thing as a theory of socialism in Marx; there are only a few remarks. He never elaborated on them because he never claimed to be a prophet, and it would make no sense to give a prescription for the behavior of people in a free society which does not yet exist. That's a contradiction in itself. Now I did not claim in my little book that art is free from social determination, but I do deny that the social determinants affect the very substance of the work. One can formulate that by saying that the social determinants pertain to the style of the work but not to its substance or quality. Let's take an example-Hamlet, or, for that

Political Commitment and Poetic Subjectification: George Oppen's Test of Truth

Abstract: As an heir of modernist poetics, George Oppen, like all poetic inheritors, appears simultaneously as disciple and iconoclast. For Oppen, Pound is a fairly remote mentor and Williams is an older pioneer. The ground they broke becomes the foundation of a literary venture that both reinterprets and challenges modernist poetics on formal and ideological grounds. Oppen and his fellow objectivists may be seen as the followers of a well-established modernist tradition, a view best expressed by Hugh Kenner: "They are the best testimony to the strength of that tradition: to the fact that it had substance separable from the revolutionary high spirits of its launching. None of them makes as if to ignite bourgeois trousers. All that was history. They simply got on with their work."' But while Oppen did "get on with his work," we must also consider what he brought to it: a profound knowledge of left-wing politics heightened by years of activism. When we consider his own remarks, we find that, grounded in the tradition as they may be, they also denote a position of ethical concern that is usually foreign to earlier modernist utterance: "I'm trying to describe how the test of images can be a test of whether one's thought is valid, whether one can establish in a series of images, of experiences . . . whether or not one will consider the concept of humanity to be valid, something that is, or else have to regard it as being simply a word.'"2 In such statements as this, and in the whole of Oppen's poetic opus, the

Robbe-Grillet's Labyrinths: Structure and Meaning

Abstract: "Un architecte moderne, aussitat qu'on lui donne un projet A faire, il se met A dessiner un labyrinthe: les H.L.M., les cites de luxe en beton arme, ou meme l'univers quotidien des couloirs du metro ... ce sont &videmment ces murs qui nous enferment et nous &crasent: la peur, l'angoisse, le sadisme, etc."' Archeology has demonstrated that from its very beginnings in Egyptian art the labyrinth was a place that dealt with life and death-man's greatest mysteries. In the labyrinth men strove to overcome death and to renew life. A dead king-god was placed there so that his life in the afterworld might be preserved. The living kinggod renewed and strengthened his own vitality by association, in the labyrinth, with the immortal lives of his dead ancestors. The labyrinth generated emotions of joy, fear, and grief-emotions that produced ritual art in its earliest forms: music, dancing, sculpture, and painting. As tomb and temple, the labyrinth fostered art and literature, activities which in antiquity possessed religious and lifegiving significance.2

The Modern Sequence and Its Precursors

Abstract: A "new" genre, the modern poetic sequence, has evolved over the past century and a half or longer. It has emerged so naturally, so without fanfare, as hardly to have been noticed. Yet, once its existence has been pointed out, and a name proposed for it, 'tis very like a camel or a mountain or a whale or-to return to things literaryan epic poem. Its presence becomes abundantly obvious, for the modern sequence is the decisive form toward which all the developments of modern poetry have tended. It is the genre which best encompasses the shift in sensibility exemplified by starting a long poetic work "I celebrate myself, and sing myself," rather than "Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Achilles." The modern sequence goes many-sidedly into who and where we are subjectively; it springs from the same pressures on sensibility that have caused our poets' experiments with shorter forms. It, too, is a response to the lyrical possibilities of language opened up by those pressures in times of cultural and psychological crisis, when all past certainties have many times been thrown chaotically into question. More successfully than individual short lyrics, however, it fulfills the need for encompassment of disparate and often powerfully opposed tonalities and energies. It is striking that the presence of this genre, the outgrowth of poets' recognition and pursuit of "new thresholds, new anatomies" (Hart Crane's visionary exclamation in a somewhat different context), has gone unappreciated for the most part. It is especially striking that experts in the very works that represent it so overwhelmingly-such works as Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, the

Historical Criticism and Contemporary Poetry

Abstract: Two writers can represent (express) the same historical-social moment, but one can be an artist and the other a mere mouthpiece. To work out the question in detail, limiting oneself to describing that which the two represent and express socially, that is, summing up more or less well the characteristics of a determinate historical moment, means not yet even touching upon the artistic problem. All this can be useful and necessary, or rather it certainly is both, but in another field, that of political criticism, of the criticism of morals in the struggle to overcome and eradicate certain currents of feeling or of beliefs, certain attitudes toward life and toward the world. But it isn't history and criticism of art, and it can't be presented as such, at the risk of general confusion and the defeat or stagnation of rigorous concepts, that is, precisely the failure to attain the ends inherent in the cultural struggle.'