Adorno and the Architects of Late Style in India: Aesthetic Form after the Twentieth-​century Novel 9781472418760, 9781315565668

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Adorno and the Architects of Late Style in India

In the postcolonial world, the claim to an emancipated national culture was bound to its aesthetic correlate, the unfolding time and experiments of the twentieth-​century novel. Today, the constructs of both novel and a progressivist national project function, in all their closures, within global scales of economic disparity and violent exclusion. What is the fate of a literary canon when it is no longer capable of delineating a future –​or otherwise, is bound to reproduce the failures of the past within its own inscriptions? How do we experience our current “globalist” moment, when lived inequities of gender, labour and ethnicity emerge in a text’s inability to speak on time? When does artistic or literary failure become the measure of a work’s accomplishment? And what sort of liberation is envisioned by works that refuse the imperatives of “progress” and “independence”  –​ which embrace the appearance of obsolescence by rejecting values of artistic freedom, originality and innovation? These are some of the provocations that arise from T.W. Adorno’s idea of late style for our own conjuncture –​a properly postcolonial context, in which every conceptual or expressive engagement is articulated through an awareness of eroded national promise. Examining works by Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, Vikram Seth and the photography of Dayanita Singh, Tania Roy examines the delayed claims of literary and artistic modernity in India through Adorno’s category of late style. In striking readings of Adorno and his interlocutors, the book extends a poetics of lateness towards a speculative history of the twentieth-​ century novel in India. Comprised of critically neglected selections from the oeuvres of canonical writers, Adorno and the Architects of Late Style in India proposes that under conditions of advanced capitalism, logics of redundancy overtake the novel’s foundational reference point in the nation to produce altered frames of thought and sensibility –​and therein, a reader who might encounter, anew, the figures of an unfulfilled twentieth century. Tania Roy is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and coordinates the Graduate Programme in Literary Studies. She has a doctorate in political theory from Duke University, where

her interdisciplinary engagement with literature was advanced through a Gerst Fellowship in Economic, Political and Humanistic Thought. At NUS, she teaches topics in critical theory, especially the aesthetics of the Frankfurt School, trauma studies, and postcolonial and world literatures. Related interests on contemporary art and biopolitics in South-​East Asia, legacies of the twentieth-​ century Anglophonic realist novel on the subcontinent and art after the liberalisation of the Indian economy considered, especially, as a response to civic violence under the current dispensation of far-​ right supremacism have appeared as book chapters and articles in journals including boundary 2, Theory, Culture and Society, Political Culture, The European Legacy and The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy.

Adorno and the Architects of Late Style in India Aesthetic Form after the Twentieth-​century  Novel Tania Roy

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Tania Roy The right of Tania Roy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-​1-​4724-​1876-​0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​315-​56566-​8  (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

To my mother, Suchandra Roy, and in memory of my father, Protap Roy –​to each, for imagining a world.

Quo usque tandem…

Contents

Introduction  Lineages of lateness: Adorno and the postcolonial 

1

PART I

Terminal beginnings: national modernism 

27

1 National allegory in late style: culture, terror and bodily disburdenment in Tagore’s Four Chapters 

29

2 Nation, transmodernity and the unimaginable community: the place of failure in Mulk Raj Anand’s Across the Black Waters 

77

PART II

Formations of the contemporary 

119

3 “Tis love of earth that he instils”: English without soil in Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music 

121

4 The art of disappearance: reading Adorno in the house of Dayanita Singh 

167

PART III

Conclusion 

209

5 Automatic intimacies 

211

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viii Contents

Coda  Bibliography  Acknowledgements  Index 

224 230 239 241

Introduction Lineages of lateness: Adorno and the postcolonial

Late work still remains process, but not as development. (T.W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven”, 567)1

The question of how “to engage a living thought that is no longer historically current”, as advanced by Fredric Jameson with regard to Theodor W. Adorno, has especial urgency for assessing the value of modern literature, considered as a worldly formation of the last century, and in its particular import for postcolonial studies.2 After the successful consolidation of postcolonial literary studies and criticism, and a few short years after the turn of the millennium, the field has found itself at an impasse, so much so, that several of its most prominent exponents have diagnosed the relationship of postcolonial criticism to its object, the literary text, as one of melancholic ambivalence. Following Edward Said’s foundational Orientalism:  Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), the study of English literature was fraught by what was, at the time, largely unprecedented contests of “the canonical nature and unquestioned status of the works of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporated”  –​an interrogation that was undertaken within the larger, collaborative effort to demonstrate the discipline’s institutional relation to legacies of imperialism.3 The subsequent reception of so-​called new literatures from the former colonies critically informed the combative struggle to transform both the discipline and also the value of literariness in the humanities. These now familiar intellectual developments, together with a select body of literary and theoretical texts, have been canonised within literary studies under the rubric of postcolonial studies. Indeed, that metropolitan and commonwealth or third-​world literatures may no longer be read in isolation from each other is a premise that has travelled widely, well beyond the immediate parameters and objects of literary studies in the last two decades. From the mid to late 1990s, traditional canons associated with national as well as comparative literatures have been reoriented, via the interventions of postcolonial scholarship, toward a “globalist” historical context –​the current conjuncture, in other words, marked on the one hand

2 Introduction by significant transits of corporate capital and outsourced labour from the Global North towards South-​/​East Asia and, on the other, by the resurgent militarisation of geopolitical space in the wake of the two Gulf Wars. Few would disagree that the decisive institutionalisation of postcolonial studies within this period corresponded with the “high phase” of postcolonial theory, so much so that until recently, the field was nearly synonymous with the signature works of poststructuralist critics such as Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. Today, in what is acknowledged widely as a post-​ theoretical moment, the history of the field is reviewed across a range of critical persuasions through attention to the socio-​intellectual mobility of its formations, or otherwise, in terms of the field’s remarkable, if ambiguous advancement from the margins of the discipline to its authoritative centre. Even as postcolonial scholarship has been transformed into a widely circulating form of intellectual currency, recent debates have recast the field’s successful institutionalisation as an index of its critical and political exhaustion. In one of the most compelling recent critiques of the field’s self-​definition, Eli Park Sorensen turns from a previous generation of postcolonial theorists to the tradition of Western Marxism and its interlocutors, especially, the early writings of György Lukács. Situating Lukács squarely within the concerns of postcolonial scholarship, Sorensen theorises a certain restiveness with the field’s extended “mourning” over its various losses; these range from the erosion of radical origins at the margins of the discipline, to the erasure of the literary text by solipsistic theories on the limits of representation: After having “revolutionized” the field of literary aesthetics through critical and politically consciousness-​ raising readings of texts previously situated comfortably within narrow, local frameworks, postcolonial studies is haunted by an atmosphere of melancholia that may be seen as an ambiguous expression of both disciplinary success and failure. Success, in the sense that an elaborate notion of the literary after the so-​called postcolonial aesthetic “revolution” has been radically transformed; but also … failure implying that the contemporary field … has lost its identity as a critical margin.4 (19) In a comparable reflection on contemporary postcolonial discourse as an “ambiguous expression of both disciplinary success and failure”, Deepika Bahri, in her Native Intelligence, observes that the field is currently beset with a degree of predictability  –​and therefore, orthodoxy  –​in its “characterize[ation] ab incunabilis by … political considerations”.5 In an extended and sensitive reflection, Bahri attributes the internal rigidification of the thought-​forms and values of the postcolonial paradigm retrospectively to its foundational moment: “As the ostensible response to imperial ideology, postcolonial literature enters an academic arena”  –​belatedly, as intervention  –​ “as already shaped by the complicated politics of representation”

Introduction  3 (ibid., emphasis mine). Determined by its institutional origins –​as a response to preponderant discourses of “imperial ideology” and their residual effects on the discipline –​postcolonial studies advance, inter alia through its critique of “representation”, into a mode of hyper-​canonicity. According to Bahri’s periodisation, a privileged set of works and methods have come to operate as the self-​“authoriz[ing]” objects of the field. Equated historically with “third-​world” values of class-​based realism, or, alternatively, with the modality of magical realism, postcolonial works continue to be read through the presumption of ethnographically determined “difference” (from the West). Together with specious certainties regarding the purpose of political struggle in and after the twentieth century, this body of literature is positioned today (as, perhaps, no other national or period-​based study of literature) as an order of social documentation. Even so, as this now established critical narrative goes, the identitarianism imputed to so-​called new literatures of the decolonising or postcolonial world has posed few contradictions to the consolidation of an “elaborate” metropolitan repertoire of theoretical and reading-​ related preferences (Sorensen, 19). As both Bahri and Sorensen indicate, following the canonisation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) within the North American academy, postcolonial texts have been selectively organised into a kind of second-​order modernism, or otherwise, as an archive of works that continually defer the burden of representation through strategies of conceptual reflexivity, figural indeterminacy and tropes of exile, hybridity and diaspora. Consequently, if somewhat paradoxically, the value and modalities of aesthetic mimesis, in its postcolonial specificities, can scarcely be theorised as anything other than information. Originally consolidated as a path-​ breaking combination of modernist textuality and critical-​ cosmopolitan resistance to nationalist hegemony, the canon devolves into monotonous, near-​automatic modes of interpretation. Shadowed by the politics of native informancy, critical categories accompanying the text are further isolated from the “aesthetic dimension” of literature, or, what Bahri identifies by way of wide-​ranging uses of the Frankfurt School, as the work’s capacity to generate semblances (Schein) through and against its empirical content (128–​129). In her attempt to rescue the value of fictionality for postcolonial studies, Bahri returns, via the dialectical materialism of Adorno and Marcuse particularly, to a well-​versed body of contemporary South Asian literature; also a return to close-​reading, Bahri’s study shows how “a select hegemonic strand” of literary works might illuminate its socially determined origins within the status quo of “art” and “politics” even while opening current perceptions of social reality to contingency and historical change (2). The provocations of Bahri as well as Sorensen’s “aesthetic turn” towards the Frankfurt School are significantly sharpened, for the purposes of this study’s uses of Adorno and his interlocutors, through our suggestion that the various lost objects of postcolonial scholarship index the field’s deeper inability, today, to conceive of literary form. In other words, to search for a

4 Introduction history with a future is to seek out formations that might persist, past the chronological reversals of nation and colony/​freedom and subjection, into delineations of futurity. Crucially, Sorensen’s selective recuperation of Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel demonstrates how this “utopian-​interpretative” dimension to postcolonial historical experience subsists within the novel-​ form itself (as it does, pace Lukács’, also in a European twentieth century). Problems of historicity as well as literary futurity are co-​located within the order of a “narrative totality” capable of presenting a “sequence of events or parts” as “already interpreted”, that is, as dynamically historicised by the compositional unities of the work itself (Sorensen, xii). Or, put differently, temporal continuities, whether historical or narratological, are reflected at the level of the work’s construction through the quality of fictitiousness. Through a reading of Theory of the Novel, Sorensen selects the specifically “ironic” mode (and affective structure) of Lukács’ thesis to outline a stringent concept of postcolonial realism, in which the reader engages the meta-​fictive (as opposed to copybook) possibilities of realist mimesis for postcolonial experience. In a scintillating polemic, now widely engaged across the field, Sorensen goes further to insist that postcolonial form –​per se  –​resides today within the legacies of twentieth-​century realism. If the social-​realist form of the novel was, indeed, historically decisive for literary modernity in the decolonising world –​as it was in India, across the form’s origins in nineteenth-​century Bengal to its pan-​national consolidation in the 1920s and 1930s under the All-​Indian Writer’s Progressive Association  –​ the subject matter of the first part of this book  –​Sorensen’s point is that entire archives of postcolonial realism have been, for too long, the object of studied neglect. Sorensen’s revisionist account of both Lukács and postcolonial realism, understood in their displaced, belated interlinkages within the context of a peripheral modernity, provides a generative methodological reference for our starting point. Nevertheless, Sorensen’s exclusion of alternative stylistic, theoretical and, indeed, affective modalities that may not be formalised through the principle of Lukácsian constructivism tends, in all its stringency, towards a new orthodoxy. More pertinently, it remains the case that any survey of the historical nexus between the periodicities of the nation and those of the novel’s development in the South Asian context must contend with processes of canon formation that have long hitched the historicity of the novel-​form to chronological accounts of India’s transit from a young nation to postcolony. As a result, national form –​including various historical formations of literary realism –​continues to function in the context of the subcontinent as the long-​standing stricture of literary periodisation. The upshot, as Ulka Anjaria has shown, is a critical-​readerly position for which the work is bound to do no more (or less) than “consolidate or contest” the authority of a monolithic national modernity (Anjaria, 17).6 It is this study’s position that the construct of chronology persists as fundamental to the predicament of postcolonial “ambivalence” insofar as it continues to operate,

Introduction  5 whether insidiously or otherwise, as the principle and symptom of a kind of melancholic historicism –​“melancholic”, because in the current globalist conjuncture, the methodological and temporal procedures of postcolonial literary history are demonstrably depleted of explanatory force even as its developmental premise in the time of neoliberal governance continues to grip a wider cultural imaginary. Incapable of accounting for historical change without also rehearsing a valorised chronology of the twentieth-​century nation, the problem of postcolonial melancholia has to do, more basically, with the field’s inability to articulate a writerly principle –​a literary ideal that might endure past conventions of historical periodisation –​but also, I would argue, resurgent critical orthodoxies of success and failure  –​to manifest, across representational modalities, a “realistic” image of purposive “historical motion at the peripheries” (Lye, 351, emphasis in original).7 Vacillating between the vectors of national promise and failed decolonisation, the “postcolonial” forfeits questions of literary form and literary futurity to a chronology that is itself no longer capable of organising social experience. And by the same token, we might also say that the (dis)order of postcolonial melancholia is encountered, again, as the exemplary intellectual predicament of our “globalist” times. In the mis-​en-​abyme of self-​reference –​ excoriated variously as processes of “self-​authorization”, hyper-​canonicity or, in Neil Lazarus’s most recent thesis, the suspect assumption of “radical and categorical … incommensurablity” between text and the life-​world of labour  –​a once-​significant body of thought confronts the superfluity of its defining terms (Lazarus, 147, emphasis in original).8 In the wake of the revisionary turn in postcolonial scholarship sketched across the positions surveyed above, we sense how the condition of postcolonial “exhaustion” attests to escalated logics of commodification that assimilate all thought-​ forms of the previous century into new regimes of capital accumulation and radically exacerbated forms of exclusion. Especially interesting is the charge, following the formidable scope of Lazarus’ survey, that postcolonial scholarship mistakes dialectically related aspects of inequality and the struggle for representation, for an ontology of “fetishised” difference. Already at a second-​hand remove from Said’s foundational claim about the divisive representational regime of orientalism, the established strategies of the field reinforce, on Lazarus’ view, an automatic presumption of duality –​ those well-​worn dualisms of difference between cultural production in the postcolony and “the West”, between text and world, as of self and other. The Marxian-​materialist intervention is taken up through our own uses, below, insofar as it makes way for far-​reaching critical and reading-​related possibilities; these certainly inform much of this study’s premise of a single if internally uneven modernity. Nevertheless, that position, as outlined most strongly in Lazarus’ thesis, continues to beg the question: In the current conjuncture, why do we still expect postcolonial writing to be structured by something other than the critical affect of melancholia, in its various institutionalised or conceptual formations?  –​in other words, why does the distinction of

6 Introduction relating world and text robustly, through an account of (representational, political) struggle fall to the field of contemporary postcolonial criticism, as, arguably, it does to no other? Under the order of advanced capitalism, social relations (in spheres of citizenship, labour, party, even intimacy) are marked worldwide by the erasure of their “human” face –​what Adorno would study across genres, cultural modalities and mediums, as the disappearance of subjectivity from extant representational forms and technologies into unreadable signs of the economic. Hardly exempt from these developments, postcolonial identity, even or especially in its remembered history of struggle, takes no other form than that of the fetish  –​that universal form of human experience today. Within this study’s orienting concern with orders and styles of lateness, postcolonial ambivalence features as a synecdoche for a deeper historical impasse where “currents” of once-​vital thought circulate, in the face of an ostensible loss of relevance, as products of a media-​saturated market. Key texts and figures of postcolonial scholarship, no less than canonical Indian novels of the twentieth-​century represented by this book, strive for legibility within a cultural domain regulated through multinational marketing concerns, intense professional competition and emergent (pedagogical, literary) imperatives tied to the rapidly changing world of information-​driven technologies (Bahri, 10). For our purposes, this means that suspicions regarding the conceptual inefficacy or wholesale redundancy of the practices and “consciousness-​raising” posture of postcolonial scholarship –​or, on the other hand, of the representational void of “incommensurability”  –​may not be extricated  –​at least not as decisively as scholars such as Sorensen or Lazarus intend –​from a more fundamental uncertainty about the value of wider expressive traditions associated with the decolonising nation. Where our premise of lateness also assumes that processes of canonisation-​ as-​ageing undergird and proliferate (through commodity-​driven demands) the disciplinary formation of postcolonial scholarship, we interrogate the stigma of orthodoxy as it attaches, more fundamentally, to modernist legacies of the revolutionary, anti-​colonial nation. To posit the ethical urgency of formations that are “no longer historically current” as a question of global import is, mutatis mutandi, a claim about the value and fate of the postcolonial today. We might begin accordingly, by noting how the geography of advanced capitalism has been concretised, in little less than three decades, through the ascendancy of the neoliberal nation across erstwhile coordinates of peripheries and centres. In the case of the subcontinent, this “globalist” direction manifests in state formations that proclaim a decisive resolution of the historical contradictions of the post-​independent period. In the wake of successive crises in world financial markets, and after a half-​century of electoral insignificance, the far right has been consolidated as the party of natural government in India. This development speaks to the settlement of a new social contract within the radically altered landscape of multinational capital:  The new accommodation

Introduction  7 reconciles an assertive, acutely acquisitive ethos of individualism across vastly different regional, caste and class-​based constituencies, with the profoundly illiberal ideology of Hindu super-​ nationalism. Derived from an entrepreneurial understanding of both citizenship and political governance, dirigiste metaphors of “development” have found, at such a turn, a prodigious second life. Through a saturated media culture, twentieth-​century iconographies of combatively accomplished independence, economic and cultural autarky, popular awakening and propulsive technological advancement are continuously retrofitted for the purposes of the new consensus. Following the liberalisation of India’s economy in 1991, idioms of resurgent nationalism have been placed in implacable opposition to the “Nehruvian” coordinates of a secular-​socialist modernity; nevertheless, it is our premise that ideologies of market fundamentalism and violent cultural majoritarianism remain tied to the spectre of their origins in twentieth-​century state formations that accompanied the historical episode of decolonisation, and, indeed, the heroic thought-​forms of freedom, sovereignty and identity. In the first decades after Independence, under the pressures of under-​ developed infrastructure, a “land-​scarce, labour-​surplus economy” inherited from the colonial regime, and successive wars with Pakistan and China, the Indian state arrived, unsurprisingly, at an accommodation with propertied industrial elites (Chatterjee, 1998, 46).9 Consequently, the state’s dual commitment to state-​led industrialisation and a programme of deep distributive justice would be recast over the next several decades into wide-​ ranging idioms of national populism. In a coruscating analysis of the general elections of 2014, titled “Narendra Modi and the New Face of India”, novelist Pankaj Mishra implicates legacies of twentieth-​century progressivism in an unsparing account of the “new face” of South Asian demagoguery.10 Published in 2014 only days before the far-​right Bharatiya Janata Party’s won its mandate to govern uncontested –​as it has, again, for its catastrophic second term in 2019 –​the essay is a brilliant abbreviation of the contradictions confronting the Indian nation in “its sixth decade of Independence”. To this end, the argument disallows all recourse, consolatory or apologetic, to accounts that would narrate the current crisis of India’s electoral democracy in terms of an epochal break with what came before. Indeed, Mishra’s analysis goes so far as to conflate the sacrosanct “ideology … of Nehruvian nation-​building” with its “unanticipated effects” in the ideologically incompatible, but historically comparable (“pan-​Indian”) consent to neoliberalism. Once undertaken under the banners of the communist international and non-​alignment, mid-​century movements of internationalism have given way to a disciplinary regime that promises frankly what was “inconceivable” within the former’s self-​understanding: “Top-​down modernization without modernity”, or today’s driving compact between a handful of unregulated Indian multinationals, fully corporatised media interests, and an increasingly centralised executive that finds popular legitimation in its address to a monolithic “Hindu” nation. Aligning the “scandal[ous] lure of indigenized

8 Introduction fascism” with the return of a Nehruvian repressed, Mishra flags, for our purposes, the redundancy of the current conjuncture  –​a turn that finally reconciles the long-​standing memory of underdevelopment with unprecedented levels of accumulated private wealth. Strikingly, Mishra makes the point by alluding to the global rise of the Anglophonic Indian novel three decades ago, by way of Vikram Seth’s emblematic historical fiction of the newly decolonised nation, A Suitable Boy (1991). At stake, from the perspective of India’s current contradictory political modernity is not only the historical setting of the novel, but Seth’s appropriation of mid-​century modes of social realism  –​a style deployed incongruously, at the advent of economic liberalisation, towards a watershed use of the Indian novel in English. Quite apart from questions of narrative content or context, an external reality associated with elite-​led processes of modernisation is distilled, through Seth’s stylistic choices, into the matter and very medium of the novel. And in this, there could be no better instance of what Lukács extols as the constructed unities of the realist novel. Recall that for The Theory of the Novel, the genre, in essence, encapsulates and gives expressive life to the experience of belatedness. Against all civic pieties regarding the opposition between religion and state, faith and rationality (or “secularism” and “communalism”), the novel-​form appears only in a world that has lost irrevocably “the natural unity of the metaphysical spheres” (Lukács, The Theory of the Novel 37).11 On the cusp of the Great War, the ontology of the novel was, for Lukács, one of sheer falleness; its world is the (after)effect of pervasive and systematic processes of rationalisation or “secularisation”, if that term is understood as the progressive distancing of (artistic) subjectivity from the communal experiences of work and life. But the novel is also, for this reason, the singular genre of modernity. It is an artifice that stands, through the repeated breakdown and reconstitution of its codes, for the loss of the ancient, indivisible sensuousness of the epic. A Suitable Boy evokes the half-​century of India’s modernisation (already the history of another era) as, precisely, an “absent, epic totality” available only abstractly through extensive elaborations of style and form. And it is also for this reason that Mishra’s essay throws up the chronology of modernisation and the (voluminous) conventions of literary history together, as recapitulated by Seth, as intertwined accounts that are currently bereft of force. Confronting his reader with the sudden, stunning obsolescence of the “sanguine” fiction of postcolonial promise, Mishra reminds us via the rapid ageing of Seth’s classic, that the development of the novel in English has long been narrated through profoundly over-​rehearsed categories of (national) modernity and progress. After Mishra, we might extrapolate even further that the vectors of advancing purposive time, as concretised within the Indian twentieth century, have transited here as elsewhere in the world, into abstract signs of economic function. How do we stand, within such a pass, to inherit ideas of historical arrival, sovereignty, modernity, even futurity  –​in other words, those temporal

Introduction  9 coordinates of nation-​building from a previous century whose possibilities were oriented as much through the anticipatory vectors of freedom and the nation-​still-​to-​be, as through the specific forms and claims of literature? “Only when neutralized and reified”, says Adorno, “does Culture allow itself to be idolized” (Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society” 24).12 In his 1949 radio lecture, “Cultural Criticism and Society”, Adorno mobilises two main ideas  –​“the ideology of reification” and institutional processes of “neutralization” –​as reversible propositions. As such, the terms acquire significance for Adorno’s post-​war audience incrementally, by virtue of their interchangeability in the course of the exposition. In part the elements of a rhetorical performance, words such as “culture”, “ideology” and even the critical vocabulary of “reification” (inherited from Lukács) are put in motion as ideas without stable or even inherent content. In other words, Adorno’s performance suggests that the very terms of Ideologie-​Kritik are given to the critic belatedly, after their successful assimilation to the identity (and interests) of an authorised opposition. Cultural criticism rejects the progressive integration of all aspects of consciousness within the apparatus of material production. But because it fails to see through the apparatus, it turns towards the past, lured by the promise of immediacy. (ibid) When placed within the context of Adorno’s address to a post-​war audience, the polemical intent of “Cultural Criticism and Society” is obvious: Its contentions are directed against the platitudes of the sort of critic who reifies “culture” and the attendant proposition of an “historical present” by imagining one term in the echo-​chamber of the other, as readymade totalities. Terms such as “culture” or the “present” are presupposed as idealised or finished formations –​target-​practice, as it were, for the salaried critic. The very charge of neutralisation, as levelled against a disastrously commodified national heritage, emerges as the exemplary fetish-​object of Adorno’s modernity. In a manner that is comparable to Partha Chatterjee’s seminal thesis on postcolonial “derivativeness”, but also differently, Adorno’s argument stages the second valence of the essay’s title, “society”, as an inherently belated formation. If social relations are said to comprise a unity, it is so as solipsism –​as oriented by the insistence on ideas, indeed, entire discourses, well after these have been depleted of signifying force. As the content and vocation of ideology critique, so also, then, the anguished commonplace, that “Auschwitz”, as the nadir of human-​made disaster, renders all traditions of meaning-​making bereft of meaning: The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. [In such the predicament], even the most extreme consciousness of

10 Introduction doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter … To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. (Adorno, 34 emphasis added) That “Auschwitz” is still imagined as an historical break  –​a calamitous rupture that founds the subsequent “degeneration” of culture, relegating its accomplishments to the past  –​is, for Adorno, the unifying mythology of “corro[ded]” forms of self-​awareness. The epochal conception of “afterness”, in other words, is underpinned by an expressivist (in this sense, humanist) ideology, Such a position tends to grasp at extant representational modes, whether of critique or poetic invention, even after creative intention (together with the modernist claim to novelty) has devolved into de-​personalised functions of the market. Or otherwise, in Adorno’s essayistic composition of such a state of affairs, “Auschwitz” as much as “poetry” feature as limit-​terms, nominations of a modernity underwritten by the universal form of the commodity and experienced, therein, as a condition of intractable delay and secondariness. As to the question of aesthetic mimesis raised first with regard to the postcolonial:  Here too, the relationship between the intent to speak to the times (“consciousness”) and the expressive forms available to such purpose (the “apparatus”) emerges, in the work, in the register of discrepancy. In The Event of Postcolonial Shame, Timothy Bewes proposes that the irrevocable tear between form and content, expressive intentionality and work –​or the breakage between the historical world and literature  –​is the ethical “event” of twentieth-​century writing.13 To follow the force of this ambitious thesis further, we might say that while the sociological contentions of Adorno’s analysis directs us towards the assimilation of critique into established orthodoxy –​the consolidation of an official opposition in the aftermath of the War –​the full force of the essay is ranged against that most emblematic instance of “institutional thinking” –​ the dogma of lateness itself. If, in 1949, Adorno describes the guilty predicament of traditions of Kulturkritik “after Auschwitz”, the essay is also the justification for a temporalising method of criticism –​one that may be extrapolated well past the particular historical and cultural context of its articulation for other, unanticipated ideologies of afterness, accompanied, as these are, by the imitability of once vital conceptual and cultural forms. If, through rhetorical reversals, the lecture undoes commonplaces about sequentially unfolding origins and aftermaths, it also makes place for a position that actively extinguishes their underlying presumption –​the proposition, as such, of chronological, developmental time. To sum up Adorno’s suggestion of a late modernity for our own procedure, we have to account for two interrelated implications of Adorno’s exposition. First, at the level of rhetorical performance, the force of Adorno’s address stages the urgencies of his time in the discrepancy between the impulse to speak and the expressive forms (including the form of the essay) that have

Introduction  11 been given, historically, to such urgent purpose. Discrepancy, abstraction or delay –​as Adorno’s comments on the “extreme consciousness” of such a condition indicates, the quality of inexpressivity, as it encroaches into given representational traditions, is not a reversible condition subject to artistic or intellectual decision. Nor does it characterise the politics of postcolonial failure alone. Following the implications of Bewes’ thesis, we might say instead, and by way of a first premise, that the inorganicity of aesthetic expression is formative of the value and possibilities of “writing” within late modernity. Second, the inhuman totality that makes its appearance as modernity –​identified, everywhere, as “catastrophe” –​is not aberrational. After all, Adorno’s polemical insistence on the impossibility of ideology-​ critique, as of every representational technology within the order of late capitalism, militates against the “lure” of myth, or the critic’s presumption of an originary if forfeited intellectual culture (Adorno, CC 24). The problematic of inadequation –​felt, certainly, in its local specificities, as the loss of contact between experience and an expression that could speak to its demand –​is essential to Adorno’s concerns since the unrelieved “feeling” of inadequacy is a structural rather than psychological condition. This is because the formation of “all aspects of consciousness” derives, now, from the universal form of the commodity (for Marx, its “general validity”) (ibid., emphasis mine). Once the law of commoditisation involving fetishism, intellectual rigidification, derivativeness and so on becomes constitutive of sociality  –​ as, indeed, of the “psychology” of the individual –​then the predicament of neutralisation is no longer a problem of (this or that mode of) representation. The experiential incoherence of social relations is systemic –​objective –​ because it is underwritten in toto by the law of commodity exchange. For this reason, Adorno’s oral performance tests repeatedly the element of ambivalence that inspirits the act of criticism, and so compromises it into an utterance of bad faith. “Complicity”, then, not only as related to the ideological opacities or self-​interested positioning of the individual or critic, but as the very condition for abstracted forms of thought and ways of living under late capitalism. Or again, if abstraction is the condition for social relations in capitalist modernity, its various affects  –​from the unhappy consciousness of progressivism, to the revivalist’s manic triumphalism as sketched by Mishra –​are at once contained and continuously recirculated through fin-​de-​siècle ideologies of cultural origin, apogee and decline. Bewes proposes that the failure of form in its relation to the affects that attend abstracted expressive conventions, is, properly speaking, an historical proposition about the twentieth century –​the guilty conjuncture, as I understand it, which at once joins and divides our imagination of post-​war Europe from the predicament of lateness as played out, in the same historical period, in the postcolony. Recall that in the drama of self-​discovery that constitutes Black Skin, White Masks, Franz Fanon’s persona, the middle-​class “native” intellectual, finds his voice only after his transplantation into the metropolitan space (and time) of “Culture” (Adorno, CC 24): “You have come too

12 Introduction late, much too late” (Fanon, 101, emphasis mine). In its post/​colonial specificity, belatedness materialises through bodily markers of backwardness, of developmental lag. Race and voice are constituted simultaneously through a fully temporalised discrepancy between (white) Europe and  –​through movements of migration and mass displacement following decolonization in the post-​war period –​the worldwide visibility of the peoples of the colony. In The Origins of Totalitarianism and also The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt claims that the first truly global appearance of the human emerged through the production of geo-​political “homelessness”, or the condition of those populations bereft of territoriality and therefore, of the “right to rights” guaranteed by the sovereign nation. If this unprecedented form of visibility accompanied the liberation of the Nazi camps, the attendant crisis in the imagination of territory, nation and citizenship would be inseparable from the upheavals of decolonisation that followed immediately after; as we know from narratives of Partition and forced migration, citizenship, the concomitant politics of “minoritisation” and therefore, the displacement (potential or actual) of peoples would be foundational to the constitution of the postcolonial nation. Following Arendt, we might say that in the mid-​century moment, the condition of possibility for the “human” is incoherence, its unthinkability within the very categories of perceptibility and intellection that would render such appearance into the image of a common world:  “Every post-​Auschwitz, every postcolonial work  –​but also, as Lukács tells us, every novel tout court—​has then a double quality” (Bewes, 45, emphasis mine). In its assertoric register, the citation from Fanon laments the postcolonial’s inability to present, on time, an articulation of culture that would also be free of bad faith; but this emblematic statement of postcolonial derivativeness also documents the irreducible textuality of “incommensurability”, whether conceptual or figurative, as the historical precondition for any cultural testament, “Western” or (post)colonial, of the times. Derivativeness  –​in discrepancy, delay  –​as double-​consciousness, then, which constitutes and so grants the relation of writing to an integrated but unequal world “after Auschwitz”. Far from being a symptom of falsified or unclaimed meaning, the intensities of a belated historical consciousness, or the affective qualities that accompany a single, uneven late modernity, are co-​located with the emergence of twentieth-​century form. The inextricability of formal procedure from the articulation ethical content –​the very mark of abstraction or alienation –​testifies to the non-​identity of the work itself as, indeed, to the heterogeneities that still reside within presumptively finished categories of art and politics, (postcolonial) realism and (European) modernism, “Adorno” and his others. As the chronicler of “damaged life” in twentieth-​ century Europe, Adorno is associated with a prodigious oeuvre, and a comparably intensive commitment to a writerly practice that stretches across the specific concerns of medium, genre and period. If Adorno’s thought coheres

Introduction  13 through dynamically constellated ideas, genres, works and traditions, it remains notoriously resistant to excerption and paraphrasing. Such difficulty derives, in no small measure from Adorno’s cultivation of an exceptional compositorial style of writing. In his appropriation of that “little tradition” of the German Enlightenment, the essay-​form, as well as the great established systems of idealist Kritik, Adorno arranges the trajectory (and conventions) of conceptual thought, as they comprise the particular philosophical contentions of a given text, in an approximation of musical ideas. Reconstructing the concepts of programmatic philosophical thought around the Marxian insistence on the materiality of the object, Adorno’s style is compacted, as if along musical lines, through clusters of ideational motifs; their contentions unfold by way of an expositional technique that turns on formidable reversals of proposition, syntax and subject-​position. If such presentation is inseparable from the determinate content (or objects) of Adorno’s oeuvre, so also is Adorno’s life-​long exchange with his older colleague and friend Walter Benjamin  –​a debt that informs our own discussions of the allegory of melancholic modern subjectivity in the postcolony (Part I); the fate of intimacy under escalated orders of commodification and neutralization; and the precarious question of domicile within a (multi)national order that dissolves the experience of place into accelerated movements of wealth, technology and peoples (Part Two). In the context and cultural location of late style in India, these are features, all, of the modern ‘landscape of catastrophe’ (an image of late works no doubt borrowed from Benjamin). As such, Adorno’s engagement with the “depressive” theoretical posture of Benjamin is represented through a range of strategically selected texts in this study, as a posthumous mode of conversation on the forms, emotive structure and topos of the logic of civilization and progress, as it unfolds within the historical disorders of enlightenment in the subcontinental context. Within the parameters of our presentation, then, Adorno’s life-​long interlocution with Benjamin is captured, as the emblem of intellectual solidarity, through “Adornian” movements of internal negation and displacement  –​which is also to say that the force of rhetorical address to friendship persists well after the friend’s inability to have survived the name-​place, “Auschwitz”. Even as Adorno’s corpus is charged with a set of critical-​affective valences that are palpably different from Benjaminian Trauer (mourning), the sign of “Adorno” emerges –​as a refraction of our own delineation of the dialectic of enlightenment in the postcolony –​as no less than the principle architect of “the form of melancholic historical consciousness that comes into its own in modernity” everywhere (Ganguly, 201).14 In relationship to his own philosophical forebearers, especially Hegel, Adorno eschews developmentalist narratives of European modernity (as consolidated within teleological receptions of Idealism in Germany) for procedure. As such, the contention of a late modernity acquires methodological significance for the conjunctural approach deployed by this study, supported, as it is, by the premise of a single but internally variegated

14 Introduction trajectory of cultural modernization “after Auschwitz”. Keya Ganguly, in an exemplary (re)reading of Satyajit Ray’s cinema, reminds us of the “emergent” critical possibilities of Adorno’s philosophical writings for considering the particular contradictions of cultural modernization in the peripheries, just as the postcolonial articulation of the movement and derangements of enlightenment accrues, in the process, generalisable significance for any consideration of twentieth-​century legacies of modernism in our globalist moment. “[T]‌urning… to the problems of a disappointing present –​betrayer of its own past” –​and against all prevailing civic fundamentalisms –​the late stylist secularizes the great myths of chronological time by demonstrating how the periodicities and narrative conventions of progressive, sequential time germinate, and, in historical effect, give rise to catastrophe. This mode of historicism requires, then, a paratactical method of exposition, one that revisits a concatenated social totality through points of internal antithesis and violent contradiction. Such a speculative approach to narratives of the historical past (as in the post-​Independent cinema of Ray, for Ganguly) has far-​reaching import for contemporary experience in the postcolony, serving, first of all, as a procedure for disenchanting “naïve faith in development … of artistic style or the autonomy of … form …; indeed, this is the lesson [Adorno] derives from Hegel” (Ganguly, 201, emphasis mine). Between two monumental works, Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory (1969), and in his own context, Adorno stakes a wager on a rationalism that can no longer appear as a matter of (organically developed, causally linked) necessity. As the very first lines of these two symmetrically related if mutually alienated works contend, the operations of conceptual thought and the determinate content of art “survive” in late modernity as accidents, only after their authority has been spent by the force (shameful or otherwise) of history. As a preliminary heuristic for grasping the historicising possibilities of Adorno’s uses of the dialectic, we might note how the materials and legacy of German Idealism are seized upon, in and across these works, not as the evolution of post-​Kantian thought from early to late developments –​as if such periodisation were unmediated by artifice and vicissitudes of ideological usage  –​but as a “colliding, at times antithetical emergence of an unharmonious whole” (202).15 The opportunities of form emerge, then, not in the generation of novelty or the insistence on historical rupture but through the residualisms of Reason and Culture –​latencies, in other words, only now expressed through the very de-​humanisation of tradition’s forms. As rationality turns into the logic of reification through the universalising thrust of capital, the corpus of tradition becomes severed from the (moral, intellectual) signatures of its great authors. But to the extent that the catastrophic depletion of context and artistic content is also the index of the work’s thorough-​going depersonalisation, reification succeeds in removing the work from the compulsion to “mean” something. In other words, it is only under conditions of late capitalist modernity that the work is emancipated from the conventions of linear temporality. Staging the inoperability of its

