Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 2004"

On Laughter, the Grotesque, and the South African Transition: Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying

Abstract: In his agenda-setting book Post colonialism: Theory, Practice, or Process?, Ato Quayson bypasses the tedious issue of the exact dating of the "postcolonial moment" and the supposed rupture the term implies by calling for an anticipatory critical practice: "one which recognizes that the condition it names does not yet exist, while working to bring that condition into being" (9). The critic's task, he argues, is to "postcolonialize," to align himself or herself with an ongoing struggle against colonialism and its aftereffects. While oriented to the future, this work-in-progress requires a complex sense of historical configurations. It must be attentive to the dialectical interrelation of the residual and the emergent, to the ways in which "the dying" and "the being born" may be reconstellated to produce new perspectives and realities (16). If this project is Utopian, it is also mindful of the despair and misery that has so often been the lot of the colonized world, and of Africa in particular. The postcolonial, as Quayson puts in one of the most revealing passages in the book, is "almost a palpable affect." When we consider the deplorable stories from the continent that incessantly accost us in the newspaper and on television and the internet (the hanging of Ken SaroWiwa, the murderous violence in Algeria, or, more recently, that in Liberia and Darfur), "the two domains of pain and discourse seem impossible to separate completely" (46). Thus postcolonial studies (more so than other fields of literary and cultural scholarship, in Quayson's view) would seem to demand an urgent ethical response. To say this is not to jettison theoretical sophistication or textual play in favor of some sort of grim realism. On the contrary: it is no accident that Quayson's

Two Negations: Fear of Being Excluded and the Logic of Self-Esteem

Abstract: Another season of the concentration camp seems to be descending upon us.1 Now one is all the more conscious of one's own vulnerability as a second-class citizen of the United States who could potentially be deprived of a United States' nationality or right to legal residence by official decree. American politics and mass media expediently promote an anxiety that America, the last super-power of an imperial nature, has turned into the symbolic target of anti-colonial vengeance.2 This assessment in turn justifies the Federal Administration's insatiable search across the globe for signs attesting to imminent attacks by "terrorists." As long as the public buys this paranoid formula, a state of emergency can easily be linked to a global colonial war, and spread throughout an entire civil population. In reference to the campos de concentraciones by the Spanish in Cuba and the "concentration camps" by the English in South Africa, Giorgio Agamben gives an historical account of how the concentration camps were inaugurated around the beginning of the last century. The camps were "born not out of ordinary law (even less, as one might have supposed, from a transformation and development of criminal law) but out of a state of exception and martial law. This is even clearer in the Nazi Lager, concerning whose origins and juridical regime we are well informed. It has been noted that the juridical basis for internment was not common law but Schutzhaft (literally, protective custody), a juridical institution of Prussian origin that the Nazi jurors sometimes classified as a preventive police measure insofar as it allowed individuals to be 'taken into custody' independently of any criminal behavior, solely to avoid danger to the security of the state"

West’s Deadpan: Affect, Slapstick, and Publicity in Miss Lonelyhearts

Abstract: We still underestimate the twistedness of Nathanael West's sense of humor, the radical strangeness of what he once called his "private and unfunny jokes."1 Recall the following bit of comic obscenity from Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). Near the beginning of this, West's second novella, the titular protagonist, who writes an advice column for a New York newspaper and considers this messianic work, has a dream in two acts: in the first he "found himself on the stage of a crowded theater. He was a magician who did tricks with doorknobs. At his command they bled, flowered, spoke" (68). When the dream scene shifts, he finds himself on a drinking spree with his college chums. Wandering into the country, they decide to buy a lamb to kill and eat, "but on the condition that they sacrifice it to God before barbequeing it" (68). They prepare an altar on a rock in the woods, which they adorn with flowers; they elect Miss Lonelyhearts "priest"; and they chant "Christ, Christ, Jesus Christ" until Lonelyhearts brings the knife down for the kill. At this point, religious ritual becomes a rather gruesome slapstick:

The Radical Imaginary of the Bell Jar

Abstract: What comes to mind when you hear the phrase "The Bell JarV Haunting American classic? Girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown? Flawed first novel? Not her again! For many people the answer lies somewhere between these phrases. And to be sure the book invites such sentiment, a feeling of empathy or even pathos for the failings of its protagonist (and perhaps its author) to find solace. The lure or enticement of the reaction, or affect, that the book triggers is one that accounts at least in part for the book's stunning popularity even forty years after its initial publication. Sylvia Plath has indeed become a cottage industry. In 2003 alone, a major motion picture called Sylvia, an off-Broadway production based on The Bell Jar, the publication of the Sylvia screenplay, a biography of Plath's estranged husband Ted Hughes called, simply, Her Husband, and the megabookstore displays which purposefully confuse The Bell Jar with Gwyneth Paltrow's movie role as Sylvia together have created a media frenzy. Focus Features' tagline for the movie, "life was too small to contain her," serves as a mandate to consumers: Life may have been too small, but Sylvia is large enough that everyone can and should have a piece of her.1 What we learn from this is not only savvy marketing strategies and the cultivation of a kind of mass literary taste for the classics, but also that the terms of female "containment" continue to plague Plath. "Containment" was of course the term coined by George Kennan in 1947 in "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" to describe both American domestic and foreign policy during the Cold War. It is perhaps because of its uncanny sense of perpetual female entrapment that Plath's story moves people such that The Bell Jar and its protagonist, Esther Greenwood, are compounded with their author and millions of readers in a circuit of feeling: we are encouraged to feel with or through The Bell Jar. This circuit of emotion situates The Bell Jar alongside a genre of fictions of sentiment. The 1 Plath perpetually appears in contemporary popular media. The female protagonist in the movie Ten Things I Hate about You (1999) reads The Bell Jar; in an episode of The Gilmore Girls, the show's heroine reads Plath's diaries; and rockstar Ryan Adams's song "Sylvia Plath" (2001) testifies to the ongoing obsession of youth culture with Plath.

Return to What One Imagines to Be There: Masculinity and Racial Otherness in Haruki Murakami’s Writings about China

Abstract: But since hegemonic (i.e. Western) definitions of masculinity continue to dominate our understanding of these so-called alternative models, even they inadvertently enforce stereotypes of "weaker" or "feminized" nonWestern masculinity. Studies of Asian masculinity are still conspicuously rare. A new body of work on Asian masculinities is always expected to be emphatically local, culturally specific, and history-oriented, presumably challenging the ubiquitously imposing Western "universal" norm. But paying attention to a particular tradition as an instance of separate development does not necessarily help. In a rapidly globalizing Asian environment, the simple East-West dichotomy and confrontation is insufficient in regional gender studies, as is the sheer assertion of some uniquely Asian realities. In the following essay I examine how Haruki Murakami one of Japan's most celebrated living novelists, whose books are usually full of Western literary and pop-cultural references and icons deals with issues of masculinity and national character in opposition to an entity that is not Western but Asian. Male gender and race in Murakami are articulated as the ultimate horizon of meaning in a world where the belief in the plenitude of being no longer holds. Focusing on Murakami's writings about China and Chinese people in relation to his construction of manliness and Japaneseness, however, I argue that sexed and ethnic beings, which nowadays may have replaced the alleged universal being or the whole of being to constitute the subject's core, are fundamentally performative. Their incompleteness of substance is actually the guarantee of their identity. In Murakami's literary representation of the inter-Asian encounters, the external ethnic object to be described and reflected upon is always inherent in the conscious self. What has been assumed to come from outside as the bodily property of a particular racial or gendered group is something that has always been inside the self and is constitutive of the interior subject. What is supposed to be within the self and (re)discovered through an inner journey, however, cannot emerge without an external traumatic encounter that knocks the subject off-balance. Such a disturbing encounter prepares the subject not simply to identify himself as a

Seeing the Animal: Colonial Space and Movement in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim

Abstract: But there are degrees of feeling the muffled, the faint, the just sufficient, the barely intelligent, as we may say; and the acute, the intense, the complete, in a word the power to be finely aware and richly responsible It is those moved in the latter fashion who "get most" out of all that happens to them We care, our curiosity and our sympathy care, comparatively little for what happens to the stupid, the coarse, and the blind; care for it, and for the effects of it, at the most as helping to precipitate what happens to the more deeply wondering, to the really sentient

The Novel as an Absence: Lukács and the Event of Postmodern Fiction

Abstract: This essay is about the formal that is to say, the nonrepresentational, nonnarrative elements of so-called postmodern fiction. What interests me about those elements is the extent to which they signal the status of the text as irreducibly an event, rather than, say, the representation or imagination of an event. I shall argue that a refocus of attention on the materiality of the text is necessary in order to understand the ethical substance of "postmodern" literature; to avoid the prevalent assumption that post-1945 fiction involves a retreat from questions of "ethics" per se, an assumption that depends on and reiterates the idea of an incommensurability between ethical and aesthetic concerns. In fact the opposite is true. Contemporary British and American fiction is overwhelmingly concerned with the question of its own possibility, in a context in which it has become, or seems to have become, "impossible." Furthermore, its ethical significance is found precisely in this apparently "formal" or "aesthetic" concern, rather than in, say, the expressed opinions of its characters or authors. These propositions are not new, but they don't enjoy general consensus either, particularly in the critical discourse around postmodernity. Approaches to postmodernism can be divided into two: those which believe the postmodern announces the end of the possibility of the event, and those which maintain that the postmodern is precisely the occasion of the event. Thus, the propositions put forward above that contemporary literature is engaged primarily with the question of the possibility of the literary itself, and that this is an ethical as much as an aesthetic issue are at odds with the claim put forward by Fredric Jameson that postmodern cultural forms represent "the cultural logic of late capitalism."1 My argument is also at odds with Charles Newman's statement that contemporary American literature presents "the flattest possible characters in the flattest possible landscape rendered in the flattest possible diction," the index, he says, of "a mentality that refuses to attribute much less contest value" (1); with David Harvey's use of terms such as "plunder," "amnesia" and "spectacle" to describe the relation of postmodern aesthetics to history (54, 55); and with Peter Brooker's characterization of postmodern cultural forms as ideologically determined "symptom[s]," rather than as forms of social "analysis" (144). If my argument has a positive relation to actually existing theories of the postmodern, it is to the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, in particular to his 1982 text "Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?" Lyotard's postmodernism is a dynamic, creative mode, rather than a "cultural logic," or a situation of historical determination both of which seem to limit our options to realist representation, on one hand, and its impossibility on the other. For Lyotard, rather, the