Introduction  15 internal conventions, the late work removes itself from twentieth-​century categories of novelty and derivativeness, origin and decline, the vitality of subjective expression versus death experienced as the calamity of an ending –​ as from the harmonizing imperative of form itself. In a terse conclusion to his commentary on Beethoven’s great liturgical composition, the Missa Solemnis –​performed only twice while the composer lived, and then only in excerpted form for unreceptive audiences –​Adorno affirms this unsuccessful work as the force of a negation so thorough-​going as to abolish even the critical measure that would distinguish between artistic accomplishment and failure. Against a consensus on the uncontested “cultural significance” of this piece –​retained in the embarrassing absence of any critical justification for the peculiarities of the composition itself –​Adorno states: Late works are “catastrophes in the history of art” because in them, all the many endings of history, including, primarily, the sentimental image of human catastrophe as aging and the finality of death, are unmade (Adorno, “LS” 567). As image, Adorno signals here, the possibilities of a form that does not contest or transcend a set of finished conventions  –​these include the various measures of organically imagined time –​but instead juxtaposes their respective closures “catastrophically” against alternative orders of temporal duration or mnemonic extension. The resulting filigree of stylistic descriptors that will characterise the late work  –​brittle inorganicity rather than over-​ripe decay, the enigmatic refusal of signification, the bewildering “derivativeness” of conventions in their reduplication as convention, the depletion of metaphor  –​requires a reckoning with Adorno’s granular readings of the objectivity of music vis-​ à-​vis its internal exposition of time. In the early essay fragment, “Late Style in Beethoven” (1937), another account of the severe constraints and considerable possibilities that subtend the appearance of artistic lateness, Adorno signals the necessary breakdown of the work insofar as its conventions are demonstrably removed (through reification) from the “empirical” content of its narration, which includes, undoubtedly, the fact of death.16 To say this through the reversal that Adorno himself sets in play: “Death” becomes perceptible in late works not as image (determined with positivistic content by plot or the pathos of perspective) but through the space and action of negation –​ as alterity. The work becomes an exposition of its own unviablity via its failing conventions, which are stripped down, now, to “bald, undisguised” conventionalisms, mere formalities that have for too long conferred the appearance of “art” upon both work and the incident of death (565, emphasis mine). If this strikes us as a remarkable contention, it is because in the limit-​form of the “image of death” –​the line of empirical reality through which the work must pass in order to evoke some other order of presentation –​ Adorno indicates the dissolution of the art-​object under the velocities of epochal, chronological progress. Withdrawing from subjectivist protocols of (hegemonic) speech and (subaltern) silence, (corporeal) fate and (aesthetic) transcendence, the late work’s most accomplished innovation is its

16 Introduction indifference to every existing code of innovation, whether artistic or historical. In an intensive abandonment of norms of expression –​including settled compacts on the formalities of beauty or the dignity of death, the value of communication and, indeed, the critical measure of accomplishment/​failure –​ late works unfold as the “naked representation of themselves” (566). The first line of the essay, “Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis” (1957) returns us to the divisive debates that have constituted the history, and current predicament, of postcolonial melancholia. These, I have proposed, range through the vectors of a fatalistic surrender to “incommensurability” and the appeal for vigorous representational “struggle”. “The neutralization of culture –​the words have a philosophical ring” (569).17 In this lapidary opening sentence, the very “words” –​“culture” and “neutralization” –​ posit a more or less general reflection that intellectual constructs have forfeited their intrinsic meaning because they have lost any possible relation to social praxis and have become that which aesthetics retrospectively claims that they are  –​objects of pure observation, of mere contemplation. As such they ultimately lose even their aesthetic import; their [specific] truth-​content disappears along with the tension vis-​à-​vis reality. They become cultural goods, exhibited in a secular pantheon in which contradictions, where works that would tend to destroy each other, find a deceptively peaceful coexistence. (Adorno, Missa, ibid.) Qualities of an ecumenical coherence or even transcendence –​Culture’s display of ideological neutrality –​is underwritten by the tracks of capitalism’s destructive progression. And cultural rationalization, or, what is the same, processes of capitalist modernization, are signalled, in the citation, through the distinct connotation of economic compulsion. The concern finds its central motif in the essay in the image of “catastrophe”. Catastrophe, however, not at all as a moment of traumatic historical rupture or a psychological personality in disorder, but in the etymological sense –​as capital’s propulsive “turns” between movements of forcible homogenisation and utopic transformation. Much more than a critique of the institutional politics of canon formation or even the museoloisation of culture, Adorno’s contention points to a set of dominant values and generic codes that have already succeeded in colonising a diversity of spatial, social and cultural entities even while erasing the history of that violence from the object’s curated appearance. We can clarify this somewhat differently through the speculative anthropology of Dialectic of Enlightenment, especially, the memorable section in which Odysseus disenchants the Sirens, those erotic representatives of the hierarchical, magical world of tradition: Modernity presupposes the prior destruction of nascent or non-​capitalist forms of organisation, whose remainders are thereafter assimilated into a synchronic, forward-​looking imaginary as signifiers of “difference”. To the same extent, the essay’s opening premise on

Introduction  17 the incremental inexpressivity of cultural forms, or the impoverishment of artistic or critical efficacy as it enters into extant thought-​forms, is a wager about the development of capitalist modernity across seemingly naturalised categories of (cultural, temporal) difference. It is crucial to note that in the process of reading the Missa according to its “gestur[al]” indifference to imputed intent or biographical periodisation, Adorno also minoritises the towering persona of “Beethoven” (LS 566, 570). The composer is not, for Adorno, a psychologically integral “personality” (said to have expressed his bodily affliction and anguish, at the end of his life, through the rough sublimity of the final compositions) (LS 564). Placed under the priority of the “alienated masterpiece”, Beethoven is a defaced signature, readable as the artifice that passes for the individual under orders of reification:  As the very sign of economic abstraction, the idea of “Beethoven” derives its power from the music. Noting how music features as the objective record of the antinomies of life under late capitalism, Ganguly comments: This density [of ideas around the figure of Beethoven] is meant to underscore … the dialectical idea that only against the backdrop of rationalized processes that have led to the “end of the individual” does the category of subjectivity become meaningful. (Ganguly, 202, emphasis mine; Adorno, 9, cited in Ganguly) As the stigma and possibilities of a fully reified cultural modernity, the signature of Spätstil also returns the work to the question and value of subjectivity, grasped now, through the perspective of lateness, as the ethically indispensable accomplishment of modernity. In other words, the specific maturity of late works emerges as a force of negation against the ideologies of an organically developed whole. By the same token, the category of the subject must be elaborated within the totalised socio-​cultural context of “corro[sive]” individualism, but properly so –​as the intransigent, de-​ materialised expressivity that belongs, above all, to music (Adorno, CC 35). The Brazilian theorist of the Frankfurt School and student of Adorno, Roberto Schwarz  –​possibly, the latter’s most creative reader today  –​ incorporates both the aesthetic and sociological implications of Adorno’s elaboration of late style into a body of literary criticism that specifies the displacements of established ideologies of progress and civilisation, particularly as these penetrate into locations organised by (semi)feudal or nascent forms of capitalism. If the particular realities of unevenly developed colonial societies stand at the limit of Adorno’s own historical imagination, they also mark the latter’s thought with the sign of finitude; it is perhaps for this reason that Schwarz demurs from conferring a name upon his method. The engagement with the Adornian reflection on lateness –​just in its lack of programmatic completion and comprehensive identity  –​is established immanently through considering the incongruity –​and exemplarity –​of the

18 Introduction Brazilian case. Cited as a consolidation of our own approach to the peripheral modernity of (post)colonial India, Brazil’s delayed historical entry into the order of capitalist modernisation results, for Schwarz, in a profoundly disordered complex of older social forms. This collision with “imported” ideologies of progress and enlightenment finds concretion in Brazil’s belated encounter with the European novel. Crucially, the acute significance of the Brazilian case is extrapolated not from the specific cultural origins of the nation, nor even the specific content of the novelistic text, but from what I have proposed is the generic modernity of the form itself. In other words, the peripheral “matter of Brazil” acquires the force of generality precisely because the history of its development, as traced through the late introduction of the novel to Brazilian culture, observes the generalizing dictates of capitalism (Schwarz, Two Girls 141).18 To clarify Schwarz’s tacit insistence on the universal significance of Brazil’s peripheral modernity:  The modern Brazilian novel may be specified, as such, because of its elaboration of a contradictory socio-​cultural whole, the very “modernity” that also subtends the modular form of the novel as it evolved in late-​eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century Western Europe. What is significant to the relation of novel and world, however, are the idiosyncratic realities of Brazil, namely, its marginal location in relation to the centres of industrial and finance capital, the context of colonial underdevelopment (marked, in this instance, by the institution of slavery) and the anachronism of “free” populations that have nothing to exchange but their (racially coded) bodies well after the event of emancipation. It is precisely these contradictory social, economic and temporal realities that generate unprecedented lines of artistic and intellectual practice, which are proffered as a creative response to the position and antinomies of peripherality. For this reason, the aesthetic encounter with peripherality, may, indeed, be assessed convincingly as Brazil’s singular contribution to worldy development of the novel-​form. In sum, if the historical contradictions of Brazil’s cultural modernity originate from its delayed encounter with bourgeois aesthetic-​ epistemic formations –​apropos the citation from Fanon –​this is also the advent of a contemporary artistic direction that rehabilitates form as a resolution to the universal problem of “discrepancy”. As Schwarz’s dazzling readings of the nineteenth-​century author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis demonstrate, the author’s formally innovative solutions to the problem of Brazil’s uneven development represent, on their own terms, a step past the “proper” ideas and thought-​forms of Europe of which they are, nevertheless, derivative –​ hence, the Brazilian novel, in all its stylistic and historical peculiarities, as the generative occasion, and material, of the “misplaced idea” of modernity. Furthermore, the distinctive accomplishment of Schwarz’s late (evocatively anonymised) uses of Adorno resides in its attention to the various scales of capital’s universalising tendency:  Through his readings of Machado, Schwarz grasps a national-​popular consciousness together with its inextricability from the experience of colonialism (as his predecessor could not

Introduction  19 quite) and affirms this complex in its various, frequently antithetical “social positions” (Schwarz, 141). At the same time, the formations of this peripheral modernity are historicised through attention to systems of modernisation that are world-​wide in dynamism and scope. The body of works represented in this study is arranged according to a recognisable historical chronology, the principal stricture of an imagined community long associated with the promise and discontents of elite nationalist-​led processes of modernisation. As such, our narrative unfolds from the late-​colonial period, through post-​ Independence into the current conjuncture, as India opens onto systems of advanced capitalism; each work, and the periodicities comprising this familiar history of the national modern are revisited speculatively, through the sign and symptoms of lateness. Via close reading, our study reconstructs a canonical archive, from Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, Vikram Seth and the contemporary photography of Dayanita Singh, through unnamed perceptual and epistemic possibilities that open through the very medium and narrative content of works, as these become subject, in time, to logics of commodification and alienation. The novel-​form in late-​colonial modalities of classical allegory (Tagore) or the Lukácsian epic (Anand) is read even as these valorised conventions of the modern novel in India disintegrate under the pressure of the reader’s positioning within a contradictory historical present. As such, the choices and organisation of the chapters in this book reflect the belated advent of India’s aesthetic constructs into the propulsive thrust and violent reversals of the dialectic of enlightenment  –​as into the twentieth-​century critique of history understood as “the unfolding movement of progress and civilization” that the “modernist experiment had attempted to counter”, across the specificities of centre and periphery, as a response to the globally decisive event of modernisation (Ganguly, 202). Part One engages two contemporaneous works by authors who are seen, typically, to represent successive generations and styles of the modern novel-​form. Rabindranath Tagore’s final work of long prose, Four Chapters (1934), foretells the birth of the nation through the grain of unrelieved personal pessimism. The setting of the novel links the work’s immediate historical context, the advent and rapid escalation of revolutionary terrorism in Bengal by the 1930s, to an expositional style that unfolds via the degradation of narrative’s principle devices. As our opening text, Four Chapters features an emancipated middle-​class woman protagonist, stalled, in her “development” as both character and narratological function, on the cusp of freedom. Caught between the increasingly incompatible values of subjective and political autonomy, sexual expression and the historical necessity of national-​popular assertion, Ela is a figure of the “inassimilable” not in her resistance to the bitterly divided totality of text and nation (any subjective or “characteristic” questioning of such a state of affairs, on her part, dissipates as the narrative advances) but as a figure of rendition –​ a dehumanised device, forced by the hand of the author himself, to fall out

20 Introduction and altogether disappear from the symbolic complex of nation/​novel. In its allegorical extremism, the work displays, at best, uneven control over conventions of psychological perspective, characterisation and plot development. If these modalities of psychological realism accompanied the introduction of the novel-​form to Bengal a generation earlier (through, particularly, the displacement of the Victorian novel of marriage and property into the colonial context), it is Tagore who is credited with consolidating the form in Bangla and, in some essential part, for its literary impact, therein, upon developments in other Indian languages. It is worth noting that Tagore (in the steps of his nineteenth-​century predecessor, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay) accomplished this transposition of the English social realist work not so much by “vernacularising” the linguistic medium of the form, but through his distinctive attempt to code the intimate contradictions of lived experiences in the colony through the genre of romance. Through his experiments with generic form (through inter alia a residual Victorianism and the misplaced modernity of romantic “love”), Tagore created a range of deeply realised feminine agents, cherished, in the complexity of their fates and personal choices, by generations of middle-​class readers. As such, the singularly belated work of Four Chapters, considered in its relative critical as well as popular neglect, acquires vexing significance for Tagore’s monumental biography. On the other hand, there is the undeniable brutality of the plot and, as we will see, the resolution of the work’s many internal peculiarities, in a conclusion of emphatic cruelty. The main contention of Four Chapters is its polemic against the uses of revolutionary violence (informed by the author’s commitment, following the disastrous Partition of Bengal in 1905 and the Great War, to an ethos of pacifist internationalism). This humanist posture is consistently misdirected, however, by the work’s tendency towards textual violence that is enacted incrementally, and then with finality, upon the “New Woman’s” (nabeena) voice and figure. If Tagore’s final funerary work of prose fiction appears to subscribe to the chronological sense of the catastrophe of aging, it is followed, in our account, by Mulk Raj Anand’s revolutionary optimism, in Across the Black Waters (1939). Our choice of text signals Anand’s foundational uses of the (Joycean) Bildungsroman for the twentieth-​century Indian novel in English, accomplished in the major works, Untouchable (1935), his first novel, and Coolie (1936). Notably, Across the Black Waters departs from the domestic setting and also modal choices of its predecessors. An under-​read historical fiction of World War I  –​ the only work in English on the topic from the first half of the century –​the novel is remarkable, not least, for envisioning a single if internally differentiated twentieth century. Drafted between the collapse of European empires and an emergent, interracial awareness of histories of subjugation, Across the Black Waters heralds a de-​colonial mode of consciousness that would be acutely subaltern in its experiential content, while remaining transcontinental in its sweep. A reflection of Anand’s writerly commitment to the cause of Leninist anti-​imperialism and militant

Introduction  21 anti-​fascist resistance, this work of internationalist hope advances, above all, a temporal hypothesis about those heady times  –​a moment in which the exclusionary regime of imperial space-​time cleaves to new forms of self-​ awareness, thereby collocating the spaces of Europe and its exploited peripheries into a simultaneous but internally heterogeneous modernity. Across the Black Waters’ claim to a “third world humanism” is cast, in its appeal to both novelty and universal significance, as a very specific interruption of the racist temporalities of Empire and metropolitan space (alluded to, above, through the citation from Fanon). A revisionary account of the reiterated crises of European conflict, the narrative relates the experiences of a young peasant recruit from Punjab in the first year of the War, in the trenches of Ypres and Festubert on the Western Front. The education of Lai Singh turns on his discovery of how “Europe”, too, is constituted through internal peripheries, in besieged agrarian borderlines made visible through their material and cultural disparities with the great capitals of the continent. Despite its dynamic displacement of the markers of ethnicity and place, the vast geo-​political vision of the work is terminated by an irresolute conclusion, which stages the protagonist’s disappearance from the trenches. By stalling its exploration of a subaltern awakening to the world, the narrative appears to exhaust itself before its proper conclusion, falling away (with its protagonist) from its orienting forms and times –​that of the postcolonial Bildung plot and its narratological precondition, the advent of the young revolutionary nation. From our “globalist” point of view  –​well after the event of incomplete or stalled decolonisation and the commodification of that very history into sadistic repetitions of cliché  –​the developmentalist ideal, even or especially in its revolutionary variation, can only appear as failure. There can be no stronger confirmation of this perception than the baldly dated features of Anand’s experimental realism, marked by gross transpositions of vernacular speech patterns into English, and the accompanying infantilisation of the subaltern’s thought-​world (Schwarz would remind us that the devolution of Anand’s mimetic realism, as of the novelistic cultivation of an ethnographically specific point of view, into stereotype, is the fate of all appeals to “concreteness” in the age of abstraction). The sibling resemblance between the youthful figures of Ela and Lalu, as suggested by Part One, requires some caution. Their affinity does not reside in concrete markers of class, caste and ethnicity or even the regimented politics of gender (in their respective specificities, these signal the experiential chasms that comprise the heterogeneity of India’s catastrophic modernity). Rather than a product of genetic origins, their line of filiation is established through artistic “process”, or what Adorno identifies, under conditions of reification, as the late work’s quality of disappearance: The principal agents of these two narratives, together with the question of a privileged point of view appear through the incremental erasure of subjective expression from the human face. Over and above their lines of questioning (which are, in fact, given “voice” and perspective in the texts), the figures of Ela and

22 Introduction Lalu stand for the late work’s emergence through the posture of doubt. This is a formal exposition of radical uncertainty, which is positioned beyond personal pronouncements of (dis)belief insofar as its qualities emerge from within that most artificial of all constructs, “ontology” itself –​or, in the case the (post)colony, the constructs of freedom, identity, even, indeed, citizenship –​ideations that once permitted “the objective intellectual organization of experience” in a national present (Adorno, Missa 577). Youth and ageing, origins and endings, woman and revolutionary. These fin-​de-​siècle fictions of India’s modernity return through our readings not as the organic elaboration of history, authorship and the expressive individual, but as inhuman appearance –​ life, itself, as the prostheses of capital. Accordingly, the historical relation between the two works do not quite adumbrate the sequential evolution of performative traditions of classical allegory, via the resolution of the unfinished form of late nineteenth-​century Bangla novel, into a pan-​national mode of social realism as programmed by the All India Progressive Writers’ Association (AIPWA). (The chronologically “correct” periodicities of literary history would propose such a line of development, following which Four Chapters would feature as a transitional work.) From our methodological position, the institutionalised content of these works are, rather, the occasion for new appearances that not only suggest alternative histories of the past, but generate undecidable narratives about the future. In the second part of the book, this revisionist proposition is tested through the deliberate constructivism of works that come after the liberalisation of the Indian polity, from around and after the turn of the millennium. The discussion begins with Vikram Seth’s critically unsuccessful second novel, An Equal Music (1999), and a focus on the author’s distinctive (if apparently seamless) borrowing from the English social-​realist novel of the nineteenth century. Taking Mishra’s critique of A Suitable Boy further down the chronology of our concerns, I suggest that the fairly anodyne romance of An Equal Music is received today, correctly, as the “political unconscious” of globalisation. For almost all available critical scholarship (and there is not much) the novel emblematises resurgent ideologies of cosmopolitanism, and, what is more, its linkage to manifestly Eurocentric claims to universalism: Reversing the hard-​won insights of postcolonial scholarship, the novel confuses its account of the humanistic value of music with the prerogatives of a newly mobile transnational elite, according to this view. As such, the work is fully complicit in a new class-​ consciousness that represents, under the order of neoliberalism, both the hegemonic subject of transnational capitalism and its invisible preconditions in inequitable distributions of wealth and cultural capital. The textual evidence for this claim is to be found in the insularity of the narrative. Its narrow thematic focus not only concerns the West (to the deliberate exclusion of the rest) but also appears to valorise that most institutionalised mode of bourgeois European culture –​following Adorno,

Introduction  23 too –​ classical music. Here, for critics, is the author’s (recently enabled) choice to exit native ground for an exclusivist literary mode, which exercises, and easily normalises its knowledge of “foreign” cultural codes; this, to the point where the novel sets forth a most orthodox interpretation of even “Western” culture. There could be no more damning example, then, of the inextricability of new modes of capitalism with the commoditisation and assimilation of postcolonial literature per se –​read sociologically, the themes and main figures of the text signify no less than the suspect persona of the global Indian author. Biographical readings of the novel do seem unavoidable insofar as the text is animated, everywhere, by an auctorial figure that successfully exploits (for a non-​domestic readership) inherited upper/​middle-​class  Indian values of wide-​ranging cultural literacy, “pure” bilingualism (as opposed to its accented, chutnified version, to borrow from Seth’s illustrious contemporary, Salman Rushdie), and formidable levels of professional expertise. All this, under a newly emergent regime of neoliberal capitalism that converts the free-​market ideal of competitive individualism into a self-​skilling, entrepreneurial model of “human development” –​ the millennial face of institutionalised identity, in other words, that fully assimilates the persona of the celebrity author. As the engagement with what amounts to a paradigmatic charge of Eurocentricism under new socio-​economic formations, my reading focuses on the oblique narratological concerns of the work, which have to do with the problem of representing music through prose. As the premise for a counter-​reading, this approach underscores the discrete, if thorough-​going problem of the work’s formal incoherence; namely, the narrative’s inability to actually represent its subject matter, the value of (musical) equality, within the presupposed totality of “culture”. The formal gambit of An Equal Music is its claim as narrative upon musical significance; where the latter is understood precisely in its lack of positivistic content, as the transcendental ground of universally audited meaning and ethical participation. In point of fact, this Kantian ideal derives from the novel’s thoroughly studied account of the early nineteenth-​century German artifice of “absolute music”. In its subtle constructivism, An Equal Music inadvertently sets up a contradiction between its explicit address to culture –​ understood, with the exactitude of the title, as the educative (liberal-​democratic) principle of equality and participation –​and the materials through which such humanism is actually enunciated. Consequently, the existence of something like “English” (which appears frequently in the thought-​world of the protagonist) is constantly mediated through something else –​the figurally depicted medium and value of the art-​object –​“music”. This recessive, profoundly fictionalised account of the civic value of Englishness –​not music –​is further reflected in the spatial imagination of the work. While alluding in historically accurate fashion to the rise and decline of competing great powers (Vienna and London), empire, as the covert subtext of the plot, appears processually, as an unresolved contest for cultural hegemony in the narrative present.

24 Introduction Music or literature, this empire of culture or the other, the work suggests –​ but –​in a confession of finitude –​never both at once. Read against the grain, through the schism of internally delayed claims upon cultural value and not despite its obvious ideological closures, An Equal Music presents a pedagogy of failure for postcolonial writing. Or, to put a somewhat different inflection on Lye’s demand for a realistic image of optimism in the peripheries, we encounter, in Seth, a realist practice whose proper locus in the text is never more (or less) than promissory. The novel’s posture of “deafness” to postcolonial orthodoxies of language, culture, and nation –​borrowed from the sentimental stereotype of the afflicted, isolated Beethoven –​suggests that Adorno’s accounts of late style might be resumed for other times and locations, as, indeed, for this elegantly middle-​brow exemplar of the aesthetic form and latencies of neo-​liberalism itself. In its concluding discussions, the book shifts the register of the argument from the locus of the “national” to the experience of space as articulated along the axes of Indian metropolitan life in the late twentieth century and after. Our topic is the photography of the internationally celebrated Delhi-​based artist Dayanita Singh (1961–​), especially, her feminised uses of academic portraiture for “subjects” that displace the human form from the frame. Presenting us with a series of portraits of intimate yet empty space, Singh’s oeuvre advances an alternative vision of the domestic interior. Through its refractory planes and screens, the photographic interior suggests a way of domiciling, once again, the dissipated “externalities” of twentieth-​century history (as accounted for in previous chapters) past the frame of the nation. Through the moods and artifice of privacy, Singh reopens not only imagination, but, altogether, the fate of a cultural imaginary that has departed from the historical ground of home, genetic or “family” resemblance, and the material culture of Nehruvian modernity. The power of absence in these images  –​really, the action of negation  –​ derives from dimensions of visibility (distance, depth, movement) that the viewer acknowledges, in fascination, to be wholly non-​perceptible in real space–​time. The stylistic provocations of Singh’s oeuvre are misconstrued if approached through the idea (and affects) of “postmodern” superficiality, or the wholesale transformation of twentieth-​century personhood, place and ontology into a trompe l’oeil of the commodity form. Rather, the active openings of perception and memory, as staged by these portraits of recessive interiority, are accomplished through the peculiar operation of subtraction. This is a procedure through which the vectors of stable perspective disappear –​if it could be said, manifestly –​from photographed space. The effect is a kind of sustained visibility that can only be described as a mode of involuted emptiness, a disembodied pressure upon perception that is uncannily more present, more profoundly “subjectified” than any posture of expression assumed by the inhabitants of the domestic interior (whether imputed, or mimetically captured in the frame).

Introduction  25 The legacy of the late work is, as Singh reveals, disuse; fractal repetitions of nothing other than the assimilated visual object. Casting the notion of a twentieth-​ century “domestic” constituency towards photographic metaphors of screening or projection, Singh presents us with a point-​ of-​ view that arises altogether outside of the perceptual and symbolic preconditions of sight. This is the aloofness of the “shutter”, or the “aperture”, a point in space that is always inverted in its relation to reality –​the alterity of the negative that circulates in free disregard of the historical dualities (and allegorical image) of subjective interiority/​ socio-​ political exteriority. The departure posed by Singh suggests that the “machinic” eye of the visual image provides an alternative perspective on the predicament of afterness, or the condition of institutionalisation that separates the constructs of national culture from their ethico-​ political matter (Bewes); and which therefore divides, at least for the current conjuncture, the twentieth-​century novel from its once-​heroic bid upon fullness. As the point-​of-​view of what is properly external to the economy of inside and outside, virtual and real, historical proprietorship and pauperization, the visual image indexes unnamed epistemic trajectories within the structure of modern consciousness; it is the anti-​form, as it were, to the fallen modalities of self-​knowledge presupposed by the reader of the novel. Adorno, in Aesthetic Theory, associates this opening with a free or floating point-​ of-​view, a positionality, or a kind of “recording”, that belongs to neither subject nor object of the image, but which has been associated traditionally with canonical forms of literary and visual realism. In a strikingly cinematic trope, also a distant gesture to his quarrel and deep debt to Lukács the elder –​Adorno speculates on the view point of technology as it might appear under “transformed relations of production” (AT 68). This floating line of vision –​the wordless, selfless intonation that runs through Tagore, Anand and Seth in different ways  –​is itself a hypothesis  –​the Adornian image for a world in which the apparatus serves, rather than colonises the mutually alienated needs of inner and outer experience. The expositional perplexities and affects that unfold in the novels discussed in the following chapters can do no more than attest to the fruitlessness of such an “attained” terra nostra –​a space of indivisible equality (to look ahead to Seth) in which no fraction of the world would be unavailable to the devices of audibility, to the writerly “gesture” (Tagore’s word), or the visible facet of the work. What is the same, Adorno’s hope  –​that the apparatus might someday help “this world to attain what perhaps it wants” –​is lisible not as the cinematic image or even music but only against the historical disconsolations of the novel-​form. Or again: The hypothetical perspective of a techne that has been emancipated from the exploitative time of modernisation –​the intent and sentiment of Adorno’s claim –​is discoverable only in the historical depredations endured by the novel’s referential content –​in the figures of “want” and worldliness that animate our study of

26 Introduction artistic lateness in the periphery, and which, as poor resemblances, still await recognition, and therefore, contest (ibid).

Notes 1 T. W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002). T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-​Kentor. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Hereafter cited as AT. 2 Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism:  Adorno; Or, the Persistence of the Dialectic. (London: Verso, 1990), 7. 3 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures (London and New  York: Routledge, 1989), p. 4. 4 Eli Park Sorensen, Postcolonial Studies and the Literary: Theory, Interpretation and the Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 5 Deepika Bahri, Native Intelligence: Aesthetic, Politics and Postcolonial Literature (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 6 Ulka Anjaria, “Introduction: Literary Pasts, Presents, and Futures”, in A History of the Indian Novel in English (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 7 Colleen Lye, “Afterword:  Realism’s Futures”, in ‘Worldling Realisms”, Special Issue of Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 49, no. 2 (Summer 2016). 8 Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 9 Partha Chatterjee, A Possible India (Oxford and New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 10 Pankaj Mishra, “Narendra Modi and the New Face of India”, The Guardian, 6 May 2014, http://​www.theguardian.com/​books/​2014/​may/​16/​what-​next-​india-​ pankaj-​mishra (accessed 23 September 2016). 11 Gyorgy Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: An Historico-​philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Forms Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MA: MIT Press, 1971). 12 T.W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society” in Prisms, trans. and ed. Shiery Weber Nicholson and Samuel Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982). 13 Timothy Bewes, The Event of Postcolonial Shame (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011). 14 Keya Ganguly, Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray (Berkeley, CA: University of California at Los Angeles Press, 2010). 15 Ganguly uses the metaphor of “collision” for the synchronic space and symbolic world of Ray’s cinema. The fetish-​like magic of the image –​and therefore, its contemporaneity with developments in visual aesthetics elsewhere  –​gives “whole” form to modernisation conceived as an integrative process that unifies disparate experiences of “progress” into antinomial, profoundly gendered and internally incommensurate orders of time. 16 T.W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven”. 17 T.W. Adorno, “Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis” in Essays on Music. 18 Roberto Schwarz, “Another Capitu? Helena Morley’s Diary”, in Two Girls, ed. Francis Mulhern (London: Verso Press, 2012).

Part I

Terminal beginnings National modernism

1  National allegory in late style Culture, terror and bodily disburdenment in Tagore’s Four Chapters

The contrast between inner and outer is produced … through the belief that we are late arrivals and epigones… (Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, V; VIII)1 Not only are artworks allegories, they are the catastrophic fulfilment of allegories. (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 84)2

An unrelenting critique militant anti-​colonial nationalism, Four Chapters/​ CharAdhyaya (1934; author’s English translation, 1935–​ 36) is the last completed work of long fiction by Rabindranath Tagore. In its subject matter, the novella approaches the widespread use of terrorism in the 1920s and 1930s in Bengal, during the militant phase of the Swadeshi mobilisation, as a symptom of profound cultural deracination within the colonial present. In its despondent adherence to motifs of cultural “annihilation” and historical “apocalypse”, and on any first reading, the work is easily contextualised through its adherence to a late-​imperial world-​view (Tagore, 28, 31–​32).3 In the first section of Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, Partha Chatterjee discusses Tagore’s literary forbearer, the late nineteenth-​century novelist and essayist, Bankimchandra Chattophadyaya, to demonstrate how post-​Enlightenment philosophies of history, which took Europe as the origin and apogee of culture, became inextricable from the vexed articulation of historical consciousness in the colony. In extended dialectical reversals of this orientalising chronology, the latter “departs” towards the twentieth-​ century consolidation of the developmentalist nation-​state through its very efforts to reverse the stigma of cultural and societal belatedness. Placed with such an epigonal understanding of history, Four Chapters invites a reading of its near-​obsessive preoccupation with the catastrophe of modern violence –​imagined through the nascent structures of the independent nation –​ as a simple inversion of preceding (imperial) accounts of civilisational ascendancy and decay. Almost entirely omitted from critical appreciations

30  Terminal beginnings of Tagore’s extensive oeuvre of prose fiction, the novella appears, today, as a by-​product of postcolonial derivativeness, and perhaps somewhat more engagingly, as an example of a wider, more global, early twentieth-​century aesthetic of decadence. With immediate reference to the question of the work’s ageing, Four Chapters’ continuing relevance to a canon of national literature appears largely accidental; the work’s unambiguous heuristic value resides in its unwitting indictment of a range of current political discourses (surveyed in the Introduction) in anachronism, insofar as these continue to maintain the fin-​de-​siècle premise of India’s ruined/​resurgent civilisational legacy across incompatible ideological commitments. Ostensibly a romance, the Four Chapters follows the lovers, Atin and Ela, within the setting of their involvement in a militant secret society. The order has been established by the mysterious Indranath, erstwhile scientist and brilliant graduate of the old European universities. Its cadres thrive within socially marginalised spaces of colonial Calcutta, seeking also to extend their underground revolution to provincial surroundings; there, a rural populace has been, by turns, neglected and terrorised by colonial and nationalist elites. As the narrative progresses, Indranath escalates the stakes of the lovers’ involvement in the group by assigning Atin to tasks that presumably intensify the violent targeting of colonial administrators and institutions (although these events are never depicted). As such, it is the commanding force of Indranath’s loyalty tests that directs the plot. Beginning with Ela’s oath of celibacy  –​taken in the service of sexually disciplining the young men who entirely comprise the organisation –​the middle chapters chronicle the breakdown of the lovers’ commitment to the radical cause, and, more corrosively, to each other’s happiness. The final, fourth chapter of the novel concludes by transforming Ela into the target of Indranath’s cruel, if entirely dispassionate scheming; more insidiously, it casts her as the ambivalent object of Atin’s damaged desires. By this point, Ela has separated from both the cadre and Atin, thereby presenting a grave liability to the necessary secrecy and regimented integrity of the organisation. Appearing at Ela’s doorstep as her appointed assassin, Atin stabs Ela to death, even as she disrobes herself in an invitation to his final, fatal violence. If, for Adorno, catastrophe is another name for the late work, its exposition occurs in the allegorical procedure. Such an insight provides the most apposite starting point for an account of Four Chapters, not only as an allegory of lateness, but through the more complex dialectical possibilities of allegory in late style. Such a position could account for the plurality of formal resources that the novella so prodigiously deploys, while also opening the allegorical composition of the work onto the proposed line of interrogation of this study –​namely, the question of a work’s contemporaneity, as it might emerge through the obsolete or over-​rehearsed conventions of the last century. Accordingly, I sketch, briefly here, some of the formal and stylistic oddities that make up the work. In extended sections of the text, Four Chapters quotes from external narrative sources and expressive modalities,

National allegory in late style  31 casting elements of myth, epic narrative, the medieval devotional lyric, as well as references to European modernism, into the four, set-​like pieces of the work. The imported quality of these formalisms are further foregrounded through narrative settings of protracted inaction. These compositional elements approximate the novella’s orienting trope, the convention of a delayed tryst between lovers –​which, in the intervals between chapters, appears as another element of the work’s underdeveloped, even arrested action. In a further divergence from medieval conventions of belated or crossed love (which typically lend duration to the narrative) the lovers’ union is so fatally thwarted from the outset, that the romance ages even before its narration begins. Two interlinked observations about these formal peculiarities might be forwarded before we commence our discussion. First, despite placing an abundance of narratological materials on display, the novella effectively undermines its ostentatious bid upon an ideal of auctorial or poetic virtuosity. Four Chapters references an impressive archive of world literature (in large measure, through speech-​marks that notate its characters’ bilingualism), but these sources are accessible only as they become immanently available to the work –​through qualities of conventionalism, formal interchangeability, and, above all, a loss of authenticating context. Put differently, the narratological means of Four Chapters are set in motion through logics of cultural neutralisation  –​that inflection point in processes of modernisation, when rationalisation (the disenchantment of semi-​feudal belief-​systems) intersects with the homogenisation (interchangeability) of increasingly commodified cultural values. Determined less by Tagore’s compulsive referencing of past masters, the fragmented thought-​forms of Four Chapters, together with markers of middle-​class traditions of reading in English, emerge, in toto, as the historical effect of ideological assimilation and historical derivativeness. Therefore, despite its titular qualification as “A Story of Young India”, Tagore’s final work of long fiction unfolds as a curated accumulation, rather than accomplished synthesis, of secondary objects, genres and texts. That, “in the history of art”, late works are “not only allegories but the catastrophic fulfillment of allegory” suggests an opening toward the peculiarities of the novella’s composition, as well as its incongruous place in Tagore’s oeuvre. But the statement is also Adorno’s most compressed acknowledgement of his debt to Walter Benjamin, his older friend and occasional colleague. While engaging Tagore’s Four Chapters with Benjamin’s (now also over-​ cited) study of the German Baroque mourning play (Trauerspiel), I triangulate their respective, roughly contemporaneous accounts of the allegorical genre, through Benjamin’s essay, “On Goethe’s Elective Affinities” (1924). Advancing a close, if counter-​intuitive reading of Goethe’s novel, Benjamin completed his most distilled work of literary criticism concurrently with his expansive study of post-​Reformation allegory (although the latter would not be published for another four years). In its emphatic affirmation of the modernity of the novel-​form, the essay on Goethe serves as a counterpoint,

32  Terminal beginnings in our discussion, to the affective complex of melancholia, or the baroque attachment to the corroded symbolic unities of the past –​affects that, for Benjamin, characterise the ruinous return of nature to the cultural architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Germany (and, therein, the allegorical performance of early modern chronologies of human autonomy and knowledge, as a play of empty illusion). From another angle, Benjamin’s suggestion of a possibly antinomial relation between the disparate temporalities and moods of the novel-​form and allegory permits a counter-​reading of the fin-​de-​siècle world of Four Chapters and Tagore’s melancholic refusal of the developmentalist time of the nation –​and thereby, an intervention into an established body of literary criticism that continues to assess the feminine protagonists of Tagore’s political fictions through their ability to collapse, or otherwise re-​invigorate, the modernist norm of “national allegory”.

The historical plot of catastrophe: Four Chapters in the context of Tagore’s swadeshi fictions Four Chapters, Tagore’s thirteenth and last extended piece of prose fiction, is, in every obvious sense, a late work. Within conventional periodisations of Tagore’s literary writing, and in the finalism of the work’s violent resolution, the novella is seen to conclude the author’s so-​called political trilogy, also comprising of Gora (1907) and Ghare Baire (Home and the World) (1916). A foundational use of the Bildungsroman for the twentieth-​century Indian novel, Gora, articulated a grounding ethical and political problematic within turn-​of-​the century imaginings of a swadeshi samaj –​or, as Manu Goswami abbreviates, the proposition of an economically autarkic, “autonomous national society”, around which anti-​colonial resistance would be mobilised for the following three decades (Goswami, 202).4 Initiating the orienting concern of all three nationalist fictions, Gora poses the collective search for sovereignty as inseparable from the value of individualism, understood as the existential, and decisively modern “burden” of ethical self-​elaboration and reflexive individuation (Kapur, 278).5 Appropriating the conceit of the orphan-​inheritor from the Victorian social-​realist novel, Gora’s narrative places its youthful protagonist on a journey of self-​ loss and discovery, thereby unfolding the story of his education within the uneven geographies of undivided rural Bengal during the first years of revolutionary anti-​colonial agitation. The promissory conclusion of the novel has Gora (literally, white boy) turn away from the dominant cultural forms of the emergent swadeshi movement, towards a pastoralist ideal of the nation, figured through putatively indigenous rural values of social accommodation, cultural syncretism and maternal nurture. Learning of his illegitimate Irish ancestry, Gora finds the will to embrace his genealogy of natal abandonment and adoption, thereby decisively removing the novel’s construct of the nation from a nascent culture of politically sanctioned violence and oppressive majoritarianism. Reflecting on processes of societal modernisation as it swept through

National allegory in late style  33 the uneven geography of Bengal in the first decade of the twentieth century, and in an historically accurate reflection of its swadeshi context, Gora locates this “home-​grown” nationalist complex incisively in the juncture between an emergent ethos of militant masculinity; the vigorous reinvention of ritualised Brahmanism for the purposes of anti-​colonial mobilisation; and the further authorisation, thereby, of caste-​or gender-​based forms of social injustice.6 In a significant continuity, The Home and the World resumes Gora’s interrogation of an embodied personhood that might emerge autonomously of a domestic politics of swadeshi nationalism, while also heralding a mode of universalism capable of disrupting, at once, localised geographies of colonial domination and the imperial hegemonies of European and English nationalisms.7 The period that separates the two works is decisive, marking Tagore’s definitive break with his youthful immersion in the politics of organised nationalism, while also anticipating his celebrated internationalist turn, during the Great War, towards an ethic of pacifist humanism. Appearing after the disastrous first Partition of Bengal and its subsequent reversal (1905/​1911), The Home and the World departs from its predecessor by looking away from the revelatory possibility of a moderate, autochthonous yet inclusive form of cultural nationalism, as offered by Gora’s conclusion. By far the most widely read of the trilogy, The Home and the World undertakes an unforgiving, and for many, still prescient critique of political nationalism through an examination of the Brahmanical underpinnings of the anti-​colonial movement, in the aftermath of the aborted partition. Indicting the swadeshi leadership as a mode of reactionary “bourgeois-​ nationalist elitism”, which, as Ranajit Guha documents, operated in the absence of a rural, mass-​based consensus at the time, the narrative also initiates an implicit reflection of the possible moral indistinction between this elite’s turn to organised violence as a technique of popular mobilisation; and imported methods of population policing, as instantiated in the British administration’s attempt to divide and govern Bengal along sectarian lines (Guha, 37).8 Widely read as a fictional elaboration of the reasons for the author’s ethical “dissent” from the prevalent terms of political nationalism, readers continue to approach the novel’s protagonist, Nikhilesh, the rationalist, reform-​ minded zamindar (estate-​owner), as a fictional reference to Tagore’s biography and historical persona.9 In a wide-​ranging intervention, recent feminist scholarship has cast especial light on the character of Nikhil’s wife, Bimala, whose fragmented, first-​person perspective not only initiates and concludes the narrative, but also, arguably, dominates the novel’s tripartite division of perspective between its main characters. With significant implications for Four Chapters, these readings have introduced a generative focus on Tagore’s formal preoccupation with the emergent figure of the New Woman (Nabeena), or the upper class/​caste Hindu bhadramahila, whose historic introduction into the colonial public sphere would eventually consolidate

34  Terminal beginnings nationalist imaginings of an organic national body into the trope of domesticity. In a notable and variegated set of contentions, readers such as Indrani Mitra, Tanika Sarkar, Supriya Chaudhuri and Michael Sprinker approach The Home and the World as an ambitious formal attempt to “synthesi[ize] private virtue and public life” through an exploration of the limits and possibilities of romantic reciprocity; methodologically, such commentary attends closely to the constraints of form that underpin Tagore’s adherence to novelistic realism. In an extended, revisionary focus on Bimala’s emergent sense of personhood, this position approaches the character as Tagore’s primary device for navigating the tensions inherent to an oppositional swadeshi discourse, which had, by this time, consolidated “the home” as the primary site and conceit of anti-​colonial resistance. Through the romantic convention of the love triangle, the narrative demonstrates how Bimala remains incapable of conforming to “the enlightened strictures of sexual moderation” expected by her husband, an imperative that was grounded the nineteenth-​ century reformist ideal of a companionate marriage between two, substantially individuated partners. Resuming Gora’s exploration of the Bildungs plot, The Home and the World, must be read, in all its complexities and in light of this critical intervention, as the story of a political education. While engaging the course of Bimala’s individuation in the context of revolutionary anti-​colonialism, the narrative places especial emphasis on the proprieties, scope and limit of the value of sexual autonomy –​here, deeply sustained and differentiated through Bimala’s feminine voice.10 As in Gora, yet so much more acutely, Bimala’s awakening to public agency is at once sexual and political –​in the mutual over-​determination of one term in the other, it is the very strength of Bimala’s voice (and characterisation) that eventually threatens not only her marriage, but also the Victorian norm of conjugal reciprocity, which informed wider, post-​Enlightenment discourses on social reform in colonial India. As Mitra argues, Bimala remains incapable of breaking the marital bond, even as the work’s conclusion suggests she can no longer be at home in it. For the spectrum of feminist inflected interpretations of the novel’s conclusion, Bimala destabilises her own signifying function within the work’s attempt to relate, and ideationally reconcile, the disparate claims of home and nation. Even further, by exceeding the preconditions for her visibility, which reside in the allegorical dynamic of the work, her character threatens the carefully wrought integrity of this foundational work of colonial realism (Mitra, 253).11 The feminist thesis on the symbolic tensions of The Home and the World are sharply instructive for this study of Four Chapters, even as the concluding work of Tagore’s trilogy remains almost entirely unread in the context of these representational contradictions. In what follows, I  suggest that Four Chapters repeats the precariousness of its predecessor’s conclusion by internalising such narratological volatility into the course of its exposition. As such, the three “nationalist” fictions might be read diachronically, or alongside each other, as an extended if internally differentiated

National allegory in late style  35 response to a moment of crucial historical transition within the colonial public sphere. The scale and contradictions of such a transitional modernity also informs the formal developments between the two works, which unfold across a nearly 20-​year long interregnum between two world wars, and the increasing institutionalisation of anti-​colonial nationalism into a programme of mass-​democratic politics.12 Understood as an “epoch-​making era in Indian history”, the bid for a consolidated national modernity in the late 1920s through the 1930s, would, in turn, capture the attention of the world as one of the most visible idioms of the struggle for the values of freedom, citizenship and the right to universal representation.13 We might narrow the question of the periodisation of the middle and final works of the trilogy, in their relation to historical context through Sumit Sarkar’s contention that “a well-​ established common sense counterposes nineteenth-​ century middle-​class social reform, centred around issues concerning women, with twentieth-​century anti-​colonial nationalism subordinating such issues to the struggle for freedom” (Sarkar, 113).14 For Partha Chatterjee, this elision of the nineteenth-​century reformist question of stri-​swadhinata (women’s independence) from the discourse of anti-​colonial nationalism was no less than decisive for later articulations of “freedom” (which would subtend, by the 1930s, the Indian National Congress’ call for purna swaraj, or national independence). Positing the late-​colonial history of the woman question more strongly, as a fracture within the institutionalisation of the independent nation-​state, Chatterjee unfolds a nationalist genealogy that derives, fundamentally, from fin-​de-​ siècle romances of an autonomous “inner-​spiritual” region; a proposition that bore, at best, an ambiguous relationship to the “material” sphere and lived reality of colonial governance in the early decades of the century (Chatterjee, 6).15 In the passage from systems of semi-​feudal kinship and affiliation into the contested public sphere of the twentieth century, the nabeena was significant for spatialising the value of an inviolate “national/​ domestic” realm. Pivotal to the self-​fashioning of turn-​of-​the-​century colonial elites, the trope of the New Woman condensed such an imagined nation into over-​sexed signifiers of “tradition/​interiority”. By 1934–5, when Tagore set to work on Four Chapters, the discourse of freedom had consolidated itself into a programme of mass politics by effectively eclipsing its historical ground in the reformist concern with (trope of) women’s autonomy. As such, the explicit violence of Four Chapters’ depiction of feminine sacrifice follows (rather than simply terminates) the equivocal, concluding image of its predecessor. Recall that at its conclusion, The Home and the World leaves Bimala outside the barred door to her home, and before an outside world, set ablaze by rioters. Standing alone, she awaits the return of her unconscious husband (who has been struck down, possibly fatally, in his efforts to mediate the rural unrest that follows Sandip’s attempts at revolutionary mobilisation). Lacking moral resolution, the narrative casts the sexually undisciplined Bimala into a figure of waiting; related metonymically to the

36  Terminal beginnings flames at the edge of a nearly unworlded narrative, Bimala is also, perhaps, recast as the residual memory of the widowed, sacrificial sati.16 Setting aside Gora’s promise of a reconciled swadeshi subjectivity, The Home and the World departs from that work’s revelation of the “home” as a regenerative sphere of maternal nurture. The childless Bimala is positioned, instead, on the volatile threshold between ghar and baire –​and therefore, at the site of an emergent symbolic confusion that will be fully inherited by Ela, in the final instalment of Tagore’s political fictions. In the arrested action of the novel’s conclusion, Bimala’s capacity for self-​articulation appears powerfully forestalled by its historical precondition, which, following Chatterjee, resided in her newly won public function, as an icon of colonial difference. If this problem of domestic difference was “resolved” in the programmatic emergence of political nationalism, it reappears, in Tagore’s last long-​fiction, in the arrested development of the romance and –​notwithstanding her incremental silencing by the text –​the inassimilable violence that falls to Ela’s lot.

Tagore, allegorist of an opening With Tagore’s trilogy, national allegory emerges as at once internal to the structure of the late-​colonial novel in India, and also, at all points, potentially in excess of its orientation by contemporary (European) standards of historical and psychological realism. Directly engaging traditions of iconicity associated with the historical conjuncture described by Chatterjee and Sarkar, The Home and the World demonstrated how the search for personhood is bound to rehearse its preconditions in colonial epistemologies of “tradition/​modernity” –​so far, even, as to strand these interrelated values within the work’s concluding paradox. Thus, while leaving the determination of a properly autonomous subjectivity unresolved, the novel renders Bimala’s inconclusive struggle for self-​articulation into something else  –​ another order of publicity, let us say, that stands outside, or apart from, the epistemic and spatial enclosures of colonial discourse in the historical present. As the condition of possibility for realist representation and its negation into the signifier of something more –​something yet to come about –​ national allegory is not only an allegory for the sexually charged contest over the woman’s emergent public visibility. To use Ulka Anjaria’s revealing formulation, the form is put to refractive use in The Home and the World, as “allegorical of allegory itself” (Anjaria, 23). By vigorously entwining the polarities of “the individual” and “public … culture”, the novel dismantles their apparent transparency (contra Fredric Jameson) in order to disclose these as contingent, rather than pre-​determined values within the trajectory of an aspirational, inconclusive and therefore contestatory national modernity: “Ghare Baire presents realism and allegory not as two discrete modes but rather as interrelated sites of contestation –​for the characters…, for history and nationalism, and for the interpretation of literature” as such

National allegory in late style  37 (23). In the encounter between narrative time and history, as between the counter-​movements of allegorical displacement and the realistic commitment to depiction, it is the novel-​form that becomes subject to emergent, unspecified, and fully “metadiscursive” possibilities (23). The most wide-​ranging discussion of the aleatory possibilities of national allegory, by far, is to be found in Geeta Kapur’s sweeping art-​historical study, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000). On the cusp of India’s entry into multinational market systems, Kapur returned to Tagore’s feminine protagonists, arguing that they remain notable for submitting the course of their individual awakenings to a series of determinate, yet necessary negations within the twentieth-​century course of India’s modernisation: Across their ideological differences, each are icons of Indian history, because they choose to suffer it upon their bodies. In a reading that is indebted to the dialectical method of the Frankfurt School, Kapur approaches the “allegorical gesture” of Tagore’s women as a category of negation that cuts through both a monolithic account of the national past, as well as positivistic modes of representation that presuppose an immanent, organic body. The mannered appearance of the artist-​protagonist, together with her dance-​like movement through time, is valorised as a differentiating, particularly feminine prerogative within the history of post-​Independent modernism. From Gora’s adoptive mother Ananodomeyi, across Bimala, to Ela of Four Chapters, the “feminine performer” stages an “exemplary demonstration of doubt”  –​across vertical cleavages of caste and class  –​ by withholding the category of the nation from hegemonic narratives of identity formation in any given historical juncture (Kapur, 277–​278). As exemplars of the performer-​as-​pedagogue, Tagore’s iconic women insist, in turn, as the template for a mid-​century modernist avant-​garde, and, indeed, its embodied legacies for India’s current turn to multinational capital. In this magisterial survey of an archive of twentieth-​century modernism, Kapur traces the persistence of Tagore’s allegorical experiments into a twentieth-​ century artistic canon in order to relocate the swadeshi fictions speculatively, as an inexhaustible (patrimonial) resource within the unfinished origins of Indian modernism. A reading-​in-​reverse, Kapur’s historiographical method is itself suggestive of her claims for the trilogy. By advancing themselves in the absence of a fully accomplished national script, Tagore’s women perpetually reopen the synchronic norm of a national modernity to the task of reinvention  –​thus, “indirectly but surely fulfill[ing] the demands of an exemplary nationhood” for emergent contexts and audiences (Kapur, 278). Kapur’s contention turns on elevating the norm of “exemplarity” into a quasi-​transcendental horizon for the self-​renewing tradition and practices of national modernism, especially within the context of India’s belated introduction to (and remarkable ascendancy within) global art markets. Such a reading does presuppose that both the figure of Tagore, and the oeuvre of his swadeshi novels, are unified and internally coherent entities. Despite the dazzling reversals that Kapur puts in play in her dialectical reconstruction

38  Terminal beginnings of modern art history, hers is, in effect, a continuist proposition (as is the overarching concern with an internally differentiated, though horizonal “national modernism”). This continuist premise is necessary to Kapur’s account, because it permits a decisively ideological interpellation of the authority of both author and work into a left-​progressivist framework –​an art-​historical narrative that is discernibly associated with the mid-​century Nehruvian state, and the associated development of an indigenous avant-​ garde.17 Whatever the merits of such an argument –​and there are several to which this book as a whole is indebted –​it is the case that in both its substance and history, Four Chapters is unable to bear the weight of a such a canonising framework. While retaining, and even rehearsing the iconographic tradition set in place by the preceding novels, Four Chapters subjects this repertoire of allegorical images to a process of contraction so extreme as to absolve them of the over-​signified, heterogenising possibilities of both colonial realism and national modernism (Anjaria and Kapur’s respective concerns). In its unqualified indictment of swadeshi militancy, the bleak concluding work of the set has been regarded as the ageing author’s last word on the limits of political nationalism. Despite its presumptive place within a chronological understanding of Tagore’s literary engagements with cultural and political nationalism –​exemplified in Kapur or Ashis Nandy’s respective treatments of the “trilogy” as a whole –​the novella is the least read of the three, and has been received as a peculiarly unconvincing text. While repudiating a coercively organised swadeshi identity in the vein of its celebrated predecessor, Four Chapters nevertheless concludes with an act of writerly violence so stunning as to obviate the force of its own polemical opposition to terrorism. Unable to reconcile the individuating demand of erotic desire with a life of revolutionary commitment, the novel’s protagonist, Ela, invites assassination at the hands of her lover –​we might see this concluding gesture as orchestrating her disappearance from the symbolic realms of “home” and “world”, altogether. Furthermore, the finalism of such a conclusion, which conflates erotic consummation with the suicidal gesture, cannot be read apart from the work’s manifestly impoverished uses of national allegory. These interpretative perplexities bear heavily upon the biographical curiosity that in the remaining seven years of his life, Tagore would not return to the mode of the Bangla novel –​a form that he strove to modernise over the course of nearly half a century, and of which he remains, in popular memory, an uncontested master. Originating with the First Partition of Bengal in 1905, incidents of revolutionary terrorism in Bengal reached convulsive proportions by the mid-​1930s. Between 1930 and 1934, the immediate context of Four Chapters’ conception and publication, senior officials of the colonial government became the target of frequent assassination attempts, most of which were carried out in the public spaces of bureaucratic offices, district courtrooms and universities.18 Tagore would have been well aware that, in sharp contradiction

National allegory in late style  39 to the bourgeois-​nationalist ideal of the sexually passive, inherently moral figure of Indian womanhood, young female recruits swelled the ranks of underground militant organisations; most of these women were middle-​ class college graduates.19 While Four Chapters addresses the immediate exigencies of this turbulent period within the domestic politics of anti-​colonial nationalism, it was, in fact, conceived in transit, when Tagore was en route to Ceylon on the last of his “world tours”. Published on the threshold of another European crisis, the first Bengali edition appeared in 1934, well after Tagore’s internationally celebrated polemics against political nationalism during the Great War, and just over a year after the burning of the Reichstag. Its autumnal mood is obvious, and is suggestive of the author’s increasing pessimism about a reconciliation between the civilisational powers of East and West.20 Given the grave substantive concerns of the novella, its poor historical reception remains a paradoxical feature of the work. While assuming the work’s canonical position within Tagore’s political fiction, commentators continue to approach the novel as “slight” if puzzling work, even as the literary text has been largely obscured within popular memory (Nandy, 19).21 In a rare extended commentary on the novella, Ashis Nandy attributes such uncertainty to the novella’s brittle narrative quality. Characteristically, Nandy ascribes an aesthetic of deliberate traditionalism to Tagore  –​according to this proposition, the author eschews techniques of psychological realism, opting, at the end of his life, for the indigenous, fairy-​tale like genre of the oral upakatha.22 The recitative quality of the protagonists’ diction, together with the work’s flattened, de-​psychologised mode of expression, does, indeed, make for what might be described as an overarching citational style of narration. Home and the World continues to be remembered for its “astonishing” technical innovations with form, especially, its non-​synchronic mode of development (accomplished through uses of the diary-​form and fragments of feminised focalisation; Sarkar, 30). In contrast, the text of Four Chapters statically instates quoted phrases, as well as archaic conventions of rhetorical address, into the exposition of its four parts. With near-​indifference to realist norms of perspective and psychological interiority, the novella’s voice derives from an archive as diverse as Indian epic narrative, medieval Vaishnavite poetry, Dante’s Commedia, and Richard Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights (widely read by a bilingual colonial middle-​class at the time); in a contemporary set of references, the work also cites Girish Ghosh’s popular national theatre, and, perhaps most reflexively, Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken (FC 78, 87, 53, 62–​63, 93, 98, 88). Falling well short of developing the internal thought-​worlds of the protagonists, these citations also undermine the novella’s gesture towards a world-​literary canon; with which, presumably, it seeks historical co-​presence. (This measure of writerly accomplishment is construed as “the immortal land of literature”, 50.) As to the lovers, Ela and Atin, themselves: Banned from sexual contact by the strictures of their revolutionary

40  Terminal beginnings discipline, they are the nucleus of a desire that cannot present within the time of the narrative. As such, the lovers must speak such desire at length. Thus, while the characterisation of the lovers glance away from full or psychological roundedness, the claim of intimacy, too, is directed outwards, in ostentatious performances of oral memory and recital. Cast into a mode of dispossession that involves their very voices, Ela and Atin are likened, by the extended second chapter, to mythical creatures of exile and “confine[ment]” left to wander  – in words rather than bodies  –​within a stone-​bound landscape of “ruined … fragments of similes, metaphors, pages of history [and] … Empire’s … cracked victory columns” (49–​50, emphasis mine). Techniques of characterological abbreviation as well as the novel’s claim to a transmundane order of literary truth (imagined as cutting across genres and periods) do intrude into the fatalistic, forward-​drive of the plot. But these elements of stylised interruption, whether classicising or archaic, do not succeed in rescuing the narrative from its machinic determination by the plot. Rather than serving as an opening onto an undisclosed futurity (pace readings of Home and the World) the counter-​time/​gesture of allegory operates everywhere, in Four Chapters, to reduce the lovers into stricken, schematic signs of the work’s belatedness.23 At the time of its publication, Tagore’s attempt to sequester Four Chapters to the conventions of a modern romance, did not, in fact, succeed in inuring it from the ideological claims of a conflicted colonial public. Significant are the ambiguities inflecting Tagore’s editorialising insistences in the 1934 Bangla edition’s Afterword (Kaifiat; “response” or literally, “defense”). Here, Tagore proposes that the work be read according to his intent, not as political fiction but as a love story. In this short, direct address to a contemporary readership, Tagore personalises the novella’s account of revolutionary violence by advancing an anecdotal account of a political falling out between friends, a contretemps that results in the author’s loss of a most cherished fraternal companion (to be discussed). As such, Tagore indicates that the narrative’s depiction of militant extremism functions as no more than “context” for the novella’s primary concerns with intimacy; these are explored in the register of fiction, he tells us, through the figure of crossed love. The Afterword reads today as it certainly did then: An anxious authorial intrusion into the narrative, it is less an explication of the content of the work, than an equivocation about the author’s responsibility for it. The Kaifiat would, in any case, be expurgated from subsequent Bangla and English publications because of its putatively libellous references to the swadeshi leadership of the time. Determined through a bowdlerised history of production, the content of the work no longer resides in its bitterly contested portrayal of “the storm … of revolutionary movement in Bengal” (FC 147). The historical claim of Four Chapters surfaces, instead, at the level of the novella’s appearance, or as we find it today  –​as a text that has been thoroughly outlived by other works in the same oeuvre. In Four Chapters, expression (whether

National allegory in late style  41 characterological or auctorial) seems persistently askew to the intentions or motives of a psychologically complex subject; it is accomplished, instead, through the recursive imitability of the novella’ most ambitious ideas (in repeated use of quotations), and mannered patterns of speech. These textualised symptoms of delay go to the heart of Tagore’s narrative of cultural decline. The novella adheres to an inverted model of developmentalist time insofar as it indicts the progressivist, historicising awareness of an emergent colonial leadership, already, in decadence; such chronological inversion also includes within its ambit the trope of a revolutionary modernity (imagined, within the narrative, as the violent negation, once and for all, of the anachronistic pull of empire within the work of nation-​building). To the extent that the novella consigns the modern eschatology of revolution to the realm of myth, as no more than a “ruin[ed]” symptom of the wider, idealised periodicities of national time, the truth-​content of Four Chapters abides in the dissolution of even this, now well-​rehearsed account of postcolonial derivativeness (49). Together with the degraded force of its expressive conventions, Four Chapters’ account of political catastrophe attests, today, to the logic of the commodity as it reigns over the choices, perceptions and difficult intimacies that comprise our post-​national, properly post-​revolutionary conjuncture.

“The New Age beckons from within you”: Ageing in Four Chapters Such a momentous transformation of the Vedantic sanyasin I  had never imagined. (Tagore, Foreword to Four Chapters, 138) I’d never imagined such a revolution. (Ela, from “the Second”, Four Chapters, 35) These were his final words to me, and this was the last time we met. (Tagore, Foreword to Four Chapters, 139) Don’t leave me behind, don’t. (Ela, from “the Third”, 82)

The narrative of Four Chapters approximates a theatrical dialogue for the bulk of its exposition (the form is elaborated through the longest second and the third chapters); but it is Atin who dominates the telling of the story. Effectively assuming the position of the narrator, Atin is the only character who is given to speaking at length, and in many ways, about the “catastrophe” of an historical present mired in revolutionary violence –​so much so, that the destinal tide of the plot seems to issue not only from his words, but from the moment of his delayed introduction in ‘the Second’ (FC 31, 32). It is in speech, and from within “ruined room[s]‌” marked by “day’s end” and unlit electric lights, that Atin conjures up the “signs and oracles” of an external

42  Terminal beginnings landscape, bound, in turn, to the “hidden jurisdiction” of sacrifice that propels the four parts forward (Benjamin, GEA 319; FC 57; Benjamin, 319). In other words, it is the poet, Atin, who is awarded the national-​allegorist’s authority within the world of Four Chapters. His narrative, as well as the spatial itinerary of his exile from the group, implicates the valorised swadeshi trope of the interior within “broken shards” of abandoned rural land and the uninhabitable mansions of a pauperised feudal elite. These figures comprise not only the geography of rural strife and widespread dispossession in the wake of the partition; they are also, and perhaps more suggestively, the historical indices of a systemic lurch from semi-​feudal to capitalist modes of production. Whereas the movement of such violent transition first impinged upon Home and the World in the form of class-​or caste-​based exploitation (and its orchestrated alibi, according to that work, in sectarian violence), it is rediscovered here, through Atin’s wanderings, as the uncanny archaeology of revolutionary modernisation (33). As such, the action and historical “movement” of revolution is imagined by the text through tropes of natural disaster, as the “storm” or “whirlpool” of radical action, and as the subjection of earthly nature to historical force, or processes of societal and technological rationalisation (138, 146). (Atin will use the metaphor for the “tornado of [his own] words” in “the Third”, in the course of his long and eventually “thunder[ous]” reproach against Ela; the chapter stages the lovers’ break, and becomes the immediate impetus for his self-​exile and Ela’s consequent banishment from the cadre) (70, English italics in original; 82). Historical action, then, is signified as a force that spins through the values of individual freedom, sexual autonomy, the organised bid for sovereignty and, crucially, the figure of poetic truth; at once relating and setting askew these norms, “history” still signals a national totality divided between the reified registers of nationalist and popular experience. Significantly, however, the national-​allegorical dynamic of Four Chapters subscribes so fully to the trope of natural(ised) violence as to narrate history, itself, as a mythic power. Corroding the distances between archaic myth and a newly accomplished modernity, human action and natural disaster, such a force outpaces the ontological parameters (and choices) of late-​colonial modernity as these frame the social and textual world of Four Chapters –​thereby transforming the trilogy’s discovery of an open or “horizonal” (sheema) self-​understanding into the most exemplary sign of a ruined past (32). What Atin saw Atin’s voice is the most significant of all the characters, because it establishes the temporal parameters of the novella’s action; it almost everywhere overpowers the novella’s uses of an omniscient narrative perspective. In “the Third”, when the latter does manage to break through the extensive blocks of dialogue, it switches to simple present tense: It is dedicated, on the whole, to unfolding the lovers’ romance in a nearly immediate narrative

National allegory in late style  43 present. (The first chapter is the only one to take place outdoors, and in the absence of Atin; it initiates the account of the romance in medias res, alluding, in the exchange between Indranath and Ela, to the fact that Atin’s attraction to Ela has caused him to join and already “break” with the cadre) (FC 15). Combined with his almost magical verbal prowess, Atin’s characteristic itinerancy is entirely literary in nature; he is himself a device in the service of the work, capable of conjuring other times and places within its closed textual order. Conjoining dilatory scenes of illuminated remembrance (of the lovers’ first meeting; 32–​36, 73–​74) with contracted snatches of memorised poetry  –​his own, and also borrowed from other sources, including the voices of minor characters in the story  –​Atin’s récits display an extraordinary anamneutic power. They foretell the novella’s conclusion as early as “the Second” (31–​32) while delaying its action through the incantatory “summon[ing”] of other temporal “horizons … and lands”; these, like the lovers’ tryst itself, are forbidden from entering the time of the plot (32). Such exceptional insight (into the phenomenal death that will conclude the work, and its posthumous life in literature) is “palaeographic” in its revelations, in sense that Benjamin will suggest –​like the reader of an antiquarian document, who is confronted with a text overwritten with the estranging script of other hands and times, Atin, the poet, articulates a truth-​ claim about the narrative present only by parsing the traces of these other histories and their contentions upon the moment (Benjamin, GEA 298). That is, unlike Ela, and despite the dialogical staging of his premonitional intelligence in conversations with her, Atin’s attention falls immanently, on the sedimented materials of the work of Four Chapters itself:  In its composite uses of characterological voice, intermittent but extended lyrical quotation, and gestures towards a history of literary indebtedness that reaches back, through the medieval Bhakti lyric to the Indian epics, the sections of text given to Atin suggest that epochal shifts are written into the body of the novella –​not, however, through logics of internal (organic) development, but through palimpsestic movements of slow erasure, superimposition and earthy compaction. But insofar as Atin’s powers are those of the narrative itself, the portentous force of his voice is always derivative of its other register –​the millenary trope of the “Kali Yug”, or the fourth and final age of Brahmanical cosmology, which serves, through popular iconographic variations in the text, to arrest such narration within the inertial plot of disaster (28). All this is immediately suggestive not only of Atin’s depressive “psycholog[ical]” tendencies (the clue to this “realistic” dimension of his character is provided in the author’s Foreword), but possibly also of the aesthetic posture of melancholy, which Benjamin identified, exclusively, with the “brooding … saturnine” gaze of the Baroque allegorist (145, italicized English words in original; Benjamin, Origin of the German Mourning Play 179). In an extended argument from the section titled “Allegory and Trauerspiel [‘mourning play’]” in the Origin of the German Mourning Play,

44  Terminal beginnings Benjamin proposes that the dominant artistic conventions of the Counter-​ Reformation emerged from the incremental secularisation of medieval eschatology and its depictive devices. The Lutheran rejection of doctrines of salvation through individual works and personal merit, together with the jurisprudential emphasis on positivism and natural law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, served to deracinate earlier, Christological models of eschatological time (McCole, 1993, 134). Forms such as the Mystery or the Passion became residualisms of an obsoleted cosmological drama insofar as their action and iconography were stripped of human value and significance (Benjamin, OGM 167–​168). Benjamin advances this argument as part of a larger a concern with historiography, especially in its relevance for contemporary preoccupations with putative cultures of decay. To this end, he distinguishes the origin of the play of mourning from that of classical tragedy (whose inner momentum involved the individual’s struggle to be free of mythic determination). Bereft of both the tragic heroism of a freedom discovered in suffering, as well as, more significantly, any source of transmundane salvation, the proper content of the Baroque drama (and its implied modernity for the German present) is historical. The particular affect of the origin of secular historical awareness is not tragic pathos, but dejection –​ Trauer, mournfulness. In this second part of the dissertation, Benjamin employs the crucial analysis of allegorical form, which he undertakes in order to engage the remaindered eschatological elements that repose in the Baroque mourning play. Benjamin argues that the literary form of Baroque’s works is torn between the polarities of “elevat[ing]” and “devalu[ing]” the elements of an irredeemably fallen world –​the proper representational modality of the Baroque is, in other words, the antinomial, near-​incoherent form of allegory. No longer understood as the plot of human progression toward the Day of Judgement, historical time becomes dispersed from the master code of that redemptive conclusion, turning, in every instance of its exposition and against intention, into a natural setting for a profane and (inherently interminable) struggle between worldly, or indeed, world powers: The allegorical intention is … [toward] natural history [Urgeschichte] … . Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica [the desiccated features of the dying] of history as a petrified, primordial landscape … . This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world; its importance resides solely in the stations of its decline. (166; modification mine) From another angle, the world-​historical march through the empty, homogenous time of the decolonising nation becomes replete with homologous

National allegory in late style  45 contradictions when returned, via Benjamin’s own baroquely “secular explanation of history”, to the novella’s four parts (as to the narrative elisions between them; gaps, which themselves appear, like empty “props” of passing time). If the “allegorical intention … petrifies” or spatialises temporal (and especially eschatological) progression into thing-​like images  –​ what Benjamin identifies as the emblem  –​the most significant trope of such a procedure is the ruin:  “In the ruin, history has physically merged into the setting” (166, 177–​178). As my earlier references to the landscape of “the Second” and “Third” have suggested, the architectural rubble of Four Chapters enclose, within the allegorical emblem, the “ruin[s]‌ ” of the national-​allegorical dialectic between the domestic interior (which is not even sited as “home” in this work) and the historical terrain of the revolutionary movement (FC 57, 319). It might even be the case that Four Chapters’ “slow version” of national allegory attempts to contain within the “rubbish” of its eroded conventions –​Tagore uses the English word –​ the strained unity of the author’s oeuvre of humanist political fiction (58, italics in original). Scripted as uninhabitable forms by the middle and most substantive sections of the text, the device of the ruin is treated most extensively in “the Third”. In this penultimate chapter, the ruin is cast, altogether, as the mis-​en-​scene for Atin’s flight from Indranath’s politics, and from his now embittered intimacy with Ela. The location of his exile is somewhere on the edges of a remote rural community, in untended forest land that encloses around structures so thickly as to render indistinguishable, the difference between archaic evidence of human settlement and recent traces of forced migration. This place, where boundary lines become “broken fences”, keeling under the burden of vegetal overgrowth and decay, is described as a radically unworlded space (Asthan; trans. as “deserted”) (57, 58). As such, both natural and architectural ruins do, indeed, appear as the index of a properly historicist awareness of how narratives of revolutionary progression “turn back” on themselves into immersive expositions of transience, degradation and, therefore, stasis (48). In Tagore’s apocalyptic allegory, all the hallmarks of incremental, linear realist time, including its variation in the time of revolutionary modernity, revert to the other desacralised axis of historical progression –​in other words, norms of chronological periodisation and epochal development are reversed. Collapsing backward towards “primordial” origins in a degradable nature, history attests everywhere, to the “barbarism” of creaturely grasping and bodily violation (Benjamin, OGM 166; FC, 51). The upshot of the counter/​reversals of time in Four Chapters is the exposure of chronology, as, in itself, a kind of de-​natured, archaeological effect. The peculiar if inadvertent materialism of Tagore’s novella resides here, in its approach to chronology as the sediment or residue of human making –​in the idiom of the text, chronology is a monumental form, subject, like any other artefact, to the law of transience. Thus, by the time we reach the third act of the novella, the protocols of (historical or

46  Terminal beginnings narrative) progression appear as eroded thought-​forms of a long-​spent past. The epochal idea to which the narrative so dolefully adheres is articulated, in this chapter, largely through the syntax of strained paratactical joinings and substitution:  Bereft of internal or organic development, epochal time is now not unlike “the masonry in a building whose rendering has fallen away” (Benjamin, 179). Two properly emblematic instances of this fin-​ de-​ siècle landscape stand out and merit further consideration within the problematic of national-​allegorical history telling. First, where, in Home and the World, the bifurcated realities of pragmatic-​reformist and idealist-​revolutionary nationalism were saved within the text as the self-​displacing promise of a deferred reconciliation, here, we are presented with the calamitous image of rural dwellings reduced to “scorched thatches”. These ashen synecdoches of village life bear witness to escalated logics of political coercion and reprisal through which a revolutionary leadership, in the absence of a mass-​based consensus, operated at this time.24 Mentioned in passing –​as one mortified element of social life among all the others  –​and with no contextualisation  –​the debris of collective terror also appear as a textual precipitate within the order of national allegory. Resurfacing from the conclusion of the preceding work, the torched cottages are signs of an historical present in which rescue, like the omitted scenario of conflagration, is closed. Second, there are the “crumbled … bricks” that relate manual toil to prayer, in rubble. Evacuated of human presence, the feudal time of ritual work and rest are associated, metonymically, with the figure of a “deserted thakur dalan”25. (Such open domestic space is feminised by the text as the communal site of “annual Durga puja celebrations”; and through the rumoured haunting, of the surrounding grounds, by the “ghost of a matricide”) (57, 58). Standing by the listing, “silted” river in which the idol would once have been immersed, the structure attests to the active profanation of the “bricks” and “walls” of sacred space by human hands (57, 58). The motif of degraded building materials recurs at a short distance, in syntactically connected figures of a “temple in ruins” and the “bare … ribs” of a “broken boat” (58). The inflection of this fractured and refractory landscape with the allusion to an especially feminine corpse –​disclosed to us through Atin’s eyes  –​is, of course, a gesture to the concluding profanity of the novella. (The exposed remains of the boat might also be read as a metonymy of the “strangely crafted … jackknife”, introduced in the previous chapter, which will slide into Ela’s “ribs”; and therefore, as a paratactical joining of the chapters themselves.) (37). Benjamin tells us that the baroque fascination with the corpse is another iteration of the figure of the ruin. If, as McCole cautions, dismemberment in death is not gratuitous but a strictly scriptural operation on the body within the Counter-​Reformation, it serves, in Four Chapters too, to “prepare”, “dissect” and “distribut[e]‌” the dying body into “manifold regions of significance” (McCole, 141; Benjamin, 217). In the context of Four Chapters,

National allegory in late style  47 the spatialisation of the time of death takes on another, different kind of torsion. It is the decisive realism of the work’s conclusion that is foretold in this collection of emblematic signs:  In a simultaneous violation of the sacred iconography of the bountiful “Annaparna” and the phenomenal (“real”) body of the lover, the text itself will be disenchanted, altogether, of the “romantic” figure of Ela (69, 70 italicised in the original). Is Four Chapters really the allegory of the ageing of the work of colonial realism and its chiastic double, national allegory? By the same token, is the work a forward-​looking indictment of the nation-​form as a “system of dominance without hegemony”, undertaken a full decade before the event of Independence? Could we not argue, otherwise, that by dismantling these representational modes into a compulsive repetition of “stations of decline”, the novella signals the ageing of the author, who once sought to innovate this same literary legacy? (Benjamin, 166). As such, is the text’s depressive meditation on the inoperability of its own (profoundly sexualised) conventions, the most apposite index of the conservatism of old age? Each of these interlinked possibilities on allegory as the work of disillusionment are defensible. But they would also require a degree of certainty that the invention of Atin, poet and ventriloquist, is a ventriloquy of Tagore, the master-poet himself. Such a line of speculation would, indeed, be consistent with the work’s own self-​presentation. In baroque reversals of the allegorical procedure, the polarities of revolutionary rupture and the continuation of empty linear time, of development and decay, youth and the personal catastrophe of ageing, converge within the stricture of chronology –​the orienting norm of a shared yet internally uneven modernity, and the premise of our conjunctural reading, which places Benjamin’s decadent modernity alongside the belated time of decolonisation. McCole cautions us, however, that the status of baroque affect is not entirely clear in Benjamin’s own analysis, so that the specificities of such affect might also condition a response to the line of interrogation on Four Chapters, opened up here. Focusing on concluding sections of Benjamin’s treatment of allegory and the Trauerspiel, McCole rehearses the moment where Benjamin’s analysis peaks around a figure introduced earlier (not only in the dissertation on Baroque allegory, but in the essay on Goethe) –​ the Fruhromantik trope of an awakening, or the opening of eyes in the “fleeting … light” and flash of the symbol (166; McCole, 147). In a definitive turn within the Trauerspiel study, the world of allegorical forms culminates by turning around on itself. By destroying the preconditions for signification from within, the Baroque Trauerspiel disillusions the allegorical form as such; conventions of vocalised bombast and “hieratic ostentation” are exposed, in such catastrophic insight, as resoundingly empty (168; McCole, 14). This instant of radical semiotic impoverishment is also a temporal breakthrough (Nu) –​a release from the bipolarity of melancholia that compels the allegorist to leap between emblem and emblem, pitching him between a state of “dizzying” vertigo and the other depth of his “emblematic

48  Terminal beginnings fury”, the slow fascination with downcast objects, “stripp[ed] naked” of dignity and value, ever available for studied acts of violation (Benjamin, OGMP 175–​176; McCole, 147). Ultimately in the death-​signs of the baroque the direction of allegorical reflection is reversed; on the second part of its wide arc it returns to redeem. The seven years of its immersion [in Hell] are but a day. (Benjamin, OGMP, 232; emphasis mine) Thus revealed, the long corruption of an historical epoch appears as only a moment in the passing of things; by the same token, such dilatory insight is also the perception of other, unrealised times and possibilities. It is the case that the Four Chapters awards Atin with such messianic vision: After all, the ability to give voice to this “sudden contraction of time in light of remembrance” is the poet’s innate or natural gift (McCole, 147). But Atin’s refractory nostalgia is the object of his peculiar intelligence; not Ela. His plangent appeals for Ela’s return to the present time of the romance are articulated as a reproachful call to “call [him] back” to her –​his exceptional powers of evocation are not exercised in the mode of alterity, as staged by the moment of allegorical redemption, above (Benjamin, OGMP 49). In this, we must respect the work’s conclusion and its unforgiving adherence to psychological realism –​a final sobriety, in fact, that indicts Atin, in his extraordinary obedience to Indranath’s command, in self-​degradation. (While the tightly knotted plot insists, fatefully, on one singular resolution, it is remarkable that Atin never considers taking Ela’s place.) Enclosed within the solipsistic economy of self-​pauperisation and degradation, neither Ela’s corpse nor the deracinated gift of lyric poetry are redeemable from the fallen time of history. Despite serving as the narrative agent of the work, Atin, or, rather, the “chaos of symbols” his undisciplined romanticist agency sets in play, cannot be the basis of any redemptive truth-​claim still to be had from Four Chapters. As Benjamin insists, redemption  –​under the sign of “resurrection” –​including the resurrection of the Romantic symbol in his thought –​ occurs “not … as the Romantics have it –​an awakening of consciousness in living works, but as the settlement of knowledge in dead ones” (182). If there are truly aleatory possibilities available to the work, and for the purposes of a counter-​reading, they must be sought in the interferences that reside within the norm of chronological progression (and its reversal into stations of unrecused decadence). The space of such an interregnum resides not in the narrativisation of catastrophe  –​set in motion through the “Jagannath” of conquest and insurrection, revolution and counter-​ revolution as it rides over the broken bones of its actors –​Indranath’s “sublime” ideal of universal history, lyricised relentlessly by Atin  –​but in the work’s undecidable point of origin (19, 22, 47; italics in original). Between two provisional beginnings, Tagore’s Foreword and the Prelude to the narrative, the false alternatives between “youth” and “age” disappear

National allegory in late style  49 into a hiatus of meaning. This pause, which gives pause, too, to Atin’s powers of speech, is not to be found in orienting idioms of the narrative. It resides in the work of disintegration, or an expository process that incrementally subtracts the ethical material of the work from its compositional principles, to conclude, finally, in the mystery of Ela’s disappearance. Abhash: A pretext for friendship In its inability to appear at its appointed moment and in proper form  –​ as the allegorical “Story of Young India” that subtitles the original text  –​ Four Chapters instantiates itself inorganically, as broken internally between “scenes” that come too late. Both plot and materials emerge from the lovers’ iterated failure to have met on time –​in the first instance, the unaccomplished tryst is an extruded narrative origin, one that emerges in “the First”, through the device of a conversation already underway between Indranath and Ela. Determined by the sealing of their pact several years earlier, the value of love emerges belatedly, as an “inside” reference also to Four Chapters’ literary precursor. In the Prelude that immediately precedes “the First”, Indranath reprises the great motif of rhetorical nationalism from Home and the World in a single, cursory line. His dispassionate, “You do not belong to society, you belong to the nation”, is the immediate echo and depersonalisation of Sandip’s, “I shall make you one with the nation” (FC 16). It is through Indranath, then, that the novella at once alludes to and sets aside that earlier work’s most provocative insight into the sentimental conventions of the roman-​a-​trois, which effectively implicated the discourse of nationalism in an economy of heterosexual desiring, thereby repositioning its conflicting ethico-​ political claims as an alibi for homosocial rivalry and masculine over-​ identification. In this work, Indranath’s nearly inhuman powers of command remove the lovers altogether from the discourse of middle-​class romantic monogamy (understood wide-​rangingly, by the previous work, in its condensed historical significance for swadeshi ideology; as the narrative’s testing ground for the moral limits of uncoerced romantic attraction versus conjugality; as an allegorical investigation of competing notions of the masculine ideal; of the innovative possibilities and closures of traditional feminine iconography, etc.). As such, within the order of the narrative present, the cliché of the lover’s tryst as well as the pledge of patriotism, are each dissolved and re-​absorbed into the event of the work’s delayed articulation. Four Chapters is not determined, therefore, at the volatile point of transaction between nation and self (and the interlinked schematic plays of national allegory and realism) –​or what Anjaria identifies, pace Lukács, as a properly novelistic conjuncture that served as the dominant cultural form of an aspirational, emergent national modernity. By incorporating the norm of “internal development” (of nation, novel, oeuvre) into material that outpaces these very forms, Four Chapters is better approached as the after-​ effect of the history such aesthetic and historical desiring.

50  Terminal beginnings If the privileged repository of both psychological and representational realism in Home and the World resided (quite strikingly) in the figure of the “woman who has just stepped out from the purdah”, the first part of Four Chapters draws to a conclusion by underscoring Ela’s enlightened consent to Indranath’s rule (Anjaria, 24). Here, the precise demand of Indranath’s words (cited above) are repeated in Ela’s promise to “disappear, silently, without a trace” when called upon to do so in the “service” (seva) of the cause (19). These lines are decisive not only because of their weird premonitory resonance for the narrative, but also because they identify Ela as an unambiguous agent in the world of Four Chapters. Ela’s “promise” to fulfil her original “oath” is introduced to the narrative as a moment of redoubled self-​articulation –​one so incisive as to capture the dynamics of both sexuality and citizenship together, well after the lifting of the curtain between them, in her heroic, “I shall remember … I am prepared” (17). Indeed, Ela’s words of self-​introduction are a veritable tour de force of the allegorical procedure of Home and the World (where the modality of national allegory enabled Bimala’s multiple ideologically generative interpellations into the narrative, even while “silenc[ing]” her claim to self-​possession and a conclusive identity) (Anjaria, 23–​24). Nevertheless, the plot of Four Chapters is so exacting in its fateful press towards resolution that it generates a series of merely chiastic affinities between characters and their conflicting motivations and interests. The overarching force of this echo-​effect is abstractive, effectively relieving the characters of the real “weight” of internal self-​interest or professed commitment to common cause between such disparate interests  –​every characterological choice, as related to the interests and politics of the individual, appears derivative of, or already determined by, the work’s conclusion. Therefore, Tagore’s “gestural” procedure. Moving through and thereby slightening conventions associated with psychological realism as well as national allegory, the stark beginning of Four Chapters reduces both the motif of crossed love as well as the structure of the work, into a sustained interrogation of cultural belatedness. Released in “the First” through Ela’s words, the gestic mode of the novella unfolds under the sign of “disappearance” and “silence” (35); the studied mannerism of Four Chapters operates through representational devices already consigned to failure. (We should note the English italics that accompany Atin’s uses of the word in Bangla/​ Sanskrit; in the inscription, an uncanny authorial voice intrudes into the narrative to claim poetry’s gestural devices for its own art: “[My] vyanjana … is what you call gesture in English”) (70). All this suggests that the root cause of the disaster of Four Chapter is anterior to the narrative of “the First” (and the conjoined motif of the romantic-​political pledge). It is to be found in a fundamentally recessive “law”, or an arche that belongs to the sphere of writing itself. Here, the gendered signifiers of fraternity, love and characterological nature emerge as values within an asymptotic conversation, as aspects of a peculiar form of

National allegory in late style  51 bilingualism –​a language that at its base, is “divided absolutely” between masculine and feminine orders of knowledge (Chattopadhyaya, 2014).26 Even before the commencement of the narrative, the author’s Foreword (Abhash) establishes the attenuated figure of the “individual” through the text’s internally disassociative form, so that in its processual or unfinished aspect, the Foreword destabilises its periodising gesture towards the psychology and history of terrorism in contemporary Bengal. The narrative of this short text concerns the “fall” of Tagore’s friend, Brahmobandhab Upadhyaya, “Vedantic scholar” and Catholic convert, who is recalled here, as the author’s most cherished fellow-​traveller in the early phase of the swadeshi movement (137–​138).27 In this brief, autobiographical note, Tagore, at 72, narrates his last conversation with Upadhyaya just prior to the latter’s death in 1907. Tagore recalls how Upadhyaya visited him unannounced in his rooms “on the third floor of our Jorosanko house” after decades of mutual estrangement. In a striking evocation of the brevity of this final encounter between friends, Upadhyaya is narrated as exiting the text as abruptly as he shows up in the Jorosanko interior. Turning as he walks out of the room, Upadhyaya calls to his friend, to confess over his shoulder: “Brother, I have fallen greatly” (Robi-​babu, amar khub patan hoeche). (The theatrics of a departure without the proprieties of leave-​taking will be re-​enacted in the final lines of “the Second”, at the conclusion of the long lovers’ dialogue:  This time, it is Atin who suddenly exits Ela’s accommodations to run onto a moving tram; his disappearance acquires a fatal resonance for chapter three, which connects his political absconsion with his decision to abandon Ela to the cadre and its “boys”) (1, 3, 19, 22, 54). The Foreword cites Upadhyaya’s last words as an evident confirmation of the author’s observation of a “momentous transformation” in the scholar-​revolutionary:  A moderniser of Sanskritic scriptural tradition, foundational Vedantist and Christian believer, Upadhaya, in the perspective of the Foreword, had broken with his innate character (swabhav) and the many gifts of its calling, by inventing a theology of organised violence.28 Expurgated from subsequent editions as libellous and a betrayal of the cause, the missing Foreword does speak to how Upadhyaya would have been entirely recognisable to a contemporary audience as the progenitor of ideologies of revolutionary resistance, which was lionised, at the time, as a legitimate response to the experience of manifest colonial aggression in Bengal.29 For the novel’s purposes, however, the Abhash establishes the significance of these historical events in a minor register, in a brief meditation on the value and time of political friendship. In other words, the full exposition of fraternal reconciliation will find a place in the narrative only by virtue of its absence, and thereby, as an asymbolic narrative compulsion that drives through the text without form or a proper idiom. Beginning as an expression of gratitude to Upadhyaya’s intellectual support and moral companionship in the early stages of the author’s career, the Foreword’s dedicatory gesture is interrupted by the scene of the friend’s

52  Terminal beginnings departure. As he disappears, Upadhyaya admits the “depth” of his personal (swabhav) failure in order to acknowledge that he has failed to meet the measure of his friend (138). Tagore, in turn, is left at a loss; he recognises, only as he is left behind, that he listens too late. As such, the text itself embarks upon the itinerary of a thwarted natural telos (swabhav), whose “meaning” resides neither in the exemplary integrity of the old author, nor in the posthumous disgrace of his old friend. It is the text that rises to the fore as a veritable sounding board of lateness: Echoing the story of a fall within rhythmic repetitions of regret (“These were his last words to me. This was the last time I saw him”), the text diverts the Foreword’s dedicatory impulse into the form of a missed acknowledgement (138–​139). While the author laconically identifies the origins of the novella here –​“I thought the incident worth mentioning before the novel begins”  –​in effect, these introductory words set up the work around a moment of non-​presence. In its various misalignments, it testifies to language as the recursive inability of one to be fully present for the other (139). Thus, while the Foreword presents this little anecdote as the immediate prompt to the task of writing, the episode itself might be approached, pace Benjamin, through allegorical logics of dismemberment and redistribution:  Upadhyay’s disappearance “into the lowest depth” reappears in the narrative of Four Chapters, across “manifold regions of significance”, as a delay between the work’s generic and formal conventions, and the excessive, confessional force of its ethical contentions (Benjamin, OGMP 217). The temporal implications of such interpellation are immediately unsettling. Dead almost three decades before the novel was first drafted, Upadhyaya emerges through the words of his long-​withheld apology, as the epitome of lateness. His guilty admission is metonymically (and most legibly) aligned in the narrative with Atin’s forfeited swabhav (“Kaifiat”, Four Chapters 144). Without character, in the idiomatic sense of the word, Atin’s deracinated swabhav thematises his “denaturalisation” as both man and poet. Nevertheless, if Atin’s own words to describe his abyssal fall (porechi pataner shesh shimaye) is a direct echo of Upadhyaya’s, and if, in turn, the history of such self-​forfeiture is both internalised and specified within Atin’s dysfunctional masculine nature (paurash; manly courage), then the drama of such violent unmanning is apprehensible only in the “refuge” of Ela’s love (33). Arrived at through a masculine yearning for wholeness, the “haloed” projection of feminine sympathy also makes a victim of the woman (33). It is this precise chain of signification that instates Ela as icon of both nation and feminine beauty within the text. In other words, a fraternal economy of (historical) delay and (bodily) compensation is the precondition for Ela’s appearance within the world of Four Chapters; an event that also sites the edge between “realistic” and “romantic” narrative traditions as an inoperable literary legacy. It is this kind of natural-​historical compulsion that moves Ela to “drop her books and writing” in the presence of Atin, and proclaim, in amazement, the very theme of the work: “I’d never imagined such a revolution” (35).

National allegory in late style  53 Depsychologised, “love” is the point of estrangement that comes between Atin and Ela as between author and friend –​and in such catastrophic (rather than subjective) fashion, is Tagore’s point of identification with the text. The difficulty of speaking punctually to an ethical urgency, theatricalised as the break between old friends, is transmitted past the Foreword into the materials of the love story, in the motif of the unaccomplished tryst. Put differently, while the Foreword displaces its account of a failed fraternal engagement into the codes and claim of heterosexual romance, it also opens up a structure of writing in which masculine and feminine orders of “imagination” are set up side by side, as a cut within the dominant order of language. If the labour of speech and the desiring toward full presence repose in symbolic values of fraternity, revolution and poetry, these masculine prerogatives of signification are disarticulated in their encounter with feminine incomprehension. The latter appears as a scission in the narrative and is characterised by near-​wordless affective action  –​the “dropping of books and writing” repeats the private scene of the Jorosanko house, and the “heartrending” interruption of speech and study that entered there, into the first-​person narrative of the Abhash (35, 138). It is the scene of writing, established as a divided and internally unpunctual event that originates the love story, giving it its particular appearance of a ruined genre. Unfolding across decrepit or abandoned domestic interiors, the romance of Four Chapters will finally open onto an unworlded narrative space insofar as the conclusion will not succeed in “making sense” of the lovers’ final paradoxical embrace. It is not Atin but Ela who is charged with bearing the weight of the Abhash’s words, its recursive witness to the loss of a friend; and its encounter with “last words”, those generic and representational conventions of writing, which fall far behind the ethical urgency of their content (138). Therefore, Ela alone is pre-​ordained to enact the narrative as something ostensibly split and left behind, a poor inertial object, altogether beneath the powers of symbolic clarification and reconciliation. To rephrase this line of argumentation, it is Ela, in her death drive, who enunciates the posthumous, imperfect space of writing in Four Chapters. Bereft of both home and world, Ela illuminates the missing figure (of each) not through the fullness of yet another speech image, but by introducing feminine marks of bodily withdrawal, disappearance and silence to the symbolic as such.

Elective affinities: Fate, sacrifice and myth across Benjamin and Tagore The death of an innocent … is the mythic archetype of sacrifice. (Benjamin, from “On Goethe’s Elective Affinities”, 309)

With this insight in mind, Walter Benjamin, in 1921, would outline the basis of a critical method for reading Goethe’s novel, Elective Affinities (1809),

54  Terminal beginnings an approach he would develop systematically in The Origin of the German Mourning-​Play (1926). While historicising the opposing lexicons of the romantic symbol and the allegorical gesture in both pieces, the Trauerspiel study provides an explicit, and now celebrated theorisation of seventeenth-​ century Baroque allegory as the form of a contemporary aesthetic conjuncture  –​that is, Benjamin’s method cuts across conventional art-​historical periodisations to locate German modernity (especially post-​Romantic artistic directions associated with abstract expressionism) as the legacy of a baroque past. In comparison, the historical and hermeneutical contentions of the essay, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities”, are presented within a greatly reduced scale of analysis, opening with a methodological distinction that drives the entire reading:  This is the precise distinction between the “material” and “truth contents” of the work (Benjamin, 298). This difference, between the “exposed upper … mythical layer” of the novel’s materials (which includes the history of criticism on the work) and the stratum of a partially “hidden” truth-​claim, informs nearly all the contentions of his commentary on the narrative (312, 314). The distinction is maintained throughout the essay in order to demonstrate how an encrustation of mythic nature around the formal dimensions of the novel acts, in turn, as a corrosive force on the individual natures, and romantic choices, that comprise its quartet of characters. As such, it is the blind or archaic power of myth (rather than enlightened choice) that prevails, for Benjamin, in the law-​like metaphor of an “elective affinity”, which entitles the novel and gives it its narrative movement. It is the invariant (pre-​modern) rule of mythic fate that insists within the scientific notion, fashionable at the time, that certain chemical elements combine through natural attraction to create an unstable series of alternating combinations. The novel’s transposition of the chemical metaphor onto the affinity between characters  –​“elected” or freely chosen on the basis of a shared element in their respective natures –​is thus the surest signal of a period of historical decline. It is not at all the question of sexual promiscuity (and the breaking of conjugality from marital law) that indexes, for Benjamin, such a culture of decadence. At stake, instead, is the innocuous and “increasingly pervasive … incursion of creaturely impulses” into the capacity for ethical decision –​a thrall that is exemplified by Goethe himself, who subordinates his art to the (organic metaphor of) the natural.30 It is here that Benjamin issues his critique of that dominant device of all Romanticism, the symbol, which he would take up again, as a fundamental premise of his study of Baroque allegory. As Benjamin understands it in both studies, the symbol is, above all, a trope that that permits a glimpse of “immortality” through the world of phenomena, which includes, among other things, the degradable, injurable matter of the body (298, 317, 355). All romantic symbology, then, tends towards a reconciliation between a transcendent source of meaning and the phenomenal world  –​by placing the corporeal within the revelatory unity of the artistic symbol (nu; literally, the “now-​time”), Romanticism naturalises suffering. Benjamin’s iconoclasm

National allegory in late style  55 within the context of his treatments of Early German Romanticism should not be missed. If Goethe himself was already entrapped within the “chaos of symbols” that would characterise later developments in the Romantic tradition, what Elland and Jenkins identify as the author’s “fabled Olympian … self-​understanding” combines, in the national present, with his imperious stature in the history of German letters as such. The comparative implications for issues of canonisation and historical usage around the figure of Tagore, in our context, is suggestive: It is the signifier, “Goethe”, that emerges as a “monstro[us]” projection of a pantheistic (collective) ego, and in the wake of which, Benjamin undertakes his analysis (315; Elland, 164; Benjamin, 136). Turning the reader from the sociological or moral significance of the marital union and the choices that might be permissible outside its norm –​ the evident theme of the novel –​Benjamin uncovers, instead, the allegorical kernel of slow “petrification” and growing inorganicity that reposes in the core of the work (340). The precondition or historical “ground” of the work’s legibility, therefore, resides not in the juridical law or even in the conventions of romance, but in an irreversibly belated or post-​lapsarian present (which is in turn revealed through the disintegrative expositions of allegory). Every choice in the novel is thus disclosed as a predestined enactment of the law of fate –​that blind and infinitely equivocal substitution of one kind of nature for another –​where “the ratio of such exchange also calculates in advance the course of the narrative and its developments” (Elland Jennings, 165). But in the character of young Ottilie, Benjamin observes the unfolding of a different order of fate. Outlining the sub-​plot of Ottilie’s story, and placing it above all the others’, Benjamin detects a “different relation to fate”; Kuiken, 294, 297, emphasis mine).31 In the novel, the woman decides to starve herself slowly to death, and she does it in hiding from the others. Destabilising the series of (non)choices that connect her to the rest of the characters, her secret, unremarked commitment to the act of passing away alone is linked, ethically and formally, to the mythic law of the novel itself; where “myth”, now, stands for the transactional logic of substitution, the form-​giving law of the commodity, in other words, that at once eludes and directs the actions of every other character. Thus, the “brutal tie’ ” between the mystery of the novel’s meaning and the integral “secret” of Ottilie’s death is the possibility, indeed the necessity, of the sacrifice according to the deepest intentions of this novel. Thus, not only is it as a “victim of destiny” that Ottilie falls –​much less that she actually “sacrifices herself” –​ but rather more implacably, more precisely, it is as the sacrifice for the expiation of the guilty ones. For atonement, in the sense of the mythic world that the author conjures, has always meant the death of the innocent. That is why, despite her suicide, Ottilie dies as a martyr, leaving behind her miraculous remains. (Benjamin, 309; emphasis mine)

56  Terminal beginnings Ottilie is not free –​but neither is she fated to a guilty whole. Unlike the others, her decision to die is hers, but her “fall” is not a voluntary choice. Ottilie’s death remains a reality, in that it occurs within the realm of the phenomenal; by disclosing the space of sacrifice as the space of the novel, her death apotheosises the “law of ‘necessity’ ” that reigns over both novel and the “real” world of which it is a part (ibid.). Surfacing from a subterranean “drive” that inwardly starves her, Ottilie’s decision becomes legible as an act of “expiation” for the comprehensive “fallen[ness]” of the novel’s imagination, which also encloses her final exercise of personal choice within its domain (309; Kuiken, 297). Starved of qualities of heroic individuality but preserved in the traces of her remains within the work, Ottilie’s “speechless” compulsion towards atonement does not so much negate the rationations of modern mythologies of sacrifice, as much as interrupt these; her death is not exactly that of the scapegoat.32 For this reason, Benjamin contends that it is not Ottilie but the traces of her absence from the novel that eventually acquire the martyr’s halo. As the very “ground” of the operation of fate within the work, might Ottilie’s askesis (in her self-​initiated thinness and eventual vanishing) stage a process of sanctification within the secular, fallen world of Elective Affinities? Benjamin himself seems to privilege such a reading at this point, foregrounding the singularity of an ethical “decision” that negates the scriptural injunction against suicide but also “miraculously” saves the character from becoming a mere sketch of the predestined “ ‘victim” of organised “brutal[ism]” (306, 309). The course of my reading suggests this question as an entry point into the systematic fatalism of Tagore’s Four Chapters, and the profoundly ambiguous truth-​claim of Ela’s choice. Might Tagore’s novella be construed along the lines of an allegory of “ambivalent sainthood” (as outlined at this juncture of Benjamin’s essay)? –​is it plausible, therefore, to read Four Chapters as a critical interlocutor of the “Gandhian novels” of mid-​to late 1930s, produced in the wake of M.K. Gandhi’s return from South Africa in 1919, in the context of his “rapid rise to pan-​Indian fame” (Anjaria, 63)? Named the Mahatma (Great Soul) by Tagore (or at least it is remembered so),33 Gandhi acquired an “an increasingly recognized status as a saint or a figure of divine power (Amin, 2), [which], coupled with his eccentric political practices and his elaboration of the relationship between personal, bodily practice, and the larger world of moral, ethical and political change, made him a salient figure around which authors took up such questions of character, allegory and symbolism. By the late 1920’s Gandhi was already what might be called an oversignified figure, “resplendent in his suffering for the people and, in turn, requiring and even demanding their obedience to his injunctions”. (Amin, 15, quoted in Anjaria 63)34 While the actions of these charismatic saintly figures “unfold according to forces such as fate, satyagraha (truth-​struggle), or karma” (the idea of a

National allegory in late style  57 destinal life, resignified by the exemplary practice of the Gandhian as a path for communitarian action), Anjaria also stresses the inherent ambivalence in the formal convergence between the allegorical index of Gandhian values of iconicity, fate and truth, and novelistic protocols of representational realism. For Anjaria, the friability of form, in the unstable convergence between ethical values and their expressive means in pre-​Independence political fictions, becomes, itself, the mark of their generic coherence. Further, and no doubt in the vein of Lukács, the “threat” of formal dissolution operates as the basis of a tenuous ontological integrity within these fictions, sought after, through techniques of allegorical-​realist constructivism, against the wider awareness of a lack of socio-​political guarantees (62): Certainly, the novels of this era also capture the fear that the compulsion to be … a paragon … might become a manacle by irreparably dampening individual freedom… . They respond to this threat not by rejecting allegorization altogether and valorizing an unmoored contingency in its stead … [but] by presenting realism as a mode that must be able to represent this threat. (65, emphasis mine) The ethical meaning of Ela’s martyr-​like choice, then, coalesces with the representational challenge of signifying that which precisely “threatens” the preconditions for novelistic meaning and the value of historical reference (23–​24, 65). See in the light of Lukácsian volatility, both the allegorical as well as realist elements that structure the novella’s “chapters” exceed their thematic and immersive preoccupation with terrorism, bringing the work into the wider, generic ambit of political fictions from this time –​the particular kind of literature that Anjaria identifies with novelistic “experiments with Gandhi” (Anjaria, 60). In their mutual over-​determination, the enfolded figures of “Gandhi” and “Ela” give rise to two very different critical positions on Four Chapters (each emphasising nearly incompatible formal registers of the work, in myth and historical realism). Such division over the doubled figure of martyred/​ scapegoated sacrifice, reappears, in its various possible determinations (but around the ghost of Gandhi) in a gripping ethico-​political claim upon our contemporary conjuncture. Such a possibility might be construed as obliquely supporting Tagore’s own contention, that the work’s conventions were always in the service of a “realistic” account of the bifurcated origins (and thus internally unreconciled form) of a popular politics, which, at the time, was oriented chronologically by the yet-​to-​be accomplished episode of freedom. For our purposes, such incompatible yet affiliated interpretative possibilities attest to how Four Chapters does, indeed, contribute to the canonical mode of national allegory, and that it does so by (dis)articulating its hermeneutical, generic and historical possibilities to a limit. However, as a way of approaching the critical desuetude into which Four Chapters

58  Terminal beginnings has presently fallen, and in a departure from Anjaria’s focus on the value of artistic commitment within works of Gandhian genre, I  contend that the extreme (hermeneutical, narrative) violence of Four Chapters’ conclusion signals an abdication of responsibility for the very contradictions that enable its allegorical structure. In The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self, Ashis Nandy rescues the myth of exemplary sacrifice, physical courage, as well as the tradition of spiritual commitment that undergirds Ela’s brata (pledge), from the sectarian discourse of militant nationalism and revolutionary terrorism. Reading the work’s conclusion as an enactment of radical passivity, Nandy presents Ela’s act of self-sacrifice as a fictional doubling of Tagore’s singular politics of dissent (a move that also serves to reduce the distance between Tagore and Gandhi’s ideological differences). Ela is also exemplary (in Anjaria’s sense of the charismatic paragon) because in the action of self-​effacement, she identifies herself, across class lines, with the popular experience of organised politics in India. Dissenting from the false alternatives of (manufactured) consent versus (authoritarian) coercion, Ela removes herself from the picture, as it were, in order to cast light on an on-​going history of social invisibility. Accordingly, her final, suicidal gesture gives emphatic form to an ethical “choice”  –​by recuperating her agency from rationalised discourses of political violence, Ela enacts her difference from a presumptively homogenous national readership, that is, in reality, constituted through the stratifying force of class-​/caste-​based privilege. Such a reading might be positioned within the context of Nandy’s wider articulations of a communitarian political philosophy, and its normative implications for the contemporary Indian public sphere.35 For Nandy, Ela exemplifies an indigenous ethic of practiced indifference to binaristic ontologies of violence/​violation that organise late-​colonial regimes of governance and self-​ formation, which are further perpetuated, through the course of state-​driven modernisation, into the elitist, exclusionary protocols of official nationalism. Nandy’s reading is far-​reaching:  It honours “Ela’s choice” not only by treating it fully in the course of Tagore’s oeuvre of political fiction, but by unfolding its affinities to an alternative, most difficult understanding of satya (truth). The Gandhian conviction that the (colonial/​communal) aggressor is also a victim of aggression is the novel’s truth. Through Ela’s valour, such content is connected historically to Gandhi’s “self-​terrorising” public performances of bodily sacrifice, undertaken, over the course of more than two and a half decades, in the service of the freedom struggle (Tickell, 331). Notwithstanding the moral as well as socio-​political gravity of this reading for a contemporary national conjuncture (defined, as it is, through popular consent to a regime of violent cultural majoritarianism), such a thesis is defensible only through a suppression of the vexed textual complexities of the narrative. While Four Chapters does, indeed, perform an acute ideological refusal of the terms of a violently organised historical present, it is

National allegory in late style  59 difficult to ignore how the work forces its idiom of conscientious objection onto a systematically “mute[d]‌” female protagonist (Tagore, 33). As I will show, Ela’s silence is not only narrated through an account of her increasing estrangement from the fictional world of both family and politics in the novel; it is inscribed paradoxically into the work as voice. In what is possibly the most remarkable feature of Four Chapters’ many formal oddities, Ela’s voice is presenced through escalating textual marks of elision, interruption and syntactical disarticulation. In counterpoint to Nandy’s interpretation, feminist readers have centralised the uncontainable symbolic dissonances within Tagore’s attempts to reconcile the competing claims of “private individual destiny” and “public culture” through the “ideological fantasy” of middle-​class conjugality (Mitra, 1992, 125). For readers such as Mitra, Sprinker and Basu, Four Chapters consolidates Tagore’s conservative turn towards what was, at the time of its production, an already anachronistic endorsement of nineteenth-​century reformism. On the question of the novel’s contemporaneity, such a thesis implies, with acuity, that while Tagore broke with political nationalism, his intellectual engagements remained tied to residual discourses of cultural nationalism. Thus, Four Chapters reprises the disparate allegorical claims of The Home and the World to forcibly reconcile its multiple significations within a “punitive” conclusion. Also an incisive departure from Kapur, such scholarship approaches Four Chapters as a decisive resolution of earlier doubt: Advancing an “unequivocal espousal of a traditional role for women in … Char Adhyaya”, the trilogy concludes in the symbolic “stasis” of death (Mitra, 253, 254, emphasis mine). The remaindered element of Four Chapters signals the eventual, emphatic inertness of the long history of Tagore’s swadeshi fictions (and here, we must remember Ela’s corpse, which Four Chapters demurs from directly picturing).36 As such, the conclusion of Four Chapters attests most strikingly to the closure of the author’s hopes for a “national society” –​or the vision of an alternative modernity, as it were, that might have been organised beneath the homogenising parameters of citizenship and civil society, within artisanal-​pastoral social arrangements, governed according to the imperatives of a reformed, feudal-​patriarchal hierarchy (Mitra, 254). Turning the tables on Nandy’s paradigmatic defense of a popular Gandhian or communitarian subject, the feminist reading navigates the pitfalls of Tagore’s creeping “traditional[ism]” to disclose how the value of cultural authenticity is asserted over the demands of a transgressive sexuality –​this, through a gendered exercise in writerly cruelty. Significantly, “the failure to reform traditional authority” is signalled not merely by Tagore’s unsuccessful –​and retroactive –​textual attempt to “metaphorically rehabilitate” Home and the World’s figure of a reformed patriarch (ibid.). In both its formal and political implications, the recursive “failure” of values of reform and rehabilitation is conflated with the ascendant figure of the sexually emancipated woman (ibid.). Emerging under the sign of Tagore’s political

60  Terminal beginnings unconscious, the catastrophe of Ela’s sacrifice thwarts the author’s overt refusal of the discourse of political nationalism while also fracturing the presumption of an intentional auctorial subject: Would it be precipitous to suggest that the progress from Suchorita of Gora to Bimala to Ela of Char Adhyaya is not, as is generally understood, merely the sign of a growing conservatism in the aging Tagore but perhaps also an indication of the “homeward” turning of nationalism itself? (Mitra, 258, emphasis mine) Profoundly unsettling the valorised figure of “Tagore” within established accounts of his liberal humanism, the feminist hypothesis focuses (as we do) on the domesticating gesture of Four Chapters’ conclusion. Moving from the lionised persona of Tagore, this position serves to shift the reader’s attention onto the figure of the insurgent sexual agent –​cut down, precisely, in the moment of her arrival. The strength of such insight derives from what Mitra identifies as a structural shift within the discourse of nationalism in the next decade. Such a “turning” would decisively marginalise the claims of militant insurgency, as such, within the public sphere, thereby “consolidate[ing] the “domestic” politics of non-​violence” into the only “authentic narrative of the freedom struggle” (Mitra, 258). Against Nandy, the feminist intervention discloses, incontrovertibly, in my view, the work’s forcible resolution of the woman question. To mobilise this insight again through the language of allegory:  The narrative’s melancholic display of fallenness cannot be parsed apart from the illegibility of Ela’s sacrifice, an action that hijacks the work’s attempted resolution into circuits of formless violence. For this reason, Four Chapters surely unsettles its designation, pace Nandy, as a “last” work proper to Tagore’s biography of ethical dissent. By the same token, the concluding chapter of Four Chapters sets awry the assumption of a progressivist chronology of literary development, which, on the other side of Nandy, informed Kapur’s affirmation of the unfinished canon and horizon of Nehruvian modernism. Arguing neither from auctorial choice nor its great repressed, sexuality, I return to Four Chapters through notion of late style, or as a work that posthumously survives these original intentions by appearing, again, through conventions that have been ruined by processes of neutralisation –​ or the experiential and affective depredations to which all human expression, under the law of the commodity fetish, are subject. Late work, then, not as an historicism that refers the psychological or biographical details of the composer’s life to the pathos of senescence and impending death, but as the objective image of damaged life in the action of our reading. If, as the review of commentary on the work, above, demonstrates, Four Chapters encounters the conflict between interiority and politics by plotting their contradiction into an insurmountable narrative impasse, it also stages

National allegory in late style  61 a departure from the periodising assumptions of literary development that inform existing scholarship on the novella. Setting aside the allusive, open-​ ended conclusion of The Home and the World, Four Chapters is not so much a rupture within the norms of voice, authorship and literary development that typically serve as the critical measure of debates around the work, as much as the action of a withdrawal from these historically determined parameters of reading. Accordingly, Ela does not merely enact the impasse between individualism and collective history through her failed bid for autonomy. Following Benjamin’s account of (femininised) stillness –​which turns outwards, in marks of silence to petrify and break apart the action of character-​driven “choices”  –​Ela is the locus of the kind of work that absorbs such standstill into the exposition of its very subject matter. To put the stakes of such a contention another way: If Ela’s disappeared body is rendered into the primary register of the work’s internal incoherence, her characteristic qualities of speechlessness and corporeal denudation cite the wider predicament of abstraction, as this enters into the structures of perception, as the condition of our times. At such a point, the norm of developmental time is experienced, in dilatory circuits of silence and non-​sense, as, itself, an artefact of the past. In the debacle of non-​choices that concludes the work of Four Chapters, Ela exercises a thoroughly self-​negating mode of agency. Her decision to disappear is linked to the novel’s rehearsal of the dialectic of (colonial) violence and (the episode of) freedom, over and again, as a singular redundancy within the narrative present. Or, what is the same, Ela’s action exposes the opposing vectors of an independent modernity, and its mythic regression into communally sanctioned violence, as the historical landscape of our own, decadent national conjuncture. Bhumika, or the myth of sacrifice If, in another way, there is any such thing for the lovers as a sign, then it is this: that for both of them not only the abyss of sex but even that of family has closed. (Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities”, 331) Literally meaning “of the earth”, the terse Prelude (Bhumika) serves as a grounding for the social origins Ela’s character.37 Situating her childhood in a dysfunctional family life, the narrative conflates the experience of maternal tyranny with a larger breakdown in the private sphere. In a lapidary first sentence, Ela’s adult choices are compressed into the recollected knowledge of oppression:  “Ela remembers that her first intimation of life came through rebellion” (Tagore, xi). No longer animated by the maternal figure and value of nurture, a de-​cultured “home” is expressed symptomatically, through the loss of paternal authority:  “Her mother … raised a storm at home in the most unpredictable ways –​disciplining unfairly and

62  Terminal beginnings suspecting Ela without reason … And something else that Ela had come to learn from her early childhood:  oppression was abetted primarily by weakness” (Tagore, xi, emphasis mine). In an allusion to her unworldly academic father, Ela likens his impotence to those who were “dependent on the family for their daily bread –​who lived vulnerably on the margins bounded by the petty circle of favours –​the ones who polluted their home life [by] instigating her mother” (Tagore, xi). Though loved by Ela, her unassertive father is held “responsible” for the abuse he silently suffers within the home. Through flattened psychological types, the Prelude “explains” the root of Ela’s independent nature, advancing, in the process, a tongue-​in-​cheek awareness of the Oedipal politics of the bourgeois, modern subject (Ela’s father is an English-​educated professor of psychology). But the Prelude’s real force goes to the link between selfhood and politics, which is allegorised through an erotic economy of power. The private “rebellion”, in the midst of which Ela’s own bid for autonomy unfolds, is an insight into the “disciplinary” psychology of colonialism, which replicates the corrosive mutuality of authoritarianism and dependency, centre and “margin”, within the bodily make-​up of the modern individual. Above all, the domestic sphere appears as a diminished chronicle of its own passing. Relegated to the margins of the work in fewer than ten terse pages, it establishes the organic trope of home/​ world as a surpassed writerly convention. Hence, as an insuperable loss of totality, the sheer inexistence of the “home” must be simply presupposed by the narrative. The particular form of subjectivity that emerges from the Prelude is already the product of the failure of the private; the privileged value of domesticity, interiority, enters “the First” only in the husk of a form. From the outset of Four Chapters, then, Tagore’s protagonists appear as attenuated subjects, preternaturally removed from the qualities and value of individuality. In its abstraction and oddly archaic appearance  –​as the emblem of cultural bereavement –​the figure of youthful lovers admits to the paucity of meaning that attends its immanent, textual presentation. Emerging abruptly from the Prelude’s gesture towards the psychology of (post)colonial discipline, Ela is more deeply characterised by her subjection to Indranath’s interrogation, as elaborated in “the First”. At the outset of the novella, Ela confronts Indranath with the depersonalisation of the “boys” who comprise the “movement” of anti-​colonial insurgency (1, 3, 19, 22). Indranath counters by urging Ela to suppress those bodily registers of morality, “natural … disgust” and maternal compassion. While the exchange assumes an obvious didactic function by giving voice to Tagore’s abhorrence of the increasing mechanisation of the nationalist cause in elitist gendered terms, it is of greater significance that Ela’s objection serves to denote the motif of “sacrifice”, identified as the mythic principle of “slaughter … to an unseen blind power”, early in the text (6). Ela’s voice alternates between the stilted “unnatural force” of her questions and the movement of “fall[ing] silent”; Indranath, however, responds to her line of questioning unerringly,

National allegory in late style  63 in the Gita’s idiom of magnificent indifference (7, 13). Above empathy, he asserts: “At the heart of power is the cultivation of cruelty; forgiveness may come in the end” (Tagore, 6). This polemical exchange does not merely signal Tagore’s “aware[ness] of the new forms of violence let loose on the world by modern (“Western”) technology”, as, for example, Nandy has it. Read through the force of Ela’s doubt, such “awareness” is registered in a reflexive textual turn –​the narrative locates the technology of terror within a philosophical interrogation of the Gita’s putatively universal values. Four Chapters might be understood as an intervention into Tagore’s own literary inheritance, for it confronts a writerly tradition that had put the Gita’s defense of action in a world of immanence –​ of commitment that remains implacable in the face of historical success or failure –​to the uses of militant cultural agency.38 Ela’s original sacrifice, in the oath of celibacy, is established within the parameters of such a discursive inheritance. Emerging from Ela’s active search for a place in an imagined nation, the value of citizenship is, in turn, situated by the Prelude in an account of her efforts to disassociate from bodily/​gendered identifications of the “home”. Arriving within the narrative present of Four Chapters, this aspirational (inherently bilingual) discourse of a modern, egalitarian community discovers that it is wholly determined by the anglicised idiom of Indranath’s politics –​a “hard … . fin-​de-​siècle scientism”, in Nandy’s words, that turns on the assumption of the “master-​plan of biology in our bodies” and which anticipates the logic of modern state formations that apportion, manage and separate populations based on race, ethnicity and the census of social reproduction (Nandy, 2009, 9; FC, 41; italics in the original). Already siting the transactional logic of sacrifice, substitution and the bureaucratic calculus as the order of the narrative present, Ela emerges into public visibility by refusing one form of bodily determinism in exchange for another. In the compressed space between the Prelude and “the First”, Ela is seen to remove her body from the ideologically charged language of late-​nineteenth-​century values of romantic monogamy and conjugality, even as she gives it over to the “scientific experiment” of Indranath’s contemporary political discipline. Such irony cannot be explained contingently, through Ela’s tragic blindness to her own motives. In the ineluctability of her self-​cancelling choices, the novella aligns itself with Indranath’s “impersonal”, indeed, classical sacrifice of empathy (22, 23; italics in original). After all, it is just by voicing her consent that Ela is drawn back into textual logics of eroticism, iconicity and performance. In or out of the home, the question of Ela’s desire remains an integral if always excessive term within the language of domesticity/​nationhood (specified historically through “biology”, or the ethnicised colonial rhetoric of norm and exception). As such, the interrogatory exchange between Indranath and Ela frames the novel’s own, far-​reaching question about its times. If the value of “tradition” appears as fundamental –​rather than oppositional –​to processes of cultural rationalisation, might it not also emerge as a symptom of modern biopolitics?

64  Terminal beginnings If Ela virtually embodies the terms of Four Chapters’ line of questioning, it is through her striking lack of expression. From the outset, Ela is aligned with the motif of sacrifice  –​the moral ground of discourses of violence linked to early-​to mid-​twentieth-​century nationalism –​through her characteristic silence.39 While Ela’s initial questioning of Indranath is established through her demonstrable outspokenness, the ensuing chapters proceed by truncating her spoken presence in the narrative. Ela’s voice is consolidated not through an enlightened or otherwise transgressive breaking of bounds, but through its pause in “silenc[e]‌”, first enacted in Ela’s opening confrontation with Indranath: This action of “fall[ing] silent” in the midst of speech proliferates the ensuing chapters through the mark of the question “why” (13, 99); “why not” (80); “why don’t you tell me”; “tell me” (78, 79); “tell me why” (76–​77); “what do you mean?” (75)40. Ultimately, the question consumes the character of Ela, who is reduced to an empty textual presence that “sits transfixed” by the very words she “hosts” (81, 88). Nevertheless, while the meaning of Ela’s question is disarticulated through and by the course of the narrative, its intonation persists –​remarkably, Four Chapters sonorises Ela’s silence, interpellating her increasing attenuation as an “individual” into its own material and development as national allegory. Between the force of Indranath’s interrogation and the violence of Atin’s unceasing poeticising, Ela disappears into elliptical marks of silence. This is less the movement of representation than of an action that punctuates the trajectory of the novel’s suppressed line of questioning through counter-​signs (and sounds) of wordless affect. Preeminent art-​ historian Partha Mitter locates the origins of Indian modernism, in essential part, through Tagore’s belated turn toward the visual arts, and his subsequent contributions to a “folk-​primitivist” pre-​ Independence aesthetic.41 Mitter’s thesis on Tagore’s departure from long-​ forms of literary fiction and poetry toward non-​mimetic uses of the graphic line is suggestive for the reading I have offered. Nonetheless, the ambiguous political implications of Four Chapters’ abandonment of material content –​ through the attenuation of allegory into the gestural line –​remain the most problematic feature of the text. If, in Four Chapters, the relation of desire to cultural expression is resolved at the level of the narrative (pace the feminist position), it is by disbarring Ela’s sexual identity from any mode of representation, political or textual. Such forced resolution ineluctably dismantles the allegorical coherence of the text, which must therefore conclude in a gesture of writerly destruction. If Ela’s “suicide” is literally indistinguishable from her solicitation of the assassin’s embrace, the text orchestrates a decisive conflation of its own terms (national allegory and the realist novel, youth and age, modern citizenship and archaic sacrifice) –​thereby opening itself to a zone of resounding hermeneutical confusion. Put differently, the question of how to read Ela’s suicide is exhausted by the opacity of her body. Her death cannot be read as a “choice” in the sense of a heroic act of recantation, or as a reclamation of authentic “feminine” nature from its phallic cooptation, as Nandy argues. Such comprehensibility would be accomplished only by repeating the collision of sexual choice with sexual

National allegory in late style  65 effacement that comprises the harrowing final act of Four Chapters. Were we to consider Ela’s jarring self-​exposure in the manner of its time –​as the feminist approach insists  –​we must regard it as it visibly appears. Ela’s nudity, is, in effect, scandalous. After all, her clothes are not torn from her; she strips herself, and appears, for one brief instance, without shame. Through erotic self-​exposure, Ela advances herself as resistant and vulnerable to the politics of collective honour/​disgrace that attend her historical awakening. Lacking the means for autonomous expression, Ela’s protest can only take the form of a bodily gesture; her choice is felt, therefore, as nothing less than shocking. Ela’s gesture confirms the theatre of the present as a lack of space, thereby paralysing the symbolic economy through which her visible emergence as a desiring subject would also, in the same moment, be covered up or stripped down –​or what is the same, coercively integrated into the circulation of organised public values, which turn on the (hetero) sexually aggressive norm of masculine rivalry and individuation. Running together the position of agent and victim into a single, self-​erasing assertion, Ela evacuates this instance of national allegory of a proper subject. As such, Four Chapters is able to cast the historical moment only in the figural “extremity” of the vita nuda: The work’s emblematic “rhetorical gesture” resides not in its elaboration of a crisis-​ridden interiority, but in Ela’s exposed, expulsed and formally de-​nuded body (Vyanjana) (Tagore, 70). Raising the theoretical apparatus of the libido in the Prelude just in order to bypass it, Tagore also releases Ela’s subjectivity from the deep scrutiny of psychology (such disciplinary knowledge belongs, after all, to the omniscient Indranath). The Prelude’s dismissive acknowledgement of psychoanalysis and the Freudian family romance subverts, in my own view, Basu’s conclusion that the text plays with the “sadomasochistic” possibilities of Ela’s sexual will (Basu, 243). Through a procedure of textual denudation and material impoverishment, the novella encounters Ela’s body “[un]forgivingly” –​in that most secular mode of allegorical standstill, which foregoes any thought of transcendence –​as an aporia between the competing claims of political fiction and romance, as between the consolidation of resurgent cultural identity and the insurgent appearance of a desiring feminine agent (FC 6). The impasse is unreformable and originates, moreover, from the heart of Tagore’s trilogy. The disaster that brings Four Chapters to a conclusion points back to the historical and aesthetic preconditions of its own articulation. These remain unsymbolisable within the author’s historical present.

The art of disburdenment, or, how to disappear The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. (Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven”, 566)

66  Terminal beginnings That sentence … in which, while the embracing lovers seal their fate, everything pauses, reads:  “Hope shot across the sky over their heads like a falling star”. (Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities”, 355)

“The settlement of knowledge in dead ones” –​with this proposition, The Origin of the German Mourning Play turned back to its initial discussion of the romantic symbol, to reconsider the fundamental theological distinction between symbolic and allegorical expression. If the specific historical conditions that gave rise to classical tragedy now disbar its modalities from expressive efficacy, the instantaneous harmony of the Romantic symbol, too, has been outpaced by the ascendancy of literary Expressionism (and its evident continuities with Baroque mannerism in the aftermath of World War I). At one level, Benjamin’s reflections on the contemporaneity of Baroque allegory appear as a powerfully historicising thesis; it establishes homologies between current aesthetic and topical developments, and the history of an hitherto devalued representational genre (so much so, that post-​ Enlightenment legacies in German Romanticism appear, altogether, as a short-​lived deviation from such a tradition). Yet at a more fundamental level of analysis, Benjamin’s idiosyncratic reconstruction of allegorical experience discloses a paradoxical, if elemental unity between symbol and allegory. Something of this integral, antinomial tradition is already present in Benjamin’s methodological contentions: Modernity is not the accumulated sum of the Baroque past, but rather reveals that past to be the most distilled instance of its own historical experience. In other words, the current conjuncture does not merely refer its formations back to a pre-​modern lineage (in order to “modernise” the latter). It demonstrates the truth of its own time –​in the phenomenal process of becoming and passing away –​within each refractory remnant of the past. If the secular, historicising awareness of the Baroque is revelatory of the modern, its forms are revealed, as in no other historical moment, by such a specifically modern sensibility. That allegory’s devices are restored to the status of a truth-​claim through Benjamin’s modernity suggests a temporal transformation that has gone to the very structure of human intellection. For such acutely historical reasons, Benjamin asserted that “knowledges” (Wissens) of death and resurrection cannot enter the work of Baroque allegory in the flashing unity of an image. Contracting both time and the bombast of voice into a point of stillness, death “settles” in the text only at the limit of each emblematic act of capture, or, indeed, at the limit of language’s self-​ possession. Subjecting aesthetic discourse to time, or to the “Hippocratic” gaze of history, the conventions of allegory were turned, again, into the degradable artefact. As such, allegorical expression comprised an intensive meditation on the conventionality not only of art forms, but of the historical itself. In other words, the procedures of allegorical gesture, diction, script and mise-​en-​scène were only rehearsals of the devices of history, now

National allegory in late style  67 recast, through registers of derivativeness and internal insignificance, in the appearance of arbitrariness. It is history as process –​or convention qua its conventionality –​that comes to be signified through the allegorical method (Ausdruck der Konvention). Benjamin’s account of Baroque gesturalism extracts the concept of the expressionless to theorise it as the principle, or, indeed, “origin” (Ursprung) of a contemporary artistic construction. As such, the category of the expressionless is not restricted to the realm and history of the Baroque emblem alone insofar as it also enfolds –​and thus escalates –​the instantaneous transformation of experience once associated with symbolic revelation. Already in the essay on Goethe, Benjamin identifies the shock-​like element of the expressionless (das Ausdruckslose), with the figure of the defaced and truncated “torso” (Benjamin, GEA 340). While the image might strike us as a proto-​allegorical form, Benjamin refers specifically, here, to the “torso of the [Romantic] symbol” (340). In a reversal of his reading of the all-​ encompassing structure of myth in Elective Affinities, Benjamin advances a thesis that has implications for his subsequent theory of allegorical destruction; as for our reading of Four Chapters as a mode of mourning appropriate for an era of baroque weariness. (We now recast Tagore’s novella not only as the effect of personal ageing, as a variety of commentaries suggest, but also of “the old age of humanity”, the juncture that truncates the speaking protagonist, whether auctorial or characterological, into a passing, insubstantial mode of appearing) (Nietzsche, 28). In the concluding sections of “Goethe’s Elective Affinities”, Benjamin argues that the luminous promise of reconciliation is preserved within Goethe’s “dusk-​filled” myth of sacrifice, in fact, as the only authentic “decision” of the work (330). Under the sign of the broken torso, the residual, shattered or displaced legacy of the symbol emerges as the trace of an historical possibility that stands apart from the many “choices” staged by the narrative present, but which lead, each on their own terms, to the atrocity of an innocent’s death (Benjamin, 330). The relation between the mythic upper-​layer of the novel, and a counter-​form to that structure, is cited in an abbreviated instance of the “shining” but now “distant” (Abstand) world of the symbol. Likened to a secret that pierces through the tightly plotted transactions of fate, this other form works against the apparent coherence of the narrative, and is never entirely “dispelled” by the novel’s structure (330; Kuiken 299). Appearing as a poetic caesura, this “counter-​ rhythmic rupture” is generated not from an image, but from within the diction and materials of the narrative. The truth-​content of Elective Affinities resides in the little novella (titled, “The Wonderful Tale of the Childhood Sweethearts” (Die wunderlichen Nachbarskinder)), a youthful piece of writing that Goethe subsequently inserted into the text of his novel. Benjamin argues that insofar as their story is buried underneath the narrative elaboration of novel, the lovers of the novella are never entirely available to the reader. But it is just through this quality of reserve that they are closer to the law that governs the

68  Terminal beginnings actions of the novel’s characters. To clarify, Benjamin implies that the very uses of psychological realism in the novel serve, inadvertently, to strand its characters within the uncritical order of mythic or ahistorical typologies –​ the compulsions of the stereotype, in other words, which come to a head in sacrifice, martyrdom, or the archetypical justification for organised violence against the modern individual. Thus, while the novel works to “draw the reader irresistibly into its interior, the novella”, instead, abjures the work’s overarching adherence to values of historically attuned reference, correspondence and psychological affiliation by “pushing every living creature out of its magic circle” (Benjamin, 331; emphasis mine). This fable-​like miniature of Elective Affinities reminds us that the Goethe did, in fact, start his work as a novella –​Benjamin describes how the novella doubles the novel’s formal structure (of elective affiliation) even while departing, or falling out, from the manner and appearance of its resolution. This difference between the finished work (the novel) and its earlier sketch (the novella) is not only one of scale, nor even technical progress; the ethical implications of their formal distinction are most obvious in the latter’s conclusion. After a sudden confrontation with danger, everything good that can happen happens to the young lovers. Therefore, the childhood sweethearts stand out, above all possible choices, as figures destined for happiness. “In the clearest way”, then, the necessary or “lawful character” of the novella’s form –​its lightness, fragility, its ornamental beauty  –​is tied to its distance from reality. This “untouchability of the center” or the mystery of an essential characteristic … stands out in bold relief. For in it, the mystery is the catastrophe, which, as the animating principle of the story, is conducted into its center, while in the novel, the significance of the catastrophe, the concluding event, remains phenomenal. (GEA, 331; emphasis mine) The assertion is, at first glance, counter-​intuitive. While Elective Affinities treats Ottilie’s death neither as a “concluding event” nor as a “catastrophe”, there is even less that is catastrophic in the novella; its tone is bright, the simplicity of its conclusion, radiant. But when considered in view of Benjamin’s proposition of two orders of form that operate at the upper and inner edges of the novel, the work is shown to consist integrally through an “internal law” of construction  –​the thesis implies that we approach the work, as a totality, not through this or that generic element, but through its structuring dynamic, which reposes at the work’s very centre. In other words, the “essential … mystery” of Elective Affinities arises from process, the dynamic that discards the outward conventions of the novel to the realm of the phenomenal, or, better, exposes these, via their constructedness, as artefactual and human-​made devices. Thus, where the catastrophe of the novel plays out at the level of the phenomenal world –​in the guilty story of slow death and mortal sacrifice –​the true catastrophe of the work is the novella

National allegory in late style  69 itself. “Conduct[ing]” the corporeal world of the novel into the very core of the work, the novella disarticulates the choices of Elective Affinities, or those properly meaningless substitutions of freedom for fate and vice versa, thereby releasing these archaic thought-​forms into the revelatory appearance of the expressionless. One more thing, for the purposes our novella and the manner in which it conducts the debased values of the wider world of the trilogy, as of a belated colonial modernity, into the “concluding event” of Ela’s (dis)appearance. If the prehistory of Elective Affinities in the naïve or surpassed modality of the novella establishes no less than the truth-​content of the novel, it is at, or as the limit of the novel’s depictive content (331). What the ostensible “folk-​primitivism” of allegory was to Tagore’s realist oeuvre, the novella is to the novel-​form in Benjamin. In both, the question of the limit can only be proposed as an unspatialisable construct. Demarcating the point where the devices of the work begin to disintegrate, the limit of form is a temporal threshold –​that moment of catastrophic turning, when narrative content irrupts through its codification as myth, to thereby de-​structure reified conventions of perspective, focalisation and narratological wholeness. In Benjamin, such release from an immanent social whole is co-​extensive with Ottilie’s enigmatic qualities of beauty and silence. Ottilie’s inexplicable decision to starve herself wordlessly out of the transactional community of Elective Affinities is, thus, on the one side, the movement of the novel’s dematerialisation (under logics of commodification); on other, the gradual disappearance of a subjectively bound perspective (“characterisation”). For this reason, Benjamin cautions us that while Ottilie’s commitment interrupts the solipsistic language of choice, she is also always of this world of suffering and creaturely death. She is never, strictly speaking, free in her decision: “For this silencing of the moral voice [of the work, of Ottilie] is not to be grasped, like the muted language of the affects, as a feature of individuality. It is not a determination within the boundaries of human being. With this silence, the semblance has installed itself consumingly…” (337). The particular mode of appearance (Schein) that ties the quality of the woman’s beauty to its textual presentation is not organicity; it is silence. As such, the incremental withdrawal of the body from the world of the text is also the unsentimental gesture that subtracts artistic semblance, or the work’s appearance, from its codification in beauty. The act of feminine disappearance in silence is not a reversal of sociological norms of beauty (to reveal, say, an authentic or resistant individuality that resides beneath the idealized appearance), just as the counter-​actualisation of Elective Affinities in the novella was not a division of the work into two failed, incompatible wholes. Four Chapters, and the exceptional departure that Ela stages from both world and work, exemplifies such an aesthetic of disburdenment as it might occur from within the “origins” of national modernism in India. The withdrawal of beauty from the appearance of the art-​work is sited as a cut within its modes of articulation, or a delimitation of what the work, as a

70  Terminal beginnings totality, can possibly symbolise within its historical world. For this reason, we can only receive the beautiful work (and Ela’s naked life) through its phenomenological disintegration, over time, into expressionless appearance. But history, or the process by which art works become impoverished of their appearance as art, is, by the same principle, an emancipation of the work’s efficacy for new ethical and historical urgencies. In his treatment of Beethoven’s liturgical composition, the Missa Solemnis (Solemn Mass) (1823), Adorno advances a peculiar relationship between the signature of the artist and the work itself. At the time of its composition (there were only two performances while the composer lived, one of them in abbreviated form), and despite the reverence that attaches to its posthumous canonisation, the work “made no lasting impression” on critics or audiences (Missa, 571). Nevertheless, of “conjuring” significance to Adorno is the “forced” quality through which Beethoven himself insisted that work surpassed all others in his repertoire, by “design[ating] it ‘l’oeuvre le plus accompli,’ his most successful work” (Adorno, Missa 571–​572). The detail should remind us of the multiple, recessive origins that Tagore attempted to provide for Ela, emerging, as she does, at the incendiary intersection of realist psychology and icon, as also his paratextual supplements (and their suppressions over time) to the novella. For Adorno, this strain between what the work could itself say in its time and what the artist wished, so dearly, to say of it for posterity, is inscribed indelibly into Beethoven’s composition, in the handwritten dedication of the artist: he wrote over the “Kyrie” [“Lord”] the words “from the heart –​may it go to hearts”, a confession the like of which one may search for in vain in all the other … works… . [It] is as if Beethoven had … tried through the force of his will … to force the work externally upon those whom it did not of its own power compel. (571–​572, emphasis mine) Presenting through features of remoteness, the late work unfolds in the gaps of a biographical life and the “psychological” intent (“will”) of the artist –​as from any community of reception that construes itself, via a “live” apprehension of the piece, in continuity with past works (566, 572). In Lecia Rosenthal’s helpful formulation, the “comparative dissonance between late work and past works” places the under question the interlinked assumption of an oeuvre and a monolithic artistic subjectivity, where each is thought as an organically developed totality (Rosenthal, 473).42 Appearing as the “writing” of a withdrawing presence, through “the peculiar character of quotation” that comes after the disappearance of creative will, this relinquishment of compositorial control is an admission (“confession”) that the objective and subjective dimensions of every expression of intent  –​in a modernity that passes everywhere under the sign of “catastrophe”  –​is misaligned. Therefore, any remediation of this historical condition through an act of artistic synthesis is open to doubt. And this is the decisive modernity

National allegory in late style  71 of late works –​as a retroactive critique of earlier accomplishments, works of late style disintegrate the synthetic unities of the past in order to “expose … the classical as classicizing” (73, 576, 578–​579, 580 emphasis mine).43 “Objective is the fractured landscape”, claims Adorno, as he, in turn, uncovers the mark of “Auschwitz” in the allegorical topos and methods of Benjamin, “subjective the light in which –​alone –​it glows into life. [The late stylist] does not bring about their synthesis. As the power of disassociation, he tears them apart in time…” (“Late Style” 567). Read in late style, the ageing of the work of art is the opening onto the other side of the fold. No longer to be mourned, the enigmatic suspension of meaning in Four Chapters invites us into a radically unverified form of subjective perception, one that is unsecured from choices involving both the time-​ bound episode of freedom, as well as the repository of image-​forms (including national allegory) that comprise a related tradition of artistic beauty. Such a viewpoint cannot seek to transcend the devices of its own modernity; like the bodies of Ottilie and Ela in their respective worlds and times, our insight, too, remains bound to obligatory preconditions in history, positionality, and corporeality. (Retrieved as a work of “permanent renunciation”, Four Chapters implicates the reader’s standing in historical closures so decisive as to no longer warrant, even, the consolatory admission that Ela’s story is a tragedy.) Rather, by introducing the scission of time into the structure of perception, the action of aesthetic disappearance opens up a space of alterity within the mythic compulsions of both work and history. In the transient light of the novel’s devices –​likened in “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” to a shooting star –​ for Benjamin, a distant recollection of the Nazarene symbol of hope –​Four Chapters, too, yields ground to an image of what might be, after the constitutive conventions of artistic presentation have been torn apart in time. As process, or in the unmaking of beauty, late works become lisible through the closures of an inherited, eroded modernity. This idea, of the still-​emergent text of modernism, is already captured by the reference to When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen’s last drama, which makes an unacknowledged entry in both Tagore and the hymnic concluding lines of Benjamin’s essay. With it, we might observe that “there echoes at the end of the book, “that ‘How beautiful’ in the ears of the dead, who, we hope, awaken, if ever, not to a beautiful world but to a blessed one” (354–​355).

Notes 1 Friedrich W. Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History (New York: Cosimo Books, 2010), 28, 51. 2 T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London and New  York:  Continuum Books, 2001), 84. 3 Rabindranath Tagore, Four Chapters, trans. Rimli Bhattacharya (New Delhi: Srishti Publishers, 2002). 4 Manu Goswami, “Autonomy and Comparability”, Boundary 2 32(2) (2005): 201–​225.

72  Terminal beginnings 5 Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000), 278. 6 The book espouses  –​and romanticises  –​an inclusivist ethos aligned with the Brahmo Samoj, whose reformism is pitted against the exacting discipline of a high Brahmanical social order. Gora, always obscurely aware of his assimilated racial identity, swings between these two available modes of self-​invention –​a crucial element of the narrative that strains against readings of Gora as a “prescient” discussion of postcolonial hybridity, as, for example, Lalita Pandit maintains. See “Writing across Empire” in Rabindranath Tagore:  Universality and Traditions, eds. Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit (Madison and Teaneck:  Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Press, 2003). 7 Tagore astutely relates racial and caste-​based oppression to the geography of Empire by staking out a binding, if contingently discovered solidarity between a semi-​ peripheral metropolis (“Ireland”) and the subcontinent. See Joseph Lennon, “Writing across Empire”, in Rabindranath Tagore, 227. 8 Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India” in Selected Subaltern Studies, eds. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 37. 9 Tagore and Gandhi are the iconic figures of such an alternative, communitarian tradition of social organisation; both feature as figures of radical “ethical dissent” from processes of modernisation involving a violently appropriative state (Nandy, xi). Approaches to Nikhilesh as a semi-​autobiographical character originate in the contemporary criticism of Lukács, and ranges across recent scholarly interest in the area of “critical cosmopolitanism”, to reconsiderations of Tagore’s “provincialisation” of both Eurocentric and nationalist historiographical traditions. 10 The work’s uses of focalised perspective, and its interlinked experiment with deep characterisation, is realised most successfully in Tagore’s striking choice of subject –​following Anjaria, that of a woman who just steps out from the purdah. I add that such formal and ideological complexities are plotted through the overwhelmingly physical nature of Bimala’s attraction to Sandip, the charismatic swadeshi revolutionary who rivals her husband’s authority both at home and in public life. Almost seduced by Sandip’s elocutionary worship of her appearance, she is eventually repulsed by his sexually aggressive transposition of the nation onto her body. 11 Indrani Mitra, “ ‘I Will Make Bimala One with My Country’”, Modern Fiction Studies 41(2) (1995): 243–​264. 12 Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement of the 1920s and 1930s was initiated against the inefficacy of measures of constitutional reform towards self-​rule, undertaken by the British government after the Great War. It was, in significant part, supported and implemented through the All India Congress Committee (established 1929), which advocated tax avoidance to protest British rule. Between 1920 and 1922, Gandhi’s non-​cooperation movement escalated these developments, mobilising millions into supporting or directly participating in a programme of mass agitation. Following his call to end the movement in 1922 (as a consequence of localised violence between police and agitators in the notorious Chauri Chauraha incident of 1922), Moti Lal Nehru and Chittaranjan R. Das co-​founded the Swaraj Khilafat (Home Rule) party in 1923. Contesting general elections first in 1923, the Swaraj party of the Indian National Congress would go onto win 7 out of 11 provinces in 1937. This dramatic electoral victory

National allegory in late style  73 must be considered alongside the powerful popular significance of the 1930 Dandi March, Gandhi’s most significant effort at mass mobilisation since the non-​cooperation movement. For Tagore and Gandhi’s famed public disagreement over the strategy of civil disobedience, see their letters, Mahatma and the Poet; Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore 1915–​1941 (New Delhi:  National Book Trust, 1997). In this remarkable exchange, the contents of a private correspondence were debated in the public domain. Tagore wrote in the Indian nationalist publication, Modern Review, while Gandhi responded through his own political journal, Young India –​ also the original English subtitle of Four Chapters. 13 Kunjo Singh, Humanism and Nationalism in Tagore’s Novels (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2002), p. 20. 14 Sumit Sarkar, “Nationalism and Stri-​Swadhinata”, in Beyond Nationalist Frames:  Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 113. 15 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1993). 16 In light of Bimala’s suspension before a possible social death, and in the civic violence that impinges upon the home, it is worth stressing the conclusion’s oblique allusions to rape as a modality of political terror. 17 Chronically out of step with the more “advanced” artistic (and abstractive) traditions of Euro-​American modernism, the Indian avant-​garde turns its historical belatedness into potent advantage; to the same extent as its non-​alignment with modular metropolitan theories of the avant-​garde, Indian modernism at once reflects on its own preconditions in the history of state-​led modernisation, while also “decolonising” those processes through the differentiating claim of art. 18 Partha Chatterjee’s “Bombs and Nationalism in Bengal” provides an exceptional, condensed history of early-​twentieth-​century terrorism on the subcontinent. Sumit Sarkar’s The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–​1908 remains the standard account of revolutionary violence within the context of swadeshi mobilisation. See Chatterjee, “Bombs and Nationalism in Bengal” (presentation, conference on “Empire and Terror”, New  York, May 2004), Columbia University, http://​www.icis.emory.edu/​subalterndocs/​Chatterjee.pdf 19 In December 1931, two young women, Suniti Chaudhury and Shanti Ghosh, entered the district magistrate’s bungalow in Tippera and shot him dead. Only two months later, as Governor Stanley Jackson was delivering the convocation address at the University of Calcutta, Bina Das, a graduating student, took a pistol from her robes and shot at him; she missed the target and was arrested. 20 See Basu’s illuminating reading of the work through Tagore’s last public address, “Crisis of Civilization”. “Rabindranath Tagore, Cultural Difference and the Indian Woman’s Burden” in On the Road to Baghdad, or Travelling Biculturalism (New York: New Academia Publishing, 2005). 21 In the post-​Independent context, Four Chapters is almost entirely associated with its 1951 stage adaptation by the Calcutta-​based Bohurupee theatre group. Even this reference is compared popularly to Tagore’s more memorable attempt to use the quartet-​ formation as romance, in the 1916 novel, Chaturanga (Four Quartets). Abjuring any reference to the swadeshi movement, the latter links modes of post-​ Enlightenment reasoning (from Vedantic mysticism to

74  Terminal beginnings neo-​positivist scientific reason) to turn-​of-​the-​century articulations of middle-​ class Hindu masculinity. Hetero-​masculine sexual “discipline” is indicted, by way of the novel’s psychologically rich treatment of the two women characters, within domestic conventions that at once continue feudal traditions of everyday misogyny while also transfiguring these into the public discourse of modernisation. 22 Since the upakatha is also something of a moral fable, Ela’s “choice” is presented as a didactic staging of moral judgement. To this end, Nandy notes that the Bengali word for novel, upanyasa, presents continuities with indigenous modes of orality and storytelling (The Illegitimacy of Nationalism 18). 23 On the question of “desire”, Anjaria’s reading of Home and the World as a “key blue print” for nationalist-​realist fiction is instructive (24). In their mutual indeterminacy, allegorical (over)signification (and a lexicon of iconographic typologies) emerges, co-​extensively, with the mimetic protocols of the realist novel. Thus, the swadeshi novel pivots on a moment of “aesthetic ambivalence”. The formal resolution of such aesthetic desire is neither in the mode of national allegory nor in realist characterization –​these are “conflicting registers” in the work’s exposition –​but in an unspecified temporal register that escapes the narrative present (21, 61). 24 Arguably, the novella presupposes –​in a continuity with the previous work –​that both modes of nationalism, traditional-​reformist and revolutionary, failed during the swadeshi era because of a lack of mass support. In this particular image, Four Chapters makes internal reference to the previous work’s incisive identification of the Permanent Settlement as a period that systematically impoverished Bengal’s peasantry. Four Chapters presupposes the rural depredations of the post-​ Settlement period, together with the author’s uncompromising insight that mainly Muslim and Namasudra peasants (untouchables) from the eastern districts of Bengal remained indifferent to the claims of swadeshi nationalism; and were actively exploited by the nationalist leadership. 25 The traditional courtyard of the feudal manor, also used for displaying the household idols. This open architectural feature, often pillared in more elaborate neo-​Classical constructions, typically faced outward to the community. 26 Arka Chattopadhyay, “ ‘I write therefore I  am’:  Feminine Inscription between Desire and Jouissance in Tagore”, http://​theoxfordphilosopher.com/​2014/​08/​25/​ i-​write-​therefore-​i-​am-​feminine-​inscription-​between-​desire-​and-​jouissance-​in-​ tagore/​(accessed March 2015). Chattopadhyay’s fascinating analysis of feminine inscription focuses on the many female characters of Tagore’s short stories, who learn to write through their dependence on literary men. In these stories, Tagore stages a counter-​writing that impresses feminine experience –​marked as silence –​into masculine orders of speech and knowledge. Chattopadhyay deploys a Lacanina insight: The (temporal, cognitive) separation of speech from comprehension interpellates opacity, by way of the overdetermined sign of the woman, into a gendered economy of symbols. Such an analysis further complicates Ela’s characteristic silence –​in her episodic confrontations with Atin, her increasing speechlessness is, indeed, inseparable from its mode of presentation, through textualized marks of suppression. 27 In The Illegitimacy of Nationalism, Nandy reminds us that on the whole, for both Tagore and Upadhyaya –​or for that matter almost all the major political and intellectual actors of their age –​Vedantic Hinduism was imagined as the authentic core of Hinduism, and the basis of all social