Interrogating Mythology: The Mandela Myth and Black Empowerment in Nadine Gordimer’s Post-Apartheid Writing

Abstract: The dialectic between history and myth-making is central in Nadine Gordimer's writing on Nelson Mandela. Deeply fascinated herself by the South African myth of Mandela as the Savior, and even apparently subscribing to it on occasion, Gordimer, in her non-fictional work as in her fiction, consistently seeks to illuminate the circumstances that nurtured the myth, while rigorously privileging history and locating Mandela's significance in the province of politics. Polemically opposed to a regime that recurrently appropriated mythology as it strove to justify and perpetuate its power, Gordimer cites Roland Barthes to draw attention to the hegemonic character of modern myth-making: if traditional myth accounts for a culture's origin in terms of nature's forces, modern mythology strives to enforce secular power by presenting it as a natural force and therefore as justified (Essential 257). And writing on the official codification of the venerable Afrikaner anti-apartheid activist, Bram Fischer, as the Anti-Christ, Gordimer identifies demonology as a specie of the National Party's political myth-making {Essential 73). Disinclined, however, to regard the Mandela-as-Savior myth as the obverse of the apartheid myth of the Anti-Christ, and thus both in the apartheid dispensation and in post-apartheid South Africa a potentially redemptive and regenerative force, Gordimer refuses an alluring narrative capable of vitiating Mandela's social relevance. Her insight is that the transformation of a historical personage into a mythic figure is an investment fraught with enormous social loss. Dismantling the myth, Gordimer projects the man; denying the god, she affirms the enormous attributes of the leader. The paradox, though, is that given Gordimer's understandable veneration of Mandela as an icon, the demythologized god of her non-fictional discourse still casts the towering shadow of a deity in her fiction. As may be expected in the work of an artist who has shown the most passionate interest in the politics of her country, in all Gordimer's three postapartheid novelsNone to Accompany Me (1994), The House Gun (1998) and The Pick Up (2001) the intense discussions of the new South African constitution, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and appropriate immigration laws that are the core of post-apartheid South African discourse find a certain resonance. But prior to Mandela's presidency in 1994 and towards the end of that era in 1999 there was just as much discussion, both nationally and internationally, about the emergent black leadership, the basic pattern of which was overwhelming confidence in Mandela's leadership and anxiety, even apprehension, about his possible successors. Just as the concern is an urgent one in her post-

Joyce, the Propheteer

Abstract: It might seem as if James Joyce has always been a celebrity author. In our time, his image appears on t-shirts, album covers and an episode of The Simpsons. But in his day, Joyce's fame, like his readership, was not particularly widespread. True, Joyce was the subject of a 1939 Time cover story, but during his lifetime and for a period after his death in 1941 there was scant information about his private life available to the public.1 The fact that his novels turn him into a one-of-a-kind, larger-than-life figure of the author par excellence, not his celebrity status, makes Joyce the perfect nexus of the intertwining histories of modernist literature and celebrity culture that this article explores. In what follows, I want to demonstrate how Joyce uses the logic of mass-mediated fame to constitute his identity as the author of and in Ulysses. I will not be showing that Ulysses is "about" celebrity but rather examining the ways that the explosion of celebrity as a popular phenomenon informs the novel. As Jennifer Wicke writes, "the social sea change which sweeps in celebrity in its wake is registered and even embraced by the particularities of Ulysses as a text" (129). An analysis of this "embrace" should revise the way we look at Joyce's legendary technical mastery, his manipulation of the autobiographical figure Stephen Dedalus, and the episode-by-episode guide for reading Ulysses that he disseminated. I intend to make the case that Ulysses does not merely observe the cultural logic of popular celebrity but in fact reworks it.