National allegory in late style  75 and political activism such that few were sensitive to the elitism and defensiveness implicit in such Vedanticism”. For Nandy, it was only after the entry of Gandhi into Indian public life that “a new awareness arose of the politics of cultures which was turning the little cultures of India into society’s last line of defense against the colonizing West” (Nandy, Illegitimacy 77). From a Marxist perspective, K.N. Panikkar has shown how the reformist debate, especially those advanced through scriptural disagreement, strengthened class alliances within the nationalist elite at the turn of the century. Panikkar’s view therefore suggests a postcolonial continuity between Gandhi and Tagore –​ despite their public disagreement  –​insofar as the classist idiom of landlord “trusteeship” was maintained within both directions of reformist discourse. That the complex of caste-​based labour, as a category of redoubled exclusion, was absorbed into the structures of reformist debate was the premise of B.R. Ambedkar’s historic 1936 speech to the Reformist convention, Jat Pat Todak (Caste Dismantlement Society, an offshoot of the Arya Samaj). 28 In fact, Upadhyaya would identify his political theory through a neologism, “Hindutva” –​an invention for which he is no longer credited. In this context, see Nandy’s brilliant reading of Upadhyaya’s direct influence on V.R. Savarkar, the refurbished icon of India’s hypernationalist, new middle classes (Ashis Nandy, Heidelberg Papers in South-​Asia and Comparative Politics, Working Papers, No. 44, February 2009). As opposed to his predecessor, Savarkar’s committed atheism was not the philosophical atheism associated with Buddhism and Vedanta, but the anti-​ clerical, hard atheism of fin-​ de-​ siècle scientism, increasingly popular among sections of the European middle class and, through cultural osmosis, in parts of modern India (9). The description of “such fin-​de-​siècle scientisim” and “hard atheism” entirely captures the qualities of Indranath’s intellectual prowess, his unsentimental belief in the machinery of modern politics and the mysterious interlude in his personal history, spent in the universities of Europe. Nandy, too, hints at such a possibility by framing his essay with an opening allusion to Four Chapters. 29 However it is approached, the work’s reference to this iconoclastic, scholar-​ turned-​revolutionary is crucial to the narrative as well as its overdetermined historical resonances. Curzon’s Partition of Bengal in 1905 according to sectarian lines was remembered long after it was rescinded in the face of implacable political protests, in 1911. As discussed throughout this chapter, the partition/​ reversal marked the decline of one phase of the swadeshi movement, and the ascendancy of another, stridently militant phase represented by charismatic figures like Upadhaya. 30 Howard Elland and Michael Jennings, Walter Benjamin:  A Critical Life. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 164. 31 Kuiken, Kir, “On the Delineation of Choice and Decision in Benjamin’s ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ ”, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 31(3) (2004): 286–​308. 32 Benjamin reminds us that the trait of the tragic dramatis persona is to speak at length before his demise, a convention that uplifts him from the level of myth, and above the judgements of guilt and innocence (Benjamin, 320, 336). Ottilie in her silent starvation, is not given such tragic freedom, even as she is “reserved”

76  Terminal beginnings from the modern, novelistic exploration of a “nature” that both individuates and affiliates freely: Both markers of lack comprise the basis of her untimely “primitivism”, as it were (321). 33 Tagore, as Nobel Laureate and effectively the national poet by this time, bestowed the appellate on Gandhi in March 1915 while writing his autobiography, after the latter had addressed him as Gurudev (spiritual teacher). There is no archival evidence that Tagore was the first to call Gandhi by this title. 34 Anjaria quotes from the Shahid Amin’s contribution to the early work of the Subaltern Studies Group, “Gandhi as Mahatma:  Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–​2” in Subaltern Studies III, ed. Ranajit Guha (New Delhi:  Oxford University Press, 1984), 1–​55. 35 Nandana Dutta explores the contemporary possibilities of Nandy’s “critical traditionalism” through a reading of Levinas; both thinkers are mobilised as points of resistance against globalised idioms of war/​terror (Dutta, “The Face of the Other: Terror and the Return of Binarism”, Interventions 6(3) (2013): 431–​450). 36 Leading auteur of the Indian New Wave, Kumar Shahani, concludes his eloquent 1997 cinematic adaptation with a shot of Ela’s lifeless body, washed about in the shallows that run by the house in which she is assassinated. It is a profane image of the goddess-​icon in its return, as debris, following its ritual immersion at the conclusion of the ten-​day, year’s end prayers of the Durga puja. While in popular practice, the sculptural remains of the last year’s icon retain their sacred powers, and are typically enshrined, in makeshift fashion, within every-​day spaces of pedestrian movement and commerce, Shahani’s film concludes with the image of Ela’s unsanctified corpse. The Viswa Bharati University, founded by Tagore and the official archival repository of his works, filed a court injunction against the film, which was stayed from public screening at the time of its release. 37 “Bhumika”, meaning “prelude”, acquires sharply allegorical significance when read through the context of turn-​of-​the-​century Vedantist discourse, where it was revived from the Varaha Upanishads, as the name for spiritual progress toward self-​knowledge. The prelude was expurgated from the 1950 authorised English edition. 38 Bankimchandra’s Krishnacharirta (1886) is the prototype for twentieth-​century mobilisations of the Gita towards the legitimisation of insurgent violence. Tagore’s elder brother, Jyotirindranath Tagore, had translated Balgangadhar Tilak’s militant, turn-​of-​the-​century interpretation, Gita Rahasya, into Bangla; Tagore himself commented on the Gita in 1938, in his Hindu Scriptures. 39 For an anthropological approach to the idiom of sacrifice in Indian nationalism and the freedom struggle, see Das and Nandy, “Violence, Victimhood, and the Language of Silence” (177–​195). 40 I am indebted to Bhattacharjee’s fine insights on this proposition, in her Translator’s Note. 41 Partha Mitter, “The Indian Discourse of Primitivism”, in The Triumph of Modernism: Indian Artists and the Avant-​Garde 1922–​1947 (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 29–​103. 42 Lecia Rosenthal, “Between Humanism and Late Style”, in Edward Said:  A Legacy of Interpretation and Representation, eds. Adel Iskander and Hakem Rustom (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 462–​489. 43 See Daniel K.L. Chua, “The Promise of Nothing: The Dialectic of Freedom in Adorno’s Beethoven”, Beethoven Forum, 12(1) (Spring 2005): 13–​36.

2  Nation, transmodernity and the unimaginable community The place of failure in Mulk Raj Anand’s Across the Black Waters

“Marsels!” “We have reached Marsels!” “Hip Hip Hurrah!” … .Lalu got up from where he sat watching a game of cards, and went to see Marseilles. (Across the Black Waters 7)1 “Vivonleshindous! Vivelangleterre! Vivonlesallies…”, the cries throbbed dithyrambically. (ABW 14)

Mulk Raj Anand’s historical fiction of World War I, Across the Black Waters, begins by depicting a mutually resonant encounter between strangers. Arriving in Marseilles on 26 September 1914, the men of the 69th Rifles of the Indian Army celebrate their cheering hosts, as well as their own successful voyage over the kaala pani.2 Having crossed the Hindu taboo of the sea, their jubilation is inseparable from the relief of emerging intact on the other side of the world. Only briefly visualised at the start of the novel, the “black waters” is a cardinal point of the work, an orientation that is as much ontological and normative, as it is as geographical. Yet in the opening pages of the text, the oceanic metaphor for a delimited ethical world is recognisable, as such, only in its sudden redundancy –​the kaala pani is a horizon, after all, that has just been surpassed. In this striking depiction of historical transition, the passage above registers the entrance of a provincial and indeed “retarded” spatio-​temporal conception of the world into the synchronic structure of European modernity. As figures that have manifestly “survived” an epochal historical passage, the sepoys emerge into visibility as thoroughly contemporaneous with the defining historical event of Europe’s crisis, even as they are marked by the archaism of their appearance. In this, and in their vocalised triumph, the sepoys perform a complex line of connection that binds their historical visibility and “voice” to the structure of an isochronic modernity –​the very moment that they interrupt and internally separate.

78  Terminal beginnings Seen from the port, and from a shrinking distance, the turbaned troops of the 3rd Lahore Division of the Indian Army men appear, in turn, as a “cargo … stranger than any … carried before” to the shores of continental Europe (ABW 7). Miming the “dithyrambic” chants of welcome that greet the soldiers, the narrative itself affirms a mobile, trans-​cultural mode of friendship between strangers. Yet it is also is quick to establish the provisional nature of this scenario. Reversing the possibility and promise of physical mobility  –​staged reflexively within the text’s own linguistic migrations  –​ an omniscient narratorial voice intervenes:  “[M]‌ost of the sepoys did not know where the war was” (ABW 7). Such rhetorical contradiction is typical of Anand’s use of an interruptive and temporally distanced authorial voice  –​here, as in his preceding works, the celebrated Untouchable and Coolie –​putting in play the multiple ironies of its address. If the geo-​political coordinates of the crossing remain inconceivable to the largely illiterate Indian troops, the proportion and significance of their arrival on European shores is legible only from the perspective of a temporally remote reader. The ambiguous implications of this historic “arrival” cannot be separated from its announcement in a deliberately strained use of English. The passage exclaims its uses of the medium through naïve phonetic approximations, in the embarrassment of shouted mispronunciation, and in the startling jumps between words inscribed visibly onto the page (“Marsels”–​“Marseilles”). From the very outset, Across the Black Waters’ dominant narrative voice stages its own relationship to vernacular Indian languages, in emphatic if awkward registers of imitation and discrepancy.

“Marsels!” – The cosmopolitics of war “Marsels” in 1914, then, establishes a kind of primal scene for Anand’s ideological and formal attempts to envision a subaltern citizen-​subject, an agent would be at once subnational and worldly in his commitments. Drafted in Barcelona in 1936–​7 during Anand’s partisanal involvement in the Spanish Civil War, the narrative explores inter-​racial encounters between recruits drawn from the imperial periphery, while staging Europe’s unprecedented engagement with its racial Other on continental terrain. Anand’s active affiliation with the International Brigade in the mid/​late 1930s must be read together with the unique historical status of Across the Black Waters, which continues to represent a singular engagement with the Great War within Indian-​English writing, and a decisive grasp of the genre of realist historical fiction for the immediate pre-​Independent context. Given its manifest internationalist commitment and the remarkable ambition of its revisionist historical vision, it is significant that the work evokes the theatre of the Western Front less through its episodic descriptions of combat than through extended accounts of forced bodily proximity between the soldiers and their rural hosts, as focalised through the perspective of its youthful subaltern protagonist, Lalu.

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  79 Key incidents of the plot revolve around Lalu’s surprising discovery of correspondences between his own rural upbringing and his “French family”, who live on the provincial and geographical peripheries of their own nation:  “Not knowing that there was a rigid caste system between Sahibs and Sepoys … Mother Labusiere” always welcomes Lalu “to sit down at [her] table” (ABW 177). Set in the bivouacs around the Labusiere’s farm, this extended exploration of European hospitality occurs just after the soldier’s first experiences of trench warfare in the front lines of Ypres, and before their subsequent (calamitous) redeployment to Festubert.3 A place-​name that the recruits repeatedly mispronounce during the breaks between combat, “Festubert” appears in the text as an indigenised inscription, “Farishtabad” (ABW 206). Interpolated into this word is the Urdu stem, ris, the etymological basis of the Hindustani rishta or “relationship”. At its broadest, the word signifies the proper comportment towards things and places, and in most specific and common usage, the relationship of conjugality –​thereby also connoting the extended civilities that attend an expanded world of kinship. Reimagined from zones of contact that are literally marginal to the actual battlefield, “Europe” provides Anand with a provisional setting for exploring the limits and possibilities of a mode of inter-​continental solidarity that is at once enabled by the regime of colonial governmentality, even as the possibilities of such a “rishta” transgress the class-​and race-​based authority of colonialism. From the perspective of its ideological ambitions, Across the Black Waters allegorically assesses the historical force and fate of European humanism through a hypothesis regarding its exogamous historical force –​ universal “Man”, as an idea and in its historical origins, is located within the topos of European subjectivity, but such a Euro-​centred present is also captured in the throes of violent internal crisis. In a manner that would be emblematised by Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and the heraldic figure of the New Man, the novel’s exploration of a passing yet utterly formative inter-​racial encounter between various subaltern groups within the context of an exhausted European present looks ahead to the “peripheral” event of decolonisation in Asia and Africa. Whatever else might be signified by Europe, as an index of historical pre-​eminence as well as emancipatory possibility –​that is, as the master-​trope of modernity –​the novel suggests that “Europe” will find its appointed place and time elsewhere. On his return to England after serving with the Republicans in Spain, Anand would rewrite the novel over a six-​month period of uninterrupted work, completing it in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II. Framed through these shifting temporal and historical coordinates, the retrospective fiction of Across the Black Waters might be approached as a remarkable navigation of European culture in the last phase of imperialism, which anachronistically links the advent of fascism to the corrosive legacies of Empire. In its gesture towards temporal and geo-​political (dis)connection, the novel suggests that the co-​implication of centre and periphery remains

80  Terminal beginnings fatally invisible within the contemporary spaces of metropolitan Europe. In an essay from the same year that outlines the author’s role in the inception of the Marxist, anti-​colonial Indian Progressive Writers Association, Anand recalls his initial shock as a university student in London, when he witnessed the state-​directed violence of the General Strike of 1926. While assuming the persona of the new-​comer to the metropolis, Anand asserts an epistemological privilege through his positioning as a colonial subject at the heart of the imperial metropolis.4 Authoritarian policing in the colonies had already “perfected the method of the concentration camp, torture and bombing” –​ those exemplary demonstrations of a fully “developed” or instrumentalised rationality  –​introducing the colonial writer to “the ugly face of Fascism … earlier than the writers of the European country” (Anand, 17, emphasis mine).5 As a genealogy of the crisis of metropolitan European identity in the present, then, the narrative of Across the Black Waters syncopates the event of decolonisation into the force of its address, which comprises an oblique appeal to the advent of national sovereignty. In other words, it is the vitality of emancipatory nationalism and the project of the modernising nation  –​ yet to be –​which underwrites the novel’s exploration of critical idioms of subalternity and internationalism. In other words, Across the Black Waters situates this interrogation within the larger discourse of an inter-​ racial, extra-​European and anti-​imperial humanism precisely through its anticipation of a progressive, modernising nation-​state, which remains the necessary if oddly immaterial presupposition of the novel’s socialist cosmopolitanism. Timothy Brennan, in his seminal thesis “On the National Longing for Form”, has argued that the “nation” in the work of Third World fiction exceeds its specific, positivistic appearance in a given allegory or image.6 In these dimensions of its historical realisation, strands of such fiction in a given historical context might well be inseparable from their institutional relation to political nationalism. But the thrust of Brennan’s categorical nomination of “Third World” fiction goes to the constitutive force of its “longing” (Brennan, 56). In its proleptic reach, the nation is a cultural idiom that registers the politics and affects of “belonging”, “bordering” and “commitment” (47). In other words, the question of a “national fiction” is posed strongly, as a thesis on cultural form. No less than a “gestative political structure”, the anticipatory force of the idea of the nation lends integrity to an experience of the present, whose felt ineluctability or incompletion under conditions of continued colonisation or thwarted development is reimagined as the condition of possibility for any future collectivity. Over and above its function within political mobilisation, the novel as form delimits a cultural imaginary, effectively “creating a people” whose identity remains undetermined by extant political programmes (47, 50, emphasis in original). Anand’s speculative fiction of the Great War speaks to such a claim, even as it destabilises Brennan’s periodising assumption (which locates “Third World” fiction chronologically as a post-​war phenomenon). More pressingly,

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  81 Across the Black Water radicalises the register of futurity that resides within Brennan’s notion of “form”, heterogenising the very assumption of a unified national time that underpins Brennan’s survey.7 Reaching towards the imminent, or, in effect, inexistent event of decolonisation and Independence, the novel is striking, nonetheless, for the realism with which it insists upon the historical preconditions of its vision. And these, for Anand, reside in the vexed simultaneity of historical experience  –​whether explicitly staged in the European crisis of a “world”-​war, or obliquely imagined through the measure of national sovereignty, in what Benedict Anderson identifies in the now-​proverbial “empty homogenous time” of a national “meanwhile”. In the violent interdependencies of Empire, European nationalism and the emergence of insurgent anti-​colonialism, the work stages the integrative pull of modern time –​a regime whose interpellative force is interrogated as the condition of the work’s own formalisation.

Adorno, parataxis and failure: The question of subaltern speech By approaching Across the Black Waters through a focus on its unruly temporal and syntactical conjunctions, I hope to reclaim the work from a long-​standing consensus on the redundancy of Anand’s canonical “national-​realism”8. As a novel that insists upon the very simultaneity that it heterogenises, Across the Black Waters might be recast today as a thoroughly paratactical work. I use the term in the strong sense of Adorno’s extended treatment of “parataxis” in his essay on Hölderlin, which characterises the poet’s late uses of the lyric-​form through the contours of syntactical disjunctions ([harte Fügung] or literally, “hard” or “harsh jointure”). “Parataxis:  On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry” may be read together with Adorno’s brief commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, titled “On Epic Naivete”.9,10 In both commentaries, paratactical style is identified as a discursive modality in which the dominant (lyric or narrative) voice yokes its subject matter together through the use of arbitrary spatial, temporal and logical connections. As such, parataxis opposes the sequential, progressive “logic of tightly bounded periods, each moving rigorously on to the next [which] is characterised by precisely the compulsive and violent quality … [of] linguistic synthesis” (NL2 135). Bereft of proper grammatical conjunctions, the “badly” coordinated words and punctuation marks of paratactical style do not relay causal meaning as much as punctuate the distance between assertions and forced connections. In the intervals between sentences, parataxis also de-​temporalises the synthetic unity of conceptual reasoning. Words emerge as signs not in their syntactical coherence, but in their deferred effects –​in immaterial traces of the “violence” with which gapless expression as well as subjective meaning (constitutive of a presumptive interlocutor or “reader”) is accomplished within a synthetic present.11 While outlining this technique of “attacking … syntax syntactically” through the lyric-​form, Adorno places the narrative dimension of Hölderlin’s poetry under the sign of the “epic”. The gesture suggests

82  Terminal beginnings that through parataxis, the obsolete force of epic address re-​emerges into a fully rationalised present, to set askew the subordinating logic (and time) of propositional thought. In “On Epic Naivete”, Adorno explicitly returns the riven jointures of paratactical syntax –​considered in the essay on Hölderlin as a proto-​modernist formation  –​to its “naïve” historical origins, in the tradition and tonalities of Homeric orality. By aligning parataxis with the archaism of epic narration in this essay, Adorno dismantles developmentalist philosophies of language, which award chronological priority and the attendant privilege of authenticity, to the spoken voice. The putative immediacy or indigeneity of orality in valorisations of Homeric “simplicity” is associated by Adorno with current strains of “philosophical anthropology”, and, more generally, with a “restorationist ideology … of false concreteness”. To put this differently, Adorno’s analysis of parataxis opposes a “metaphysics of presence”, which would set the spoken word above a belated, or manifestly derivative written medium. For the “restorationist” consensus, writing attempts to substitute itself for the fundamental “loss of [unmediated] experience” (“On Epic Naivete”, NL1 26). But parataxis –​at least for Adorno’s Homer –​is already an inscriptive technique. In its insistence on materialities that cannot be domesticated into the grammar of the vast, narrated “now” of the Homeric present, parataxis chisels out the minutiae of lived experience and constellates these into non-​purposive narrative units –​thereby enacting a “kind of remembrance for what cannot really be remembered any more” (NL1 26, emphasis mine). A brief companion piece to Dialectic of Enlightenment, the commentary on Homer reprises Adorno’s seminal thesis according to which the epic form dramatises the origins of the reasoning subject in the struggle between ratio and the invariant forces of myth. As a historical modality, epic rehearses this primal conflict between “freedom” and “nature”, or the capacity for heroic individuation versus the anonymising power of myth, not through opposition and confrontation; but through pre-​modern, even magical modalities of accommodation and mimesis. If “myth” occurs everywhere in Adorno’s corpus as the mark of “unarticulated sameness”, epic narration attempts ritualistically to approximate the a-​temporality of this originary, unchanging world –​sonorising the “endlessly renewed beating” of mythic patterns within its own diction, the epic acknowledges the forces of myth in the hope of containing their annhilatory indifference to life (“On Epic Naivete”, NL1 26). The naivete of epic diction  –​the power of its Urdummheit or primal “stupidity” –​resides here, in a voice that holds blindly to material particularities that have already, manifestly, been dissolved into the discursive order of separation, exchange and commensuration. “The narrator’s stupidity and blindness –​it is no accident that tradition has it that Homer was blind –​expresses the impossibility and hopelessness of this enterprise” (NL1 27). Epic narration stages a conflict between reason and its mythic prehistory that has not yet been superseded by the triumph of the former; yet the ultimate outcome is already visible in the contours of a narrative

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  83 that advances through neutral “reportage” and the imperative of progressive development (NL1 26). Displaying all the hallmarks of modern realism, epic form brushes against its substantive content, running at a tangent, as it were, to the narration of a world of singular value and unmediated experience. For this reason, Adorno reads the epic as a proto-​bourgeois formation; but also, at the same time, as an internally differentiated temporal category: “A critique of bourgeois reason dwells within epic naivete. It holds fast to an experience that is destroyed by bourgeois reason that ostensibly grounds it” (26). As an “impossible…enterprise”, epic “yearning” materialises a horizonless world-​ historical reality that that can no longer be thought as a bounded ethical totality, any more than extensive “economic basis of the crises and social presuppositions of…the late capitalist era” (26). [W]‌ hat occurs once and only once is not merely a defiant residue opposing the encompassing universality of thought; it is also thought’s innermost yearning, the logical form of something real that would no longer be enclosed by social domination and the classificatory thought modeled upon it: the concept reconciled with the object. (Adorno, “On Epic Naivete”, NL1 26) For a moment in which the material world is fully appropriated to the exploitative taxonomies of a hierarchical order of knowledge, any determinative image of “reconciliation” appears premature. In its fidelity to “concreteness”, immediacy and authenticity –​in the “blind … yearning” for an embodied figure that lives “once and only once” –​voiced naivete enacts its failure to find organic expression within the medium of narration. In short, the Homeric “now” is a demonstration of formal “impossibility” –​a stylised rehearsal of the obviation of its own claims within the textual present. For this reason, the syntax of epic naivete is inseparable, for Adorno, from the ventriloquisation of intractable “stupidity”  –​the “backward” inability to cognise, and so successfully assimilate to the regime of a rationalised, increasingly synchronic present. Formally accomplished through parataxis, the quality of belatedness that characterises epic naïveté may not be reduced to a “residual” empiricism, or the stigma of a putatively undeveloped literature (NL1 26). In failing to coordinate narrative form with expressive content, the impoverished “speaking” of paratactical narration emancipates form from the “false concreteness” of historical intention and a presumptive subjective presence –​those indices of a singular, incommensurate “self” that, for Adorno, has already been assigned to the order of interchangeability and exchange in a colonising present; and, indeed, to the broken world of the contemporary novel. The gaping jointures and the staggered movement of parataxis theatricalise  –​in the blank spaces between images and words  –​ the immanent disappearance of an empirical speaking subject. Put differently, paratactical narration evacuates the premise of a subject that might

84  Terminal beginnings be present to itself in the course of narrating its historical “birth”. As such, parataxis emerges as a fundamental aberration within the temporal integrity of the present. Adorno’s analysis of epic narration entwines an analysis of time and voice with a thesis on self-​representation for which the “subject”, as an agency of expression, may be approached only through the trajectories of its failure to speak on time. If, on this ambiguous analysis, the epic emerges as the proper antecedent of the realist novel, the thesis on failure might be revisited speculatively, from perspective of Homi Bhabha’s now-​established identification of the “postcolonial” narration of time. In Bhabha’s analysis, postcolonial time appears, tout court, as such a “polarized historicist sensibility of the archaic and the modern” (Bhabha, “DissemiNation” 94). Drawing on the work of Anthony Appiah, Bhabha has gone on to implicate this notion of non-​simultaneous modernities within his more recent conjectures on “vernacular cosmopolitanism”  –​a “cosmopolitan community envisaged in marginality” or, in the border zones of space and time, especially within the context of transnational travel and migration.12 In this regard, Dirk Wiemann’s recent study of the Indo-​English novel as a foundational “genre” of a shared, trans-​local modernity appears as an impressive reprisal of the proposition regarding the proleptic “yearning” of the nation-​form within current debates on cosmopolitanism and trans-​ nationalism (Wiemann, Genres of Modernity 77).13 Celebrated as the arrival of a homogenously imagined communal present, the postcolonial nation is, for Wiemann, presupposed and “interrogated” by the Indian novel precisely on the ground that “national-​time is heterogeneous” –​thereby staging its claim to transnational contemporaneity (Wiemann, 77).14 In large part, my thesis speaks from such a literary history of the genre of the Indian novel in English: my prefatory reading of the novel has suggested that Anand’s paratactical account of the subaltern’s arrival upon the stage of history interrupts the Eurocentric “grammar” of a subordinating/​coordinating modernity. So, the first few lines of the novel established a semantic and syntactical gap in the discrepancy between the words “Marsels” and “Marseilles”. The protagonist is introduced into such discrepancy as a figure that literally connects the two inscriptions by crossing (and remarking) the distance between. But such point of coordination is established precisely in order to undercut expectations of a unified ideological subject already set up by the syntactical pattern and “rhythms” of the text. To recall the passage that frames the reading of the novel within this chapter:  a temporally distanced narrative voice reverses the rhetorical register of the novel’s celebratory beginning, retrospectively reminding the reader of the staggering scale of recruitment and mobilisation that underpins the scene of the sepoys’ successful oceanic “crossing”. The Longman Companion to the First World War estimates that 1,500,000 men were recruited from the subcontinent, who served in every major theatre of the War (Nicholson, 248).15 Sent immediately to the Western Front upon the declaration of war,

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  85 the Indian Army was redeployed after the first year of the War because of an exceedingly heavy number of casualties. Altogether, over a 100,000 are estimated to have been wounded or killed in action  –​and Anand, from his position on the verge of a second War, testifies to the historiographical invisibility of these numbers within the present. In an emblematic use of rhetorical reversal, the passage de-​temporalises expectations about narrative action and development: For all its apparent clumsiness, Anand’s authorial intervention into the emergent “voice” of a subaltern consciousness comprises, in effect, a proleptic form of address.16 It hails a speculative reader, who might, in her turn and from the perspective of a future time, re-​ read the meaning and scale of such calamitous loss; who might also, thereby, return the ineluctability of statistics and the immense historical eventuality of the War to its present significance for a relationally produced modernity. In other words, the politics of the sudden, laconic use of “proper” English –​ “most of the soldiers did not know where the War was” –​resides in a rhetorical interruption of humanist expressions of emancipation and equality. It alerts the reader to the chrono/​logical difference between the promissory experience of physical mobility and inter-​racial equality (as enacted in the narrative present); and the unthinkable precondition of such promise, the inhuman “totality” of colonialism’s hierarchical distribution of race, space and time.17 In the context of the novel’s lack of resolution –​and not despite it –​the opening scene of the work is remarkable for its deliberate ambition, serving to undercut the developmentalist flow of proper chrono/​logical transitions that comprise a modular, Euro-​centred modernity. In the sections that follow, this thesis will be explored through specific references to stylistic reversals in Anand’s text, which fracture the overarching third-​person perspective of the narrative voice by interpellating fragments of epic narrative and paratactical syntax into the action and diction of the work. It is my central contention, however, that these moments do not survive Anand’s (con)temporising gesture. The “heterogenising” devices of epic narration, including the syntax of vernacular orality and the archaism of myth (as mobilised immanently within the thought-​world of the protagonist), do not only interrupt the flow of a homogenous (trans)national “now”. (This is Wiemann’s thesis, more broadly, on the self-​aware “genre” of the contemporary Indian novel in English, which is located in the late twentieth century to the turn of the millennium.) Bereft of synthetic meaning, these devices appear as “monumental” forms that have been stripped of substance and context  –​or are themselves “archaic[ised]” –​as they unfold within the literary and linguistic registers of the novel (Adorno, “Beethoven:  Alienated Masterpiece” 575, 576). Seen through the optic of late style, Anand’s “pioneering” attempt to naturalise the marks and sounds of vernacular speech within an English medium is marked by obsolescence from the very moment of its expression. After all, and despite Anand’s own self-​mythologisation as foundational figure within the canon of Indian-​English writing, his vanguard use

86  Terminal beginnings of the English medium exemplifies, for the literary critic today, yet another form of naïve epistemology. The inventory of “realist” techniques that comprise the figure and syntax of subaltern consciousness are assembled, in their embarrassing datedness, through the retrograde modalities of mimeticism and totemistic correspondence. In other words, the novel’s uses of epic narrative, syntactical naivete and, more generally, its strategic “historicist” juxtaposition of archaism and modernity fail –​thereby exceeding Anand’s writerly intent to render subaltern experience “concretely” within the prose and medium of the work. I subscribe to this critical consensus on the Anand’s outmodedness if only to argue in the sections that follow that the text’s failure, and in its iterated generation of failure, is productive of new possibilities. The discussion will align Anand’s literary construction of an “epic international[ism]” with deliberately staged moments of subaltern mimicry within the text. Typically, these scenes display the sepoys’ naïve humour, but in their overly self-​conscious “set up” by the text, they also exceed their function of characterising qualities that might be construed as innate to subaltern identity. The ethnographic registers of a putatively “real” sense of vernacular humour work against the expressivist intention undergirding Anand’s work of “translation” –​becoming, effectively, a parody of the very medium of its representation. Subaltern mimicry is performed through the onomatopoeic non-​sense of “git-​mit git-​mit”  –​a phonetic approximation of English whose heard opacity, for the sepoys, is equal to the “phon phon something something” of French, or the assembled “tish-​mish” of an unlearned a foreign language (ABW 11, 113, 152, 167). Indeed, Lalu and his fellow mimic-​men might be construed as “stupid” –​in Adorno’s sense –​for insisting on the materiality of language at the expense of its instructive, referential content. As comic performers, the sepoys imitate words and tonalities in order to deracinate these of their lexical and historical coordinates. The reversibility of such “clown[ing]” is further demonstrated by the endearing character of Andre, a young French boy, who, in full ignorance of the significance the “long sacred hair” of the sepoys, dresses his head (ironically) with a “bandage”; through childish pleasures of imitation and dance, he plays at being a sepoy and becomes a “favorite of the soldiers” (ABW 177, 178). In an obvious if unintentional analogy to such mimicry, Anand’s style, too, emerges through the “peculiar character of quotation”, and the idiom of playing with foreign words (Adorno, “Beethoven:  Alienated Masterpiece” 575, 576). In other words, in the relationship between subaltern patterns of speech and the novel’s acute reflections on its own medium –​that is, in the manifest and reversible imitability of one in the other –​the work’s claim to historical veracity and ethnographic representativeness is continually destabilised. Despite the open-​ended direction of these imitations, the stigma of “bad” writing continues to attach to Anand’s oeuvre, and it derives precisely from the stilted force these “vernacularised” dimensions of Anand’s style and diction. These “remaindered” formal elements might be revisited again, in

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  87 their very redundancy, through the novel’s motivic concern with “ghosts” and “spirits” (ABW 123, 129, 130, 133,148). The narrative action of Across the Black Waters frequently dilates around figures of spectral possession, even as their apparitional “crying” within the thought-​world of the protagonist is never psychologised, or properly positioned by the dominant narrative voice (ABW 125, 142, 264).18 The aspects of Across the Black Waters sketched above may be conjoined metonymically to the novel’s dominant trope of a haunting. In a stunning subversion of conventional notions of the spectre as a figure of disembodiment, the narrative observes –​ through the protagonist’s interior perspective  –​that “there was still some pain to be extracted from the bodies of the dead”; in a protracted claim upon narrative progression, “pain”, as a register of extra-​discursive or sentient historical knowledge, survives the immediate narration of events “until the next dawn” (149). Placing the logic of plot development under the spell of such temporal invariance, an episodic narrative fixes, in such moments, upon registers of mortal shock or suffering. It thereby establishes a peculiar modality of expression and, perhaps, historical self-​awareness, which is articulated through “moans”, “sobs”, “cr[ies]”, “whimpers”, “moan-​ like sobs” and “half-​moans and half-​sobs” from within the protagonist’s thought-​world (ABW 125, 119, 264). These are sound images; indices, within the textual present, of a world that has lived past its material degradation. In the oxymoronic logic of a pain that survives the body, the novel traces the aberrant persistence of a world of “concreteness” within the text –​ a floating, de-​substantiated, and fully redundant world, already lost to the violent inception of a sovereign nation in the bureaucratised separations and transportation of populations initiated by the Great War. And here, I note that the de-​subjectified yet ethnically taxonimised “cargo” of sepoys that make landfall in Europe is incisively construed by Anand, a decade before Independence, as initiating the final, decisive phase of de-​colonisation on the subcontinent. As a figure of forced mobility, Anand’s migratory “subaltern” figure is also disturbingly allusive of the catastrophic mobilisation of peoples across borders through the imperatives of sovereign identification, connection and exception that marked the event of national Independence/​ Partition.

Speaking across: Scenes from Across the Black Waters Dedication Dedicated to the author’s father, “Late Subedar [petty officer] Lal Chand Anand” who served in the Great War, Across the Black Waters is a manifest attempt to reconcile the historical present, which resides on the brink of World War II, with a suppressed subaltern experience still within the reach of living memory. Preceding the dedication is a brief author’s note that records the drafting of the novel in Barcelona between January and

88  Terminal beginnings April 1937, when Anand fought in the Spanish civil war. In fact, the novel was completed when the start of World War II was underway –​albeit in the rarefied peace of the university and its environs –​in the town of Chinnor in Oxon, where Anand resided happily in the first year of his marriage while being affiliated with Oxford University. Anand’s dedicatory gesture arches over the interruption of distances, plotted by the different spaces of Barcelona and Oxfordshire in the historical present  –​and here, a reference to “Bloomsbury” as the centre of metropolitan modernism must also be noted, insofar as Anand conceived of his first work, the celebrated Untouchable (1935) within these mobile geographical coordinates. If the opening paraph obliquely references Anand’s compressed itinerary through continental Europe and Britain from the mid-​ 1920s to the late 1930s, the novel might be approached in the first place as a materialisation of such physical and intellectual mobility; at the same time, the nomination “Subedar Lal Chand” inscribes a subaltern identity into that process of literary migration, reinvention and domestication. Remarking the specificity of another, inassimilable experience of Europe, the dedication to a dead father introduces the “subaltern”, the historically obscure “Subedar”, as a figure of displacement into the work. The apparitional world of the colony  –​the provincial world of Anand’s own childhood and youth in Peshawar and Amritsar –​is interpellated into the novel’s various metropolitan destinations, in the present, as recorded by the prefatory note. The opening reference to the author’s commitment to the Spanish Republican cause and his larger, ideological resistance to authoritarianism in Europe is mirrored in the fiction’s youthful protagonist, who must embark on a process of moral and political self-​education through the course of his deployment from the North West Frontier Provinces to the Western Front in Europe. By making oblique reference to the biographical coordinates of the work’s inception and situating these within the drama of the protagonist’s Bildung, the narrative also stages a critical inversion of the European context and setting of the novel –​in the first place, Lalu’s arrival in “Marsels” is cast as a refusal of the self-​reinforcing logic of obedience in the colonies. If elements of a personal history link Anand to his fictional creation, they also suggest a peculiar kind of simultaneity between the events of the World Wars I and II. The untimely appearance of a belated or unfinished past as a register of historicity cuts through the dedicatory inscription, which returns the memory of an autocratic father to the displaced son.19 In other words, the reference to “Subedar Lal Chand” might be read according to Anand’s own “legend[ary]” accounts of his artistic self-​creation, which repeatedly emphasise his youthful decision to leave the subcontinent in order to study in London because of an increasingly intolerable relationship to his father (ABW 169). This well-​rehearsed chapter of Anand’s biography is discussed in the personal narrative of Apology for Heroism, in which Anand describes how he was severely beaten by his father in 1924 (not for the first time) after

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  89 being arrested in Lahore in an anti-​colonial demonstration.20 Illustrative of the historical dialectic between political discipline, corporal punishment and the experience of youthful disempowerment in both public and private spaces of “home”, the episode exceeds the immediate terms of Anand’s personal “confession”; it becomes exemplary (on Anand’s account) of the formation of provincial masculinity in the disciplinary spaces of the colony. Such an insight also serves to establish the scene of Anand’s peripatetic intellectual and personal life and his subsequent reinvention as a writer of commitment within the heart of the imperial metropolis; and beyond, in the prevailing, trans-​Atlantic model of heroic masculinity for which the anti-​ fascist Partisan was exemplary.21 The opening frame of the work, then, might be construed through the dedication’s register of a difficult love  –​of a personal knowledge of that corrosive historical movement in which the paternal enforcers of sexual, cultural and political authoritarianism are also its historical victims. When read alongside the dates that frame the novel –​which place the novel’s historical concerns in a proximity with political authoritarianism in the present –​the dedication takes on a strikingly ambiguous significance. It suggests that the stigma of provincialism –​whether European or otherwise –​resides in the willed obedience to unjust rule. Such insight is conjoined with Anand’s self-​ conscious “apology” for the model of the Romantic artist-​ hero, as rehabilitated through a notion of engaged cultural practice. It propels the novel’s (quasi-​biographical) moment of departure, as well as its vigorous adherence to the generic conventions of the postcolonial Bildungsroman in which the labour of expressive self-​individuation, or “subjectivity”, is plotted allegorically onto the collective historical “longing” for national form. Bildung I have suggested, thus far, that the national “longing for form” acquires an additional torsion through its interpellation into Across the Black Water’s imagined community of subaltern trans-​ nationalism; this proposition may be further elaborated through an examination of the novel’s place and function within the so-​called Village Trilogy of which it is a part. Published in 1939 three years after its initial drafting in Spain, Across the Black Waters is the second of a series that narrates the life of Lai Singh, whose story unfolds programmatically as stages in a political awakening. In the first work, The Village (1930), the adolescent Lalu flees the disastrous consequences of an illicit romance with his landlord’s daughter. The plot revolves around the systematic humiliation of the young protagonist at the hands of the village head, his father and elder brother; while his family faces collective punishment for Lalu’s indiscretion, they are themselves the immediate agents of the boy’s brutalisation, excoriating him relentlessly for his repeated transgressions (symbolic or otherwise) of rural Sikh mores. The Village casts feudal authority at the conjunction of sexual discipline, bodily

90  Terminal beginnings prohibition and political despotism; the paternal policing of “tradition” ensures that its enforcers are entirely constituted through such a totalised disciplinary regime. Through the strictures of propriety  –​or through the interpellative call to know one’s place within an established feudal/​colonial hierarchy –​Lalu’s intimate oppressors are also, always, the collective target of such systematic exploitation. As he comes to realise the intimate origins of such violence, Lalu runs off to join the Indian Army –​where he discovers how the authoritarian organisation of Sikh village life is reproduced at an institutional and geographical distance, in the repressiveness of his immediate superiors, in the lower ranks of native officers. Here, traditional and colonial hierarchies reinforce each other; much of Across the Black Waters turns on a subplot involving sexual rivalries generated by the mutual attraction between Lalu and Marie, the French farmer’s daughter. The plot exploits the situation towards a didactic demonstration of how petty officers have internalised the racialised hierarchies of colonial authority. Indeed, the claustrophobic milieu of everyday life in the camp is established as much through the ominous proximity of the trenches as through the relations between these minor characters, who reproduce their servility to a punitive, if distant, colonial authority by visiting acts of official cruelty upon their subordinates. If the course of Lalu’s political self-​education  –​and the development of his emergent “voice” –​depends on his ability to identify the multifaceted origins of oppression in his own situation, his capacity for self-​interrogation is developed genetically between the worldly concerns of the novels themselves. In other words, Lalu’s existential development acquires its especially “epic” or world-​historical significance by unfolding across the novels’ respectively feudal/​subnational and diasporic/​ transnational horizons. The narrative force of both works emerge from points at which episodes of disempowerment cut across the representation of a youthful, masculine agent in order to stage his struggle for self-​ possession. But the movement between them suggests that the narrative of transition itself is fundamental to the constitution of Lai Singh’s heroic subjectivity –​as it is to the promissory “journey” of cultural and societal modernisation undertaken by the decolonised nation-​state. As such, these works may be situated formally within the tradition of the twentieth-​century Bildungsroman, which reproduces its classical precedents even as it transforms these by exposing how the most pressing convention of the genre –​development –​is an effect of imperial teleologies of civilisational advancement/​decline, historical progress/​devolution. Gregory Castle has demonstrated in a wide-​ranging account of the history of the genre, that the formal transition between the Bildungsroman’s classical and nineteenth-​ century instantiations accompanied a wider, general trend towards the institutionalisation of regimes of socialisation within state-​ sponsored educational systems.22 From Max Weber’s account of rationalisation to Adorno and Horkheimer’s polemic against

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  91 the self-​cancelling “individual” of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, across to Foucault’s identification of sexual and corporal discipline/​punishment in the late nineteenth century as an integral element of a contemporary “episteme”, theorists gesture to an historical moment in which the “bourgeois” subject of liberal society was both presumed and advanced as absolute, insofar as it had become a commodity or, otherwise, an “effect” of the very system that produced it. Despite the divergence between the philosophical and ideological range of these positions, a periodising consensus emerges about (Western) modernity: by the early decades of the twentieth century, it becomes evident that as a viable subject, the citizen-​self of liberal societies had to play an active part in the institutionalisation of its own formation. As Castle stresses, this situation is not in itself an illustration of the tautological or self-​cancelling claim to “autonomy”  –​that prerogative of self-​reflexivity, agency or efficient self-​management –​that lent the classical eighteenth-​century notion of an enlightened subject its cultural authority and unique distinction within the intellectual history of Europe. For by transforming modes of production into the theatre of self-​reproduction, this subject affirms an innate capacity for directed change; in other words, in its demonstrable capacity for self-​cultivation, the educable subject signals the telos of an advancing, self-​regulating society. Castle links the genre, in effect, to the logic of capital in advanced industrial societies, which “must of necessity replicate its managers, technicians, educators and cultural authorities”, who are in turn, incorporated into the self-​furthering institutions of the state and the economy (Castle, 160). Conversely, I suggest, the periodic or even accelerated crises in this system may not be approached in merely economic or political terms. Insofar as they are constitutive of further, historical possibilities, the idea of systemic “crisis” takes on an idiomatic, or cultural force –​as, arguably, it does today. The occasion of crisis serves as a reflexive demonstration of the internal resources of a self-​regulating and advancing society.23 Approached as a cultural form that is intrinsic to processes of cultural and societal rationalisation  –​that is, to modernisation in the context of underdevelopment –​ the Bildungsroman’s uses for a subject poised between imperial and colonial economies become particularly interesting. At once centred and minoritised, Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) or, more obliquely, Virginia Woolf, in The Voyage Out (1915) present paradigmatic instances of a critique of colonial Bildung; undertaken from the margins of imperial privilege from the assimilated perspective of the Anglo-​ Irish bourgeois or the upper-​/​middle-​class English lady, respectively. James Joyce, of course, writes The Portrait of the Artist (1916) from the lowest strata of the imperial hierarchy, that is, from the perspective of a colonised subject in a metrocolonial situation; the parallels to Anand’s (self)positioning as a displaced colonial would be an emphatically stated in the latter’s own “portrait” as an artist (above):24 By staying close to the uses of the genre in its nineteenth-​century conventions, the (post)colonial Bildungsroman suggests,

92  Terminal beginnings precisely that prevailing regimes of socialisation are no longer capable of or, indeed, invested in supporting the classical freedoms of self-​cultivation.25 Along with Castle, Joshua Esty has repositioned the genre against a traditional consensus that sees Bildung as the idiom of either social integration; or, in an opposite but mutually reinforcing thesis, of a transgressive individuality that sets its face against the absorptive force of society; for Esty, the (post)colonial Bildungsroman might be characterised formally by its “dilated” and inverted uses of canonical, developmental time.26 The implication has powerful resonance for the specifically postcolonial use of the form. My reading of Across the Black Waters suggests that by staying within the conventions of an established genre, Anand’s (repeated) subscription to the colonial Bildungsroman might be seen to deform its structuring temporal and linguistic parameters –​and with it, the idea of an epochal transition into contemporaneity –​to the point of exhaustion. Placing Esty’s strong claim regarding the anti-​ teleological direction of the form within the context of late colonial writing, I  propose that the Bildungsroman in this context is less a subversion of literary form (and the expectations that derive from it) than a materialisation of the perception and experience of uneven development through writerly conventions that are, themselves, in crisis. In her powerful comparative analysis of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist and Coolie,27 Jessica Berman has argued for the place of colonial inter-​textualities in reconfiguring the question of literary “influence” in such a way that the category of “modernism” (and the genre of the Bildungsroman in particular) might re-​emerge as mobile practices that “highlight the multidirectional flow of global literature and culture, where streams of discourse move not just from metropolis to colony or even back from colony to metropolis, but as in (the instance of Anand/​Joyce) from colony to metropolis to another colony and back again” (Berman, 466). In other words, the genre’s very development demonstrates the jagged lines of connection, discontinuity and reversibility that conjoin the metropolis with margins that are both internal to and remote from the spatial and discursive “centre” of literary activity. Revisiting the presumption of an “accomplished” subjectivity that underlies classical antecedents of the genre, the question of an incomplete or aborted Bildung suggests that models of socio-​economic development that govern the prosperity of the imperial nation are, in their provincial or interstitial metrocolonial reception, exactly those that terminally disable the colony. Berman’s comparative cultural analysis of the Bildungsroman may be further de-​ territorialised to bear on the question of “national-​ realism” and its putative claim to a representative popular subject. In the case of both Ireland and the subcontinent, vast sections of the colonial population were systematically excluded from those aspects or spaces of the colony that were developed. Following theorists of (post)colonial “elitism” and cultural “hegemony” Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee respectively, on the subcontinent, these marginalised life-​worlds within the colony were also,

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  93 at the same time, “passively” integrated into the decolonising nation’s nomination, organisation and mobilisation of a modernising “people”. Castle notes how in the early decades of the twentieth century, Ireland exemplified unreformable social problems found in developed sectors of the West (such as indigence, unsanitary and inadequate housing, or lack of formal employment opportunities within urban, industrialising areas), whether in the context of Europe or within the colony itself. Anand’s early novels Untouchable, Coolie and Across the Black Waters –​all of which subscribe acutely to the form of the Bildungsroman –​might be read within the comparative scope of this thesis. All three works suggest that the visible and intractable contradiction of the archaic within the trajectory of development was dramatically instantiated, at a greater distance, in the chronological and material oddities of the colonial cities of the subcontinent.28 In his psychological allegory of colonialism, The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) Albert Memmi addresses the crisis in the capacity for self-​ development directly to the asymmetries in cultural and economic development between imperial and colonial locations. Arguing that colonial subjectivity arises from the fissures of symbolic discrepancy and material inequality, Memmi imagines the “birth” of such a modern identity in terms of an “internal catastrophe” (CC 99). Memmi chooses to present his exploration of a form of arrested development, unique to the colonial situation, through the prism of adolescent experience:  “the revolt of the adolescent colonized, far from resolving into mobility and social progress, can only sink into the morass of colonized society –​unless there is a total revolution … the potential rebel falls back on traditional values” (CC 99). In the failure to effectively resist imposed modes of socialisation, the adolescent is led back(wards), as it were, to replicate the structure of colonised identity within the intimate spheres of home and family: “Revolt and conflicts end in a victory for parents and tradition. But it is a pyrrhic victory. Colonized society has not taken even half a step forward; for the young man, it is an internal catastrophe” (Memmi, CC 99). In other words, the anti-​colonial ideology of “revolt” collapses into the nativism associated with a resurgent affirmation of identity through lineage and kinship ties; a symptom of failed development, the regime of “tradition” as it remerges in (masculinist) discourses of indigeneity is interesting to Memmi not so much for its ostensible recidivism or “backwardness”. Rather, the renewed authority of tradition signals an aberration within the very chronology of advancement and regression that determines conceptions of modern time in both metropolitan and colonial contexts. Captured in a posture of catastrophic immobility, the adolescent/​ colonised is seen, by Memmi, to suffer the protracted isolation of subjectivity, for he is not only severed in fact from external, socially viable means of attaining “legitimate” (bourgeois) self-​hood within the internal hierarchies and unevenly developed spaces of the post-​colony; he replicates within himself, a brutalising and effectively uninterrupted “hiescence”, or an explosive splitting away of subjectivity from its own, proper ends (Castle, 161).

94  Terminal beginnings Indeed, the articulation of an historically suspended, ideologically fraught and chronically transitional existence might be seen to characterise the form for disparate colonial writers that are the contemporaries or immediate precedents of Anand, including Rudyard Kipling (whose Kim finds a peculiar, inverted symmetry in Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora), Jean Rhys (in hallucinatory evocations of racial and cultural dislocation, dramatised through the feminine trauma of sexual inexperience), and, as Esty has shown, the “women’s fictions” of the Anglo-​Irish, Elizabeth Bowen. Following Berman, to situate Across the Black Waters in this colonial-​ comparative  –​and broadened modernist  –​framework is to rethink the relationship of modernism and colonialism as co-​implicated discourses. It is also to suggest the deterritorialising force of the works in question themselves, which, in the register of Adornian lateness, exceed historicist accounts of the work that secure its possible meanings to biography and historical intention (themselves construed as linear chronologies of “contemporaneity”/​ ”obsolescence”, normative progressivism/​aberrational recidivism). I approach the story of Lalu’s Bildung (sketched above) through the revisionist frame of an expanded and diasporic modernist context –​if his journey is the metaphoric itinerary of an emergent, subaltern cosmopolitanism, it concludes on a peculiarly irresolute note in Across the Black Waters. Through intermittent yet extended uses of internal perspective, the concluding pages of the narrative provide an incoherent account of the youth’s disappearance from the battlefield –​Lalu becomes virtually indistinguishable from spiralling figures of spectrality (“the God of Death [and his] hosts … ghosts, bhuts, djinns, howbattes, and hobgoblins”), losing both his footing and his voice amidst “gale upon gale of sound” (ABW 260, 263). Even as Lalu confirms “he was not dead” –​and not much more –​as he falls forward into the enemy’s trench, the question of what exactly happens in this novel of discovery remains unresolved. Through this emphasis, I propose that Across the Black Waters be approached formally, in terms of a redoubled narrative displacement of violence. In the first instance, violence is (brutally) privatised in obscurely sexualised, non-​denotative uses meaning that are put into Lalu’s mouth. Grief, fear and “abject[ed” sexual desire become the registers of violence on the battlefield. Such violence and its afterlife is explicitly dramatised in the unwitnessed death of the aged, unreformable Brahmin Dhanoo whose atavistic figure literally “haunts” Lalu’s perspective on events through the novel; and in Dhayan Singh’s death, Lalu’s closest comrade-​in-​arms and protector, who goes missing in action towards the end of the novel. A feature of Adorno’s treatment of the “hard joinings” of parataxis is an attendant “slackening” or softening force of certain remaindered coordinates. These sometimes emerge as sound-​markers of a speaking voice that lyrically abdicates its “grip” on plot and synthesis, to the movement of language itself (“On Epic Naivete”, NL1 29). In the blank space of intention –​that is, in the non-​signifying flight of a surplus word, or in the

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  95 “immers[ive]” opacity of a distanced, foreign tongue  –​Adorno identifies the erotic force of language. “But it is not real things and sound that is evoked … in this hopeless fiction … of the immediacy of the soul” (NL1 51, 52). In its “residual absurdity”, the lexically deracinated word or a medium bereft of its normalising expressions, sets free the other-​directed movement of language –​thereby renouncing the wilful grasp of subjectivity that seeks a decisive identification with its object in the present. Elliptically touched by sound-​words that estrange its expressive force from domesticated images of identity, the medium is momentarily freed from discursive logics of individuation and objectification. But such an emancipatory flight towards sound, or the image of sound, is inseparable from notions of expressive abdication; and the lived “humiliation” of a failed relationship to the other in the present: “Only [when] freed from the humiliation of isolation in the particular” does the “chimerical yearning of … language … become an expression of the subject’s insatiable longing, which find[s]‌[real] relief only in the other” (Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society”, NL1 53).29 Moments of such “residual” lyricism in Across the Black Waters are striking precisely for their infrequency:  in an affecting instance of such a softening use syntax, the narrative touches upon the image of Lalu “[r]‌eclining back to a moment of abandon” in the cramped and incomplete privacy of his quarters. The episode can only be construed, in its obliquity and in the tact of its distanced narrative voice, as a scene of sexual self-​gratification. If Lalu has learnt to “crush the luxury of desire according to the unknown will of the Sarkar”, he reclaims “in the [very] muteness of obedience”, the “forfeit[ed] dignity and pride of manhood” –​he “yields to the suggestion of an instinct which was the revenge of his body upon sadness –​a strange, purblind tenderness for Marie” (ABW 195). It is the image of “muteness” –​the visceral register of “obedience”, “sadness” or “tenderness”–​that stretches the narrative toward the anonymous “will of the Sarkar” and returns it to the “abject” presence of Lalu’s desiring body. Jessica Berman has argued for Anand’s uses of sound as a marker of the travelling “uncontrollability” of language in its diasporic effect (Berman, 466). In Across the Black Waters especially, these are also affective registers of missed experience, and, as such, are the coordinates of a non-​synchronic experience of time. In the sonorisation of Lalu’s unrepresented(able) experiences, the images of a haunting or “forefeit[ed]” desire serve to conflate the event of battle-​field violence with scenes of dispossession that have occurred, as it were, before –​in the circumstances that surround Lalu’s decision to leave his village and come to Europe as a sepoy of the “Sarkar”. If, in the second and determinative instance of violence, Lalu’s disappearance/​ capture/​survival occurs in events that are pushed forcefully off-​stage, the overarching movement of the novel produces a sustained effect of “plot syncopation and distension” –​what Esty identifies as a characteristic feature of the anti-​developmental and decidedly modernist Bildungs-plot. Despite sudden escalations of action in sporadic engagements on the Front, Lalu’s

96  Terminal beginnings story is related through movements and rhetorical devices that slow the pace of narrative time, effectively “loosening the fabric of the narrative” (Adorno, “On Epic Naivete”, NL1 26). Anand’s style, then, emerges in iterations of delay, coalescing in passages marked by the syntax of epic conjunctions, anacoluthic reversals, proliferating anti-​climaxes; and in observations that loop into the text in close “realist” psychological characterisation, and out again, through the elliptical, estranging force of prosopoeic address (these will be taken up closely in the following sections). Resuming the larger story of Lalu’s “voyage out” in the Sword and the Sickle (1942), Anand does relate the return of Lai Singh, now a man, from years of German imprisonment to the subcontinent. Yet if the final part of the trilogy turns on Lai Singh’s representative experiences as a radicalised peasant organiser during the anti-​colonial movement, its assertion of political manhood emerges belatedly, in the wake of an ultimately unrepresentable “crossing” –​only after the formal and narrative interruption introduced to the trilogy through Across the Black Waters. It is perhaps for this reason that an early (and unique) appreciation of the trilogy by Krishna Nandan Sinha asserts that Across the Black Waters stages a “clear departure from the earlier novel … The Village”, even as the reprisal of its concerns in The Sword and the Sickle “fails to reconcile the schism in [the protagonist’s] own nature”, which has already, fatefully been set in place.30 Sinha’s insight into the novel’s “lack of success” –​a failure that informs the fully “doctrinal” tone and “superimposed” integrity of The Sword and the Sickle  –​ repays attention. Sinha affirms the novel’s expansive moods and landscape, suggesting that the “slow drift” of a narrative that is reminiscent of an archaic “chorus”. Yet despite the epic scale of its vision and voice, Across the Black waters is not a “success[ful] work because –​unlike the “fresh … and original The Village –​ it must leave “native grounds to describe global catastrophe” (Sinha, MRA 49–​50). In other words, the charge that Across the Black Water’s dominant narrative voice ultimately “lacks conviction” because of its failure to express its “global” subject matter truthfully, is related to its quality of redundancy. Marked by an “exhaustion … of concrete experience”, the work’s expressive “inadequacy” is resolved in the forced conclusion of Lalu’s (existential and political) manhood, as chronicled in the story of the returning hero in the Sword and the Sickle. Yet despite the “exhaustion” of form and genre already evident in the “fail[ure] of Across the Black Waters, Lai Singh, says Sinha, persists in curiously disembodied terms for the reader –​despite the manifest obsolescence of the formal parameters of its expression and appearance, the figure “continues to haunt our memory even when we have finished” with the trilogy. My account focuses on the “schism” that Sinha incisively identifies with Across the Black Waters –​the internal hiatus that divides the protagonist’s experience from his voice does indeed work against the integrity of the trilogy, separating the narrative time of Across the Black Waters from its

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  97 “proper” textual and historical conclusion in the imagined arrival of the modernising, socialist nation-​state. I  suggest that the novel does not only narrate a critical episode of interruption in the protagonist’s story of maturation; through vocal and lexical stoppages that are put into the hero’s mouth, that is, in textual remainders that fall outside or beneath the realm of denotative meaning, the novel “articulates” itself as a work of interruption. Running through the developmental arc of the trilogy, the caesura of Across the Black Waters may itself be approached synecdochally, through the figure of disappeared youth. If the image of catastrophically frozen youth has outlasted the forms and context of its original appearance –​as Sinha asserts –​such a figure, indexing failure and belatedness, presents a striking ambiguity within the author’s own artistic and political self-​understanding. Terminating its articulation within the forms of the “contemporary novel” in English, the protagonist of Across the Black Waters (as of Untouchable and Coolie) emerges, metonymically, in textual surpluses to narratives of social incorporation accomplished through the acknowledgement of authority; or equally, to the narrative of individual emancipation accomplished through its transgression. In other words, in running up against the un-​narratable event of failed development, these works expose their own narratological and historical limits –​thereby destabilising their location within “progressive” modes of literary representation, as articulated through Anand’s own, overlapping commitments to modernist and social-​realist imperatives. Address In a gesture of literary fidelity to historical fact, Anand honours the attempt of Indian subalterns to represent their own experiences of the Great War in writing, in letters home. In intertextual allusions to this “minor” form of an epistolary history of the Great War, Anand inserts letters, written by Lalu to his mother, into the narrative. These points become exemplary of the efforts and contradictions attending the narrative’s own attempt to ventriloquise the subaltern voice for a contemporary reader. By interpolating the epistolary form into the textual registers of the work the reader, and especially through the trajectory of the letter’s familial rhetorical address, the reader is introduced into the restricted perspective of a “naïve” account of events through gestures of familiarity and displacement. The section addressed here is remarkable for the length of the “letter”, which extends over four pages. Headed by the postal addresses of both recipient and sender, and set into quotation marks, this textual fragment enacts the force of its appeal as a mode of narrative address: ‘To Shrimati Gujar Kaur (Mata [mother] Gujri), the widow of Sardar Nihal Singh, Haveli Walla [of the big house], in the village of Nandpur, Tehsil Sherkot, District Manabad, Punjab, Hindustan, this letter is sent by Sepoy Lal Singh, number 1112, 2 platoon, 2 company, 69th Rifles,

98  Terminal beginnings stationed in a village near Ypres, Tehsil [town] Ypres, District Ypres, Subah [province] Flanders, near Franceville’ Mother!… More than a mimetic attempt to represent historical facts realistically, such a gesture of marked quotation (and provincialism) has the effect of interrupting the course of narrative action. In its repetitive, multiple and numerical appeals, the letter is charged with an incantatory force of address; it is a moment in which the novel pauses to reflect on the limits and possibilities of writerly form within Anand’s revisionist commitments. It is also, in turn, a remarkable use of synecdoche to gesture to the novel’s own materiality, which, as I have discussed, might be approached as an effect of processes of trans-​continental mobility, diasporic literary activity, colonial administration and ideological errancy. For a letter-​writer of limited formal education, the geographical location of Europe as such remains inconceivable, as does the letter’s ultimate recipient, the novel’s reader who exists “out there” beyond the temporal parameters of the fiction. The successively indigenised specification of a European address culminates in the provincialisation, “near Franceville”. This attempt at (self) location is affecting not only for the imaginative transposition of an indigenous geography onto the terrain of Europe, but also for the ultimate relativity (“near Franceville”) that qualifies the attempt. Anand’s deployment of writerly naïveté has subversive formal implications  –​if the inscriptive attempt at self-​representation minoritises Europe, then the process effects, in turn, a corresponding displacement and fictionalisation of Hindustan. The elusory entity of continental Europe is over-​written by the manifest abstraction of the nation, which becomes apprehensible to the reader only through movements of escalating, and, indeed, traumatic absentation. The letter-​writer reaches the unit of the nation-​state by moving outwards from house to village, sub-​district and district, to province –​nominating himself in the culminating irony of a serial number. Advanced through a historically limited perspective, this appealing failure of the claim to identity intersects at the outer limits of the text, with the reader’s sudden recognition of a subjectivity that has been deprived of historical representation. By missing its mark in both directions, the letter’s heading manifests the nation in its symmetrical irreality with Europe. Within the coordinates of such mutually apparitional geographies, idioms of plenitude emerge to frame Lalu’s immediate experience of Europe, which, despite its “frozen hell”, stages the values of hospitality, material affluence and interpersonal warmth. They give us good food, specially chocolates, which is a sweet. And they give us good rum … Tell Dayal Singh that here one cow gives a pitcher full of thick milk. Tell my saintly brother to forget God for a little while and do as these people do, feed the cattle properly on straw and greens and oil seeds … Mother, the land of France is wide and fair,

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  99 even as the land of Punjab … This country is full of precious things, such as machine ploughs, steel implements, sheep, pigs, cow, chickens, beetroots, potatoes and apple wine. The Francisis of Franceville and the Flamands of Flanders are wonderful cultivators. They plough five times as much land in a day with tractor machines as we do in ten days with a wooden land-​scratcher. And they use manures full of medicines such as the Sarkar ought to invent in Hind … The house in which I live is like a palace yet it belongs to a farmer … My French mother is just like you. She is very kind to me. (ABW 185–​186) Anand’s fictionalised narrative does reproduce, with striking fidelity, an indigenous and highly ambivalent discourse of “subtle solidarities with Empire” that emerges from the vast body of transliterated or transcribed letters sent home by subaltern recruits, which are preserved today, in their poignantly voluminous numbers, in the archives of the India Office (Gandhi, 96).31 However we address the ideological tenor of these letters, they should be read, primarily, as interlocutions, for they were drafted in fundamental part, especially after the summer of 1915, as responses to regular news of drought, famine and agrarian dispossession in rural Punjab. Through this archive, Leela Gandhi evaluates the scene of European hospitality according to the articulation of a transitional cosmopolitanism, as discovered through “divergence and unexpected conformity of bodies” in everyday life in the trenches. This is Anand’s pointed implication, in the welcoming image of a “French mother” –​a figure that is hybridised by its textual interpolation into the narrative through its uses of the letter-​form. Yet the expansive, maternal idiom of hospitality also suggests that the indigenous discourse of a nurturing, transnational solidarity  –​experienced in stark contrast to relations with white colonials in the province –​emerges from asymmetrical presuppositions, in a setting where the “basic protocols of shelter and refuge attain to hospitality on the strength of an ennobling surplus” (e.g. the gifting of “chocolates” or sweets without occasion, or “apple wine” for water at the table). Gandhi clarifies: If generosity is a virtue peculiar to the prerogatives of European plenitude, a corollary shows a uniquely Indian virtue of “sacrifice”, emerging from uniquely Indian conditions of scarcity… “Lack” is disclosed as the genetic substance for those habits of non-​attachment which sacrifice, in its turn, exemplifies… As letter after letter rehearses, upon this logic, a desire for death as reward rather than as punishment, as indulgence rather than sentence, there suddenly comes into view a new reading of “sacrifice”. No longer mere shorthand for that renunciatory capacity unique to those who live (or have chosen to live) a life of poverty, sacrifice also comes to signify a claim to immortality. (Gandhi, 98)

100  Terminal beginnings The motif of sacrificial rites animates Anand’s own ambiguous vision of transcendence in a fraternity derived from the experience of shared suffering on the front. A cosmopolitan possibility might, perhaps, liberate indigenous experience by crossing the bodily prohibitions that organise traditional hierarchies within the colony, and may do so even while displacing “Europe” from its hegemonic claims over the discourse and possibilities of humanism –​ yet this liberatory possibility is articulated by the text through the incoherence of condensed symbolic violence (ABW 128, 129, 141). Put otherwise, the convergence of culturally (in)different bodies in their conformity to the rule of bare life is related to the obvious antinomy –​a uniform conformity in death: “Sepoys … collected themselves around a bucketful of smouldering ashes as if they were assembling a meeting of the brotherhood to perform the last rites on the sacrificial fire for the dead” (ABW 141). Yet Anand’s fiction is noteworthy not only for mimetically reproducing the governing dialectic of generosity and sacrifice that is the thrust of Leela Gandhi’s analysis; it is striking for the force of its intervention into this rhetorical structure of European “indulgence” and subaltern “virtue”. If the novel is largely narrated from the interior perspective of its young protagonist Lalu, it is literally and rhetorically traumatised by the figure of “utmost sacrifice”, old Dhanoo (115). “Ghostly” in life, Dhanoo, after death, repeatedly “possesses” Lalu’s account of events. As the motif of a symbolic disappearance, Dhanoo’s “furtive, underground” existence –​in life and in death, at home and abroad –​apotheosises the exacting rule of corporeal discipline within the colonial encounter with modernity. According to its disembodying logic, the subaltern is subjectivised within hierarchical discourses of modern self-​hood through the same idioms that efface his lived experience. So, in Anand’s ironic characterisation, the ritual of sacrifice that is required to enter into a viable or autonomous modern identity is fundamentally related to its antithesis in Dhanoo’s piety, which demands a “pantheistic” renunciation of identity in every worldly engagement (ranging from interactions with the landlord, to the manner in which he must properly eat and excrete, to the demand for recognition in death). Despite his attention to the minutiae of Brahmanical ritual in life, Dhanoo’s corpse, it is emphasised, goes without the funerary pyre –​its face is left behind to look out from the bottom of the waterlogged trench. The dialectic of an identity premised on repetitive and escalating scenes of sacrifice culminates, in the present, in the paradoxical image of a bodiless countenance. Redeemed neither by funeral sacrifices nor by the rhetoric of sacrificial heroism, Dhanoo’s face returns from the humiliating contingency of his death, as a superfluity within the discourse of both tradition and modernity, and, as such, is the novel’s primary register of a deep historical “sadness” (ABW 195). The ethical question of Dhanoo’s lack of “relevance” to narratives of development is captured in the indigenised, deliberately anachronistic idiom of supernatural “possession” and spiritual “transmutation”. Through this spectral textual presence, conveyed through subaltern orality and belief systems,

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  101 the world-​historical trope of “sacrifice” turns on itself, exposing the nexus between a particular history of social inexistence and its continued historiographical erasure (128, 140, 150). Through the modality and address of the epistolary form, Anand attempts to traverse the ideological complicity between dominant discourses of authenticity, which brings the values of (European) metropolitan openness, on the one hand, and an ethos of indigenous abstemiousness, on the other, into a mutually reinforcing if asymmetrical encounter. Both polarities of “cultural” identity, as constructed through the shared event of global crisis, are produced through the governing idiom or “rite” of symbolic sacrifice. Such an insight positions the novel at a distance from the project of national education in vernacular languages, which characterised the contemporary enterprise of the All India Progressive Writers’ Association (AIPWA). At once an intervention of a modality of vernacular self-​representation into the dominant narrative voice, the subaltern’s “letter” home is also an ironised demonstration of the difference between an accomplished “popular” voice and its discursive and historical preconditions. As a textual mark, the letter indices the historically emergent voice of the subaltern recruit. Yet it also invites us to decipher the relation between the skills of literacy required for representation in the public domain, and the interpellative discourse of substitution, sacrifice and individuation that characterises the discourses of both “home” and the world. In these moments, the novel’s legibility recedes in the face of premature, perhaps even hegemonic notions of “popular” identity and cultural citizenship within the AIPWA’s project of a progressive, literary movement in India. Reading, reciting and dress rehearsing Indeed, several scenarios of reading are interspersed into the narrative, suggesting that we “read” an analogue between the novel’s formal intervention into the dominant idioms of cosmopolitanism that are also its own condition of articulation, and the subaltern attempt to negotiate meaning, and to thereby claim a place, within the discursive hierarchies that comprise a profoundly hierarchical historical present. In the repeated instatement of acts of reading into the linguistic body of the text, the narrative is aligned with Anand’s work of literary transcription. The slippages that attend such an effort are deliberately captured, in an early episode, involving the regiment’s arrival in Orléans. Here, the sepoys “stood … with elementary stares around a statue in the middle of an empty space while the Frenchmen waved their hands with quick, impatient gestures, and repeated “Something … Something … Jindac” (33). The semi-​literate Lalu presses forward and “cranes” to read an “inscription” off the body of the young woman, who confronts the soldiers with a raised sword. “Jean d’arc”, carved in stone, is anglicised into the textual inscription, “Joan of Arc”. It is registered in Lalu’s mind’s eye, cuing a schoolroom recollection

102  Terminal beginnings of a war between the Agrezis and the Francisi (a fact that leaves his illiterate companions incredulous). The strained effort of reading succeeds in slowing down the pace of events, allowing the protagonist to provisionally reclaim the “empty space” of the square, for himself and for his companions, from the incomprehensible rush of French. Even so, it is the foreign and partially indecipherable sound-​image “Jindac” that signifies the limits of Lalu’s literacy. Lalu fails to see the irony that is manifest to the novel’s reader as he deciphers the inscription –​he appears not see himself in the twin discourses of nationalism and martyrdom that fatefully frame the youthful body before him. The possibilities of “literacy” –​which figuratively clear the ground and secure a footing for the subaltern in this episode –​appear through the epistemological méconnaissance of identity. The sexual dimensions of this transposition of subaltern identity onto the statue’s (androgynous, artificial) body stages the scene of ideological misunderstanding. Rather than indicating the “naïve” limits of subaltern subjectivity, the episode suggests an opacity within the very terms of subjectivity, which exceeds both “naïve” and sophisticated subject positionings. If the subaltern emerges through an act of reading out loud only to be positioned at a distance from the “proper” meaning of what is being said, the rationalising gaze of the reader, by the same token, is delayed –​ as a scene of formative mis-​reading, the episode serves to shuffle the outward signs (ethnic or sexed) that normally code the subaltern presence within the fixed hierarchies of colonial/​nationalist knowledges.32 The distance staged between fictional and meta-fictional acts of reading does not allow the novel’s (English-​speaking, and, most likely, metropolitan) reader to interpose herself into the work as the repository of a collective consciousness that is presently only incompletely available to the subaltern de-​coder. Such a possibility of a transcendent, “advance-​guard” mediator of subaltern experience –​the very positioning of the Progressive Writer’s Association (PWA), which Anand would lead for some years  –​is forestalled from asserting itself as a historically immanent possibility. It is particularly in its depiction of failed colonial Bildung that Across the Black Waters postpones the PWA’s attempt to reconcile the literary forms of a modernising present with a putatively “popular”, if hitherto unrepresented collective consciousness. Towards the concluding sections of the novel, on route to Festubert, “a “Padre Sahib, no less than the Bishop of Chetpur … on home leave’ ” makes a visit to the regiment to boost morale. Lalu is taken out of the regimental formation and introduced by an English officer as having been educated in a mission school, and as being able to communicate in English. After responding in English to “indulgen[t]‌” queries about a missionary childhood, Lalu deliberately conflates his educability in English with his ability to pray in that language. As a demonstration of his linguistic skills (which both guarantee his central place within the fraternity of the recruits, even as it sets him apart), Lalu recites from the from the “Prayer Before the Crucifix”, the Thanksgiving offered after Communion in the Roman Catholic Mass: “… I kneel before

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  103 and contemplate Thy wounds before my eyes” (ABW 252). Through a gesture of acute inversion, the interpolated liturgical text does not so much bear witness to the inexistent figure of Christ, remembered from the walls of a mission schoolroom, as much as ironise its testimonial content. By lending a de-​sacralising voice to the sacrificial victim, such mimicry de-​mythologises his textually and historically unrepresented “wound”. Despite his profane mastery over the words, Lalu mouths the failure of discourses of (self) representation. Lalu’s colonial mimicry –​not just of English, but in it –​ exceeds the subject of its address, indicating how the figure of subalternity slips from its position of representativeness. “They have pierced My hands and My feet; they have numbed all my bones” (252) –​in this corrosive (rather than sentimental) gesture of subaltern self-​nomination through the first person, Anand redoubles the prayer’s ruling image of specular identification and its exhortative appeal to the exemplary life. Lalu is fully aware of his “histrionics”, causing hilarity in his English-​speaking audience of young Tommies. Feigning ignorance of the “real” meaning of his words, he maintains a double register of address, speaking obliquely to his white compatriots (thereby entering momentarily into their world), even as he outstrips the Bishop’s own command of both (liturgical) text and medium (English). He explains to the Padre in the language of canonical officiousness that the prayer is “also applicable to the souls in Purgatory” –​or, of course, to those who wait between skirmishes. Rehearsing such purgatorial suspension within the linguistic matter of the text, the narrative stages the long interlude of the Great War, which has brought together the constitutively separate life-​worlds of Europe and its margins. It is a moment that suspends both the historical movement of these events as well as the linguistic markers of racial difference (252). Despite his brilliant display of comic ambiguity, however, Lalu cannot estimate the full force of his “piercing” address to a reader who is compelled to “contemplate” a brief yet irrefutable bodily reality that appears in the deforming words of another. In a localised act of parodic repetition and mimicry, the English medium becomes a placeholder between the agent of a transnational solidarity that would exceed the conditions of its ideological articulation in the crisis of Europe and the reclamation of an authentic “voice” through which the specificities of a subaltern consciousness might come of age into its own proper time. Through the sound of Lalu’s accented, lexically displaced English, Across the Black Waters testifies to the distance between committed literary representation that “writes back” to European modernity, and the figure of alterity in whose name such writing is undertaken.

Voicing failure: Landscape and writing For when they first joined the army, these legionnaires did so because, as the second, third or fourth sons of a peasant family, overburdened with debt, they had to go and earn a little ready cash to pay off the interest on the

104  Terminal beginnings mortgage of the few acres of land … which stood between the family and its fate … Of course, these second, third and fourth sons “sprung from the loins of tigresses” as the recruiting sergeant used to call them … were sensitive to the elegant cut of the tight white trousers, the double stud tunics, the shapely turbans with red under-​turbans and the well-​oiled soft shoes which the Sarkar gave as regulation mufti to the sepoys to be paid for on installments when they went home on furlough…  . And … sometimes a war was on somewhere, in a geography of which the family or the son had no conception, and he faded into thin air, only to confirm his own and his family’s prejudice that all who went beyond the mountains or across the black waters were destined for hell. But occasionally, one man in a village returned, with a stripe on his arm or a star on his shoulder, or a medal on his chest and demanded a large dowry before he would wed the daughter of any worthy in his brotherhood … And now once in a while in a district arrived a hero, a man who had earned both a medal and a pension attached to it. And he soon became a legend and people came to see him, the wonder, especially as he had left an arm, a leg or an eye behind, and used a miraculous wooden substitute. (Anand, Across the Black Waters 168–​169) Not forward:  under the law of the present, which in Hölderlin is the law of poetry, with a taboo against abstract utopia, a taboo in which the theological ban on graven images … lives on. Not backwards:  because of the irretrievability of something once overthrown, the point at which poetry … and history intersect. The decision, finally, expressed as an anacoluth in an amazing reversal… (Adorno, “Parataxis”, NL2 142)

“And now once in a while … arrived a hero” initiates, in the middle sections of the novel, an abrupt, extended reversal of the novel’s tone and style. In its chanted approximation of the mythical rhythms of “fate”, and in its increasingly abstracted flight from the landscape of “family”, the “village … in the hills and plains” and “a few acres of land”, the narrative crosses mountains and the black waters to stage a subalternity that “fades into thin air”. This event of disappearance is eventually returned to a textual present –​but in the passage’s repetitive invocation of the “now” through a continuously narrated present, we are returned to a pastoral origin, “home”, that is suddenly bereft of the character of Lalu. Until this moment, the subjectivising optic of the protagonist’s “interior perspective” had moored the unstable meanings of Lalu’s migratory experience to historical happenings on the ground, as it were, of Continental Europe (even if these were staged obliquely through what Adorno calls, elsewhere, the “static hauntings” of a bereaved cultural past, as imagined within a “technocrat[ic]” present).33 In a dramatically extended passage that can only be abbreviated for the purposes of this discussion (above) this classic technique of psychological realism is effectively reversed. Journeying through the “allegorical cleft” of

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  105 a stylistic and topographic fracture within the form and setting of the novel, the reader is abruptly confronted with the archetypal myth of the returning warrior-​hero (NL2 123). Sitting athwart the overarching integrity of the work, this interpolated fragment of epic narration suggests, along with Adorno, that “all synthesis … occurs in opposition to the pure present …” (NL2 142). The intractability of the epic “now” of these passages gestures to horizons that exceed the narrative’s imagination  –​pointing allegorically outwards, in effect, to the parameters of that exemplary genre of modernity’, the novel itself. Anand’s fragmentary use of epic narration emerges as a hiescence within realism’s historical commitment to archiving the “relationship of the past and the future, the backwards and forwards”, a directional movement that is captured in positivistic images of chronological development/​regression. As an organising idiom of modernity, chronology itself falls, here, under the archaic “taboo” against representation (NL2 142). The diction, here, is an exemplary instantiation of the naïve syntax of epic narration. In inversions of the full stop, “periodic syntacticity” is honed out of the text as a lapidary inscription of “intensified violence” (NL2 137). The passage’s iterated use of the period visibly bridges the “elegant” ideal of military equality (as an escape from feudal strictures and economic exploitation through the garb of the uniform), the myth of colonial generosity (the “medal”, the “stripe”), and the promise of “hero[ic]” individuation and citizenship through the politics of recognition (“the “information … of reward (ABW 168–​169). As such, the rigour of the punctuation mark works to establish its own force and place  –​its grammatical authority  –​ within the civilising mission of liberal humanism. Against such syntactical discipline, the visibly forced coordinations of Anand’s epic-​fragment enact a “sacrifice of the period” to paratactical conjunctions that fail to establish causality and to anacoluthic confusions of the necessary hierarchy between the premises and conclusions of an argument. This is most dramatic in the serial positioning of the conjunction “and” within the expansive body of the text: “And he soon became a legend … and people came to see him… and [he] used a miraculous wooden substitute” (ABW 169). By rhetorically cutting apart the reader’s expectation, the novel aligns itself, as writing, with the inorganic jointure of a “miraculous … wooden” prosthetic. At once the medium and symbol of economies of forced “substitut[ion]”, the paratactical word –​in its cruelty and terrifying impersonality –​stands suddenly in place of Anand’s vaunted “Third World … Man” (Anand, Roots and Flowers 15).34 In the first excursus of the Dialectic of Enlightenment to which the short essay “On Epic Naivete” might be read as a companion piece, the figure of Odysseus, and the re-​telling of his exile and return, serves to instantiate Adorno’s thesis that the temporal integrity of the modern subject is accomplished through logics of sacrifice and self-​renunciation. As a proto-​ history of the subject of Enlightenment, epic, too has its paradigm in the

106  Terminal beginnings deceptiveness of mythical sacrifice. In every instance, the dialectic of sacrifice aims to exchange as equivalents something that is worth less for what is worth more: The hecatombs in exchange for a victory in war so final that there will be no further wandering, the proper name that the hero surrenders to Polyphemus, calling himself out as No-​one (Udeis) to win, in return, an anonymous universality. “The Concept of Enlightenment” develops this theory of progress in order to demonstrate how the logic of substitution, implicit in mythical sacrifice, drives the development of discursive reasoning into the mid-​century present: Substitution in the course of sacrifice marks a step toward discursive logic. Even though the hind offered up for the daughter, and the lamb for the first-​born still had to have specific qualities, they already represented the species… . Substitutability reverses into universal fungibility. (DE 10)35 The hero’s intelligence allows him to resist nature and “fate” qua myth, but in its own sacrificial logic, such a model of advancing selfhood becomes myth. The real form of epic reason resides in the hero’s ability to dominate himself, that is, to renounce himself in the service of the universal law of self-​ preservation –​in the quoted passage, the ubiquitous order of the “Sarkar”. In Across the Black Water’s own excursus into the myth of the subaltern’s origin, the “natural” forces of “famine”  –​a historical reality in Punjab in the first year of the War –​are sonorised through the repetitive appeal to the “second, third, and fourth sons” of the land (the phrase is used five times in two pages) (ABW 168). Internalising the imperial rhetoric of individuation through sacrificial substitution, these unnamed men are interpellated into (post)colonial modernity as “scarecrows” (168). In this etiolated image of the human, and above all, in the culminating synecdoche of the prosthetic that stands in for the man, the subaltern is conjoined to a de-​racinated nature, depicted only through discursive logics of substitution, fungibility and expropriation, the trope of a home-land is thoroughly denaturalised. In the “now once in a while”, images comprising the epic landscape of Across the Black Waters decelerate to a standstill, introducing, in effect, the political import of Homeric blindness –​or “the maxim of not looking backward that is directed against the chimera of origin” (NL2 142, emphasis mine). As the mere semblance or appearance of logical reasoning, “the epic form of language … slack[ens]” the hold of propositional or enlightened reasoning, which asserts a necessary relation between things, and between people and things. Loosening the fabric of reported speech, epic syntax “pulls” discursive logics into the image “without making this image transparent” (NL1 28). In other words, language –​itself –​becomes an image. To establish this insight, Adorno’s essay on Homeric simplicity focuses, in its concluding reflections, on the description of Odysseus’ shield. An object of resistance

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  107 that militates against its assimilation into the levelling “repor[tage]” of war, the shield telescopically draws the entire landscape of battle into the visual details of its own appearance –​thereby “reversing [the hierarchy] between image and plot” (28). “The impulse that drives Homer to describe a shield as though it were landscape and to elaborate the metaphor until it becomes action, until it becomes autonomous … ultimately destroys the fabric of the narrative” –​and thereby de-​subjectifies the expressive content of the work (NL1 26). In its fidelity to the concreteness of the object rather than the subject of narration, the epic enacts an “anamnesis instead of merely reporting and –​through a protocol for which [linear] time is only an index”, “casts … the story … down into a void”; here, epochal history and the rationalised measure of modern, chronologised “memory can find no purchase” (26). In the excerpt from Across the Black Waters, above, the coerced identifications of the “and” enunciate the thorough-​ going loss of an originary, bounded world of experience. The extinction of this “backward” world of memory appears to cancel the proleptic yearning of the text, which has been the focus of this discussion thus far. For if the “forward” movement of the world is troped here, once more, in the oceanic metaphor of crossing, such a journey is concluded this time in “snapshots” of agrarian distress and ecological ruin that obviate the residual nostalgia of the passage. Yet it is just by immersing the reader in the fungible matter of the body, or in the degraded earth of the land as it appears here and now, that the narrative exposes its “cleft” syntax to the reader –​serving, in effect, as a counter-​form to the images that make up such an eroded historical present. Connecting the image of the prosthesis with the inorganicity of the text, Across the Black Waters presents itself as a fully depersonalised, inhumanised modality of representation. In this, it moves beyond techniques of colonial mimicry or the strategic subversion of documentary time through the textual interpolation of archaising forms. (These are antecedents, of course, of the contemporary question of whether the subaltern can speak, and of the possible place of such speech, which has been assigned to the conjecture of a “parallel” or “vernacularised” modernity). Despite its saturation in mythic violence, the invocation of “home” in the ultimately unvisualisable image of nature retains a powerful if unrepresentable affective force. Running against the hegemony of positivistic images of the past, these sections of epic locution preserve “nature” as an element of non-​identity within its own syntax and narration. The inassimilable claim of nature is registered materially in the medium of the text, in the discrepancies of paratactical coordinates; or, what is the same, in the non-​signifying remainders of synthetic reasoning. The domination of the Logos is not negated abstractly but instead recognised in its connection with what it has overthrown, the domination of nature as itself a part of nature, with its gaze focused on humanness, which wrested itself from the “amorphous” and “barbaric” only through violence… [T]‌he anamnesis of suppressed nature in which Hölderlin tries

108  Terminal beginnings to separate the wild from the peaceful, is the consciousness of non-​identity … that transcends Logos (Adorno, “Parataxis”, NL2 14; emphasis mine). For these sections of Anand’s text, the unreadable “image” of an unviolated subaltern body is, paradoxically, the inorganic body of writing  –​ or the prosthesis. As for the image of resistance in Adorno, the Homeric shield, so also here, the crude matter of the substitute limb. If the “miracle” of the primitive wooden leg advances itself in place of a transparent, integrated image of a subaltern identity, Anand’s belated uses of epic narrative stage the unprecedented promise and failure of a progressive, universal “humanness” (NL2 14). No longer a heroic subject but a grotesque assemblage –​ not without its own poignancy  –​the prosthetic figure of the subaltern evacuates the dominant discursive equivalencies of “tradition” and “modernity”. If these substitutable discourses of identity comprise the historical “dialectic of Enlightenment in the colonies”, they also order the narratological coordinates of a story of progressive transition with which the trilogy tries –​and fails –​to accord (Aamir Mufti). Each term is left behind as ruined “monuments” to a unified body of colonial knowledge (Adorno, Beethoven 156). The novel’s focus shifts, in this moment, from envisaging a subject –​ who has, in the end, already been produced through the rule of (post)colonial exceptionalism  –​to the discursive and epistemological preconditions of its very articulation. These reside, in all their contradiction, in a violently integrated modernity  –​a material reality that emerges, today, not as the subject of Across the Black Waters, but as the irreducible object of renewed interrogation. Subaltern crossings Across the Black Waters revisits the colossal myth of subaltern “sacrifice” in its dialectical encounter with Euro-​centred principles of freedom and enlightenment as process –​as historical movement, in other words, which at once breaks apart the appearance of a unified, hegemonic metropolitan subject, while also accounting for its dynamic constitution from the position of the (post)colony. The novel draws a staggered line of connection –​in effect, of emergence –​between this hegemonic mode of subjectivity and an insurgent subaltern consciousness that was, in reality, visible in Punjab at the time of the novel’s inception.36 Interrupting the narrative present with the abrupt, illimitable joinings of paratactical syntax, the text’s digression into epic form serves to open an emergent form of subaltern consciousness to horizons it cannot, itself, comprehend on time. The novel grounds the promise of a radically minoritised humanism  –​the figure of the subaltern  –​and its premise in the advent of the independent nation with historical acuity, in increasingly forced techniques of nationalist/​colonial mobilisation, recruitment and policing, set in place during the Great War. Whether as the agent of popular nationalism or of Third World humanism, subaltern consciousness is grasped, in the “immanent” world of the epic, only through the recursive

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  109 crisis of its originating tropes (Lukács, TN 17). Altogether, Across the Black Waters establishes elliptical lines of contact between the proposition of a subaltern “voice” –​itself the manipulable, ethnicised effect of governmentality in the mid-​late 1930s and after, through the post-​Independent machinery of the Green Revolution –​and a reconfigured readerly subject, located interstitially, in the traffic between metropolitan and nationalist avant-​gardes. Put otherwise, the “cut” or breach of novelistic technique (the topic of Anand’s first lecture in “Roots and Flowers”) permits the author to concretise the link between narrative form and history paradoxically, as one of distance. Ironising its uses of English in the terms of a “foreign” word, the novel distances its medium from its subject matter, thereby dis-​aligning the claim of narrative authenticity from the demand of representativeness. The upshot is the possibility of an anti-​mimetic mode of realism in Anand, which also serves to “misplace” modernist, metropolitan style onto a truly novel line of artistic interrogation –​that of the mobile, and ultimately unpresentable “consciousness” of an urgent, contemporary world reality, at once signalled through, and divided by, subaltern emergence. It is only in this way that Anand can advance his odd defence of the Indian novel in English as most “authentically representative of [its] time” (Roots and Flowers 18). As an afterword to this line of reading, we should note the slippages between the colonial-​military uses of the rank of the “subaltern”, and the oppositional construct of this figure, in the early work of the Gramscian Subaltern Studies group, together with the figure’s subsequent itinerary into “high theory” as the orienting lexeme of Gayatri Spivak’s deconstructive approach. How do we locate the unfinished story of Lalu’s Bildung within this more recent trajectory of the politics of naming, as it occurs within the field of postcolonial literary criticism? –​and are we obligated, by virtue of such retrospection, to re-​evaluate the figure of Mulk Raj Anand, who remains a notorious exemplification of the “left-​progressivist” elitism of Nehruvian modernity? As a private soldier or sipahi, Lalu falls at the bottom-​most rank of the Indian Army; technically, his immediate superiors, who replicate colonial as well as feudal hierarchies even in the course of their transit to new horizons, are the native petty officers (the actual “subalterns” of the Indian Army) who at once mediate and are also subject to the exclusionary/​ incorporative authority of colonial society. Founding member Ranajit Guha states the aims of the Subaltern Studies collective as a project of rethinking Indian colonial and national historiography from the perspective of the discontinuous events of peasant insurrection during the colonial occupation, and at the time of the freedom struggle. In a now-​emblematic set of passages, Guha asserts: The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism –​colonial elitism, a bourgeois-​nationalist elitism –​ sharing the prejudice that the making of the Indian nation and the development of the consciousness  –​nationalism  –​which confirmed

110  Terminal beginnings this process were exclusively or predominantly elite achievements. In the colonial and neo-​colonialist achievements [in which Anand surely participates] these achievements are credited to British colonial rulers, administrators, policies, institutions, and culture; in the nationalist and neo-​nationalist writings, to Indian elite personalities, institutions, activities and ideas.37 The issue is not so much that native informants of India’s (structurally elitist) middle class may collaborate (with insidious self-​interest) with first-​world readers who avidly seek an “authentic” voice that falls outside these two broad classes of intellectual hegemony. Rather, at stake is the possibility that the subaltern, in its historical specificity, is necessarily a heterogenous figure, irreducible to these two visible bands of recorded history. Hence, Guha sets out the ideal of a “politics of the people” –​following Spivak’s reading, in spatialised terms  –​as standing outside such history (as an “autonomous domain … neither originating in such elite projects … nor dependent … on it”) and inside it (“adjusting … vigorously to the conditions of the Raj and in many respects developing entirely new strains in both form and content” in the itineraries of colonial production) (Guha, 1, 4). Recognising that this proposition of popular solidarity might be charged with residual empiricism, Guha constructs the “people” topologically, as an “identity-​in-​differential”. Hence, the dynamic stratification of hegemony, where the subaltern “people” move in and through what Guha terms a buffer zone, or the bottom layer of a literate class that mediates between the people and the macro-​political structures of authoritative-​elitist power  –​this is not unlike Fanon’s proposition of authentic popular culture, identified with an uninstitutionalised “zone of occult instability” (WE 243). Famously, Guha’s subaltern class emerges, through the operation of subtraction, as the “demographic difference” between “the total Indian population” and the elite (8). In “Death and the Subaltern”, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan has suggested that the space such taxonomy opens up, and attempts to fix as the object of study, is exemplary of the “productive crisis” at the heart of Subaltern School “historiography and its method” –​in other words, the crisis between the established knowledge forms and their truth claims becomes “inextricable from a problem of ethics” (Rajan, 118).38 Against Guha’s self-​understanding –​which conceives of the subaltern “differential” in class-​based (largely masculinist) terms of the master–​slave dialectic –​the Subaltern Studies’ effort might be viewed, itself, as a kind of ethical “exemplarity”: By rewriting the impossibility of authentic “speech” into the very condition of possibility of (a deviational or differential mode of) writing, “death”, or disappearance, “functions as disclosure rather than as attribute in and for subalternity” (131). The digest of national modernism’s various “fail[ures] to appear” on time, its “condemnation” to incoherence, its “loss of enunciative space”, the “dissolution” of its own identity in the inability to encounter alterity time (Dhareshwar, 107)39 –​all these signs of modernism’s ageing might be

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  111 extended towards the kind of impossibility that Gayatri Spivak associates with the question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”.40 The middle-​class failure to represent subaltern speech, for Spivak, is not only a summary account of subaltern muteness and hegemonic practices of middle-​class expression. The disgrace of such a failed historical present provides an index to the condition of subalternity itself. As a properly unanswerable question, the title of Spivak’s essay sidesteps the opposition of subjective intending expression versus de-​ humanised muteness by proposing that “subalternity” is not a function of identity at all –​it bears no positivistic correlate to socio-​political descriptors in race, class or even the redoubled erasure of gender in these categories. In the “epistemic fracture” that isolates the subaltern from the condition of the speaking self, Spivak indicates subalternity as residing on the “other side of difference” (including the differences between speech and silence) (Spivak, CPR 309). The point is not that such an uncognisable division cannot or should not be bridged, but that any such mediation can only be undertaken by placing the subaltern under further conditions of assimilation, opacity, heterogeneity –​or the predicament of modern abstraction under conditions of what Across the Black Waters depicts, in its unsettling digression through the slow-​time and syntax of epic, as violently accelerated movements of capital. The figuring of personhood as failure is, for Spivak, associated with the “gesture” of an impossible “decision” –​that the subaltern is offered no “lines of social mobility”, is to recognise that she or he has no flight out of the condition of not being heard even now, as we read (Spivak, 28; 34/​Adorno, Missa 576).41 If Spivak insists on the ethical impasse that subtends both middle-​class/​caste forms of expression and subalternity, it is to bind their relationality to a properly illegible historical present. The singular idiom of “vanishing” before the various cross-​cutting demands of speaking –​or the historical force of accumulated inequity –​stands as witness as much to the condition of subalternity as to our continuing entanglement with it (Spivak, CPR, 304). The structure of expression as impossibility is the deciding feature not only of left-​modernism’s melancholia, a poor symptom of the Left’s loss of a critical notion of “the people” (and with it, a robustly sociological or “empirical” concept of the subaltern). Like the Adornian idea of catastrophe, the inaccessibility of a voice in the fullness of its presence is, above all, an historical proposition because, as a problem of form, it attests to every articulation of “subjectivity” into the terms of modernity. Or otherwise, to imagine, now, the sibling resemblances between Ela and Lalu that are at the foundation of the twentieth-​century novel in India: How else could our own abstracted modernity find legibility if not through the positionality of the subaltern?

Notes 1 Mulk Raj Anand, Across the Black Waters (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 2000, 2008), 7 (hereafter cited in the text as ABW).

112  Terminal beginnings 2 The Indian Army contingent –​the Indian Corps –​that served on the Western Front, consisted of two divisions of infantry  –​the 3rd (Lahore) Division, and the 7th (Meerut) Division, along with their support troops of pioneers, artillery –​and one brigade of cavalry, the 4th (Secunderabad) Cavalry Brigade. These troops landed in Marseilles, France, on 26 September 1914, less than six weeks after the declaration war on Germany by the British. The Indian Army was immediately deployed to the Western Front because it represented the largest standing volunteer force in the world at the time. Non-​conscripted recruitment came largely from the northern and north-​eastern provinces of British India and was undergirded by older imperial taxonomies of “martial” ethnic groupings. 3 Set within the coordinates of the Ypres Salient, and following the itinerary of the Indian Corps between Wytschaete, Messines, Neuve Chapelle and eventually Festubert, the novel records the troops’ historical movement between 1914 and 1915 along the line of the French–​Belgium defences. The first encounter in Ypres occurred after dark, in October 1914; Ypres marked the first uses of mustard gas by the Germans.   Preceded by a four-​ day artillery bombardment by over 400 guns firing 100,000 shells, the attack around the village of Festubert was launched at night on 15 May in 1915 by two divisions of mostly Indian infantry, who made rapid initial progress, despite the failure of this initial assault to effectively destroy the German Sixth Army front line defences. After several trenches were lost to the Germans in October 1914, an “at all costs” order was issued by the Indian Corps commander, Lt.-​General Sir James Willcocks, and hand-​to-​hand fighting between German and Indian troops ensued. With the onset of winter proper, conditions progressively worsened, and the Indian troops, clad in light tropical drill, suffered particularly in the frozen mud of the trenches. Remarkably, the text alludes to all these events despite its oblique, narrowed-​down use of interior perspective. See Ian F.W. Beckett, Ypres: The First Battle, 1914 (Harlow, UK: Longman Publishing Group, 2006), 86–​87, 242–​246. 4 Anand’s Conversations in Bloomsbury is an exemplary instance of such self-​ conscious positioning. In a series of quasi-​autobiographical scenes that depict Anand’s involvement in the late 1920s and early 1930s with the circle of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Anand assumes a literary persona that is simultaneously as peripheral to the discussions emerging from the intellectual heart of metropolitan modernism as it is integral. 5 Mulk Raj Anand, “On the Progressive Writers’ Movement” in Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents, 1936–​1947, ed. Sudhi Pradhan (Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1979), vol. 1, 1–​22. 6 Timothy Brennan, “On the National Yearning for Form” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 44–​70. 7 Despite its emphasis on the “heteroglossic” uses of the myth of national origins for reimagining the present, the treatment of works within Brennan’s piece ascribes to the assumption that form is primarily a synthesising principle, holding together the fractured experience of postcolonial identity within an imaginary register. 8 Perhaps the most powerful re-​articulation of this established consensus occurs in Aamir R. Mufti’s Enlightenment in the Colonies: the Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Like an earlier generation of critics of this modality of the postcolonial

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  113 novel, Mufti relates the formal indices of realism (mimesis, deployed towards plotting the “passage … from primitivism to modernity”) to the hegemonic narrative of state-​led “development” in the Nehruvian period (Mufti, 184). In this way, Mufti also reprises an earlier historical objection to the “paternalistic elitism” of revolutionary leadership, which fully indicts the stylistic questions regarding the force or failure of a ventriloquised “vernacular” agent in such a politics. The most established criticisms of Anand of this type are Suresht Renjen Bald’s, “Politics of a Revolutionary Elite:  A Study of Mulk Raj Anand’s Novels”, Modern Asian Studies 8(4) (1974): 473–​489 (cited here, p. 488); and the more recent argument by Arun P. Mukherjee, “The Exclusions of Postcolonial Theory and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable: A Case Study”, Ariel 22(3) (1991): 27–​48. 9 As recent re-​evaluations of the relationship between Adorno and Lukács have argued, such an account may be traced directly back to the latter’s The Theory of the Novel (1914–​1915), which Adorno read as a student in the early 1920s. First drafted at the start of World War I, in the grip of what Lukács would later recall as a “mood of permanent despair” and “the war psychosis”, Theory of the Novel proposes that epic narrative survives, in the present, in the form of the novel. In Lukács’ peculiar formulation, the novel is an epic form because it transports the “fragmentary nature the world’s structure into the world of forms” (TN 39, emphasis mine). The novel remains tied to epic intention by virtue of this paradoxical grasp of a sundered civilisational whole. See Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 39. The monumental essay on Holderlin continues to present a seminal reading of the poet; it is driven through its own harshly disjointed structure and tone, by an extraordinary polemic against Heidegger’s philosophical appropriation of the poet. The essay is a late work by the measure of both chronology and Adorno’s philosophical conception of lateness, having been prepared for and delivered to the Holderlin Society in 1963, in the setting of a divided Berlin. The essay “On Epic Naiveté” was written in 1943 but published only in 1958. Adorno’s reflections on “parataxis” taken together, and in all of their delayed significance, speak to the historical specificity of the German post-​war context within his own public practice as a critic. Along with other post-​war lectures and radio-​essays from this period, Adorno raises the “question of a German literary tradition tout court, the question how contemporary criticism could or should appropriate the German literary past” and whether a national literary canon might or should survive the Shoa. See Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “A Precarious Balance:  Adorno and German Classicism”, New Literary History, 42(1) (2011): 31–​52. 10 Theodor W.  Adorno, “Parataxis:  On Holderlin’s Late Poetry” in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), Vol. 2, 102–​149 (hereafter cited in the text as NL2). Adorno, “On Epic Naivete” in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), Vol. 1, 24–​29 (hereafter cited in the text as NL1). 11 Holderlin’s late works, in their expansive, unrhymed forms and hymnal tonality, is aligned by Adorno with a canon of late modernism that ranges from the seriality of Schonberg’s music, to the protocol sentences of Beckett.

114  Terminal beginnings 12 Homi K. Bhabha, “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism” in Text and Nation, eds. Laura Garcia-​Morena and Peter C. Pfeifer (London: Camden House, 1996), 195–​196. 13 Dirk Wiemann, Genres of Modernity: Contemporary Indian Novels in English (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008), 77. 14 Despite attention arising from the notion of “vernacularised” modernities to questions of non-​elite or demotic mobility, terms such as “vernacularisation” or even “marginality” as descriptors of an alternative modernity remain problematic. As Aihwa Ong in Neoliberalism as Exception (2006) and Pheng Cheah in Inhuman Conditions (2007) have demonstrated, the economic, political and cultural logics of trans-​nationalism –​which are inseparable from the regime of neoliberalism today –​are effective in creating sovereign, self-​functionalising and fully ethnicised subjectivities. At the same time, the same forces of governmentality that enable the production of reflexive, self-​managing subjects accord other populations an “exceptional” status within and beyond the boundaries of the nation-​state. If both are ideological positionings of identity, the latter resides, strictly speaking, beneath the classical politics of citizenship, sovereignty and subject-​hood. See Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception:  Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2006) and Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), esp. ­chapters 1 and 2. 15 Colin Nicholson, The Longman Companion to the First World War:  Europe, 1914–​1918 (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2001), 248. 16 Bald, “Politics of a Revolutionary Elite”, 488. 17 Ben Conisbee Baer has recently renewed Untouchable’s well-​noted uses of colonial mimicry through a powerful focus on “anacoluthic” reversals within the text. In the confused or weak causal links of anacoluthon: [t]‌he colonial military system becomes, for Bakha [the untouchable protagonist] and his friends, the promissory figure of a desired equality unattainable in the caste Hindu world … This cathexis of military equality … cuts across the lines of caste, so that “[t]he consciousness of every child was full of a desire to wear Western dress” (Untouchable, 101). (Baer, 578) The lesson of colonialism is thus presented from the novel’s opening page as profoundly paradoxical: it is a matter of both equality and superiority” (Baer, “Shit Writing: Untouchable, the Image of Gandhi”, Modernism/​Modernity 16(3) (2009): 578 (emphasis in original). Baer remobilises the tenuous logical causality of Anand’s “and” in his own commentary, referring the formal and ideological dimensions of Anand’s prose to Partha Chatterjee’s thesis on “the rule of colonial difference”. For Chatterjee, the colony is produced as a space of “exception” that its functionally appealed to in the enactment of colonial discrimination and hierarchy; the rule of exceptionalism ultimately confirms a metropolitan self-​understanding that takes itself to be the historical embodiment of the universal (Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 17–​34; also cited in Baer, 578). The contradictory logic of such a universalist identity reappears again, as the focus of Across the Black Waters,

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  115 may be approached through Enrique Dussel’s critique of Eurocentricism and the notion of an asymmetrically integrated “transmodernity”. 18 The aged Brahmin Dhanoo spends his time in “uncomprehending innocence” about the circumstances of his deportment to the European battleground, directing his limited energy and tactical intelligence towards meeting the daily exigencies of living in a ritually “clean” manner. He dies by the sidelines of the novel, drowning unnoticed in the communication trenches after the troops’ first encounter with the German assault at Ypres. If cultural transgression is promissory for some (like Lalu, who has already cut his hair for symbolic and pragmatic reasons), it poses a terrible “sacrifice” of physical and existential integrity for Dhanoo. Dhanoo is an intractable, if useless, figure of unincorporable non-​modernity. 19 After the infamous “Jallianwala Bagh massacre” in 1919, the adolescent Anand was arrested and flogged, in accord with the public police order, for breaking Dyer’s police curfew. Anand returned home bearing 11 visible “stripes” on his back, and was severely berated by his father, at the time a pensioner of the Army, for straying into areas circumscribed by the British government. Anand was thrown out of the house together with his mother, a collateral object of paternal retaliation, for the marks of humiliation that he bore on his body. If apprehensions of political tyranny were enduringly embodied in the subcontinent in the public memory of Dyer, they would be combined henceforth for the young man, with the everyday knowledge of paternal despotism. Anand would recall how he felt the double-​fisted blows of politics and tradition viscerally, in a crisis of “self-​disgust” (Apology, 21). 20 See Saros Cowasjee, So Many Freedoms: A Study of the Major Fiction of Mulk Raj Anand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), which remains the authoritative full-​length study on Anand, especially pp.  5–​10, which describes Mulk Raj Anand’s childhood as a provincialised version of the Oedipal romance. Expelled from the “enchanted circle” of childhood intimacy with his mother, Anand’s developing conflicts with his father through his adolescence and young adulthood turned on his early involvement with anti-​colonial agitation and his public support of Gandhi’s mobilisations under the call for purna swaraj (self-​ rule), upon the latter’s assumed leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921. 21 This moment of departure and metropolitan reinvention is best known, however, for the extensiveness of Anand’s literary friendships. Through T.S. Eliot, in the course of working on his magazine Criterion, Anand entered into an extended conversation with E.M. Forster, whose support would be vital for his watershed work of subaltern fiction, Untouchable. 22 Gregory Castle, Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida, 2006). 23 Habermas’ paradigmatic thesis on an “unfinished modernity” is notable; it finds its original articulation in the discursive nature of “crisis” in capitalist societies, in the seminal Legitimation Crisis (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1975). 24 See Mulk Raj Anand, “A Drink with Bonamy Dobree in Museum Tavern” in Conversations in Bloomsbury (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5–​7. 25 The nineteenth-​century English Bildungsroman may be seen, in turn, to replicate the divergences on the nature and function of Bildung within the classical tradition, which can be followed in the distance between Goethe’s and Humboldt’s

116  Terminal beginnings respective visions. The former’s paradigmatic Weimar novel, The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister (1795–​1796) advocated an aesthetic Bildung that would serve as a kind of mystical apprenticeship, through which the subject would be inducted into an “esoteric” or elite, paternalistic authority; the heterosexual, male protagonist questions his social horizons only to return, as it were, to an authority in whose active replication he “discovers” himself. Humboldt’s vision of a humanist education advances, instead, a notion of an “autonomous” engagement with the arts –​bracketed off from the external, instrumentalist demands of socialisation, a humanist education allows the subject to engage without externally dictated interests or motivation, in the public culture of a free and democratic nation. The nineteenth-​century English uses of the Bildungsroman, in Dickens or in Eliot, for example, takes a pronounced pragmatic turn, reflecting how an aesthetic-​humanist education provided avenues for socio-​economic (and gender) mobility within a highly stratified class structure. 26 Joshua Esty, “Virgins of Empire”, Modern Fiction Studies 53(2) (2007): 257–​275. 27 Jessica Schiff Berman, “Comparative Colonialisms:  Joyce, Anand, and the Question of Engagement”, Modernism/​Modernity 13.3 (2006): 465–​485. 28 Consider the emergence of massive, concerted efforts of urban planning in the North of India; the genesis of the idea of the rationalised (post)colonial city resides historically in the relocation of the capital of India to the built, “secular” city of New Delhi (1911). See Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New  York:  Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1999). See also Mulk Raj Anand’s account of his childhood in Seven Summers: A Memoir (London: Penguin Books [1951], 2011). In a pivotal episode, Anand relates his childhood memory of being taken to the Coronation Durbar of 1911, at which King George the Fifth would lay the foundation stone for Edward Lutyens’s historic work of urban design, New Delhi. Anand recalls how as a small boy, he was taken, literally under wraps, in a train compartment for the military staff attending the coronation; his entire journey is spent under a blanket, and he is kept out of sight at the ceremony. All precautions are taken to ensure that the incongruous sight of subaltern officer’s child would not mar the extraordinary pageant of Indian aristocracy and the ornamentalism of an Imperial military aesthetic, in the new city. 29 Adorno speaks of the symbolist Stefan George’s immersion in French, as other to German, in this context, and of the remaindered, merely ‘elliptical” use of the incongruous, and properly meaningless “gar” [at all] as a particle in the sentence “Nun muss ich gar/​Um den aug und haar/​Alle Tage/​In sehnen leben” (from now onwards in your eye and hair must I live in desire). (NL1, 52–​53). 30 Krishna Nandan Sinha, Mulk Raj Anand (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1975), 49, 51 (hereafter cited in the text as MRA). 31 See David E.  Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War 1914–​1918 (London: Palgrave, 1991). 32 This proposition can be borne out by a later incident in the novel, when Lalu “misunderstands” the meaning and function of a mass reproduction of “The Source”, Ingres’ “academic” study of a frontal female nude. 33 Adorno, “Veblen’s Attack on Culture” in Prisms, eds. Shierry Weber Nicholson and Samuel Weber (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1983), 2, 88; see Adorno (73–​ 94) for the full essay. 34 I note here the chronologically disconnected beginning of this passage in “[f]‌or”, the punctuated reversals of “but” and the fallacious uses of a prolific “and”,

Nation, transmodernity, unimaginable community  117 whose astonishing non sequiturs extend over two pages, and might be read, for this reason, as a use of anacoluthon. See especially Baer. 35 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 10 (hereafter cited in the text as DE). 36 I borrow the idea of “emergent” cultural form from Raymond Williams’ essay, “Dominant, Residual, Emergent”. The emergent is characterised less through the novelty of its form than through its articulation of oppositional or alternate possibilities that reside, in a given moment, at the intersection of residual aspects of an earlier, partially antiquated popular culture and a dominant (hegemonic, finished) cultural proposition: What matters, finally, in understanding emergent culture, as distinct from both the dominant and the residual, is that it is never only a matter of immediate practice; indeed it depends crucially on finding new forms or adaptations of form. Again and again what we have to observe is in effect a pre-​emergence, active and pressing but not yet fully articulated, rather than the evident emergence which could be more confidently named. (356) In Cultural Theory, An Anthology, ed. Imre Szeman and Thomas Kaposy (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2011). 37 Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies (New Delhi and Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1982), 1. 38 Rajan, Rajeswari S., “Death and the Subaltern” in “Can the Subaltern Speak?’ ”: Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C.  Morris (New  York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 39 Dhareshwar, Vivek. “Postcolonial in the Postmodern:  Or, the Political after Modernity” Economic and Political Weekly, 30 (30) (1995):  104–​112. I  cite Dhareshwar’s charges against Kapur’s perpetually deferred space of the avant-​ garde, since the critique is paradigmatic of the contention that the Left’s delay in making contact with its subaltern constituency, is, in effect, a self-​renewing precondition for its historically elitist distance/​advantage. 40 Spivak, G.  C., A Critique of Postcolonial Reason:  Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 41 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffins and Helen Tiffin (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 1995).

Part II

Formations of the contemporary

3  “Tis love of earth that he instils” English without soil in Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music

From one city of shrunken power and lapsing music, I travel now to another. Let there be some change in my state. (Vikram Seth, An Equal Music 242–​243)1

…the paradox of a light rustling [Rauschen] still perceptible only virtually in an inner acoustical space, into which the heroic landscape disappears, sacrificing the sharpness of their images into dissolution and openness… (Adorno, “Lyric Poetry and Society”, Notes to Literature, Vol. 1, 27)

In a sharp contradiction to the monumental historical fiction of post-​ Independent India, A Suitable Boy (1994), Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music (1999) has been almost entirely neglected by critical scholarship in the decade and a half since its publication. This paucity of critical interest is particularly striking when measured against the celebrated reception of novels by Seth’s contemporaries, Amit Chaudhuri and Salman Rushdie, and their respective treatments of North Indian classical and rock music, published in the same period.2 Such scholarly indifference to the possible contribution of An Equal Music to the contemporary Indian novel in English might be explained, at first glance, by the novel’s plot, which turns on an intricate and possibly exclusionary focus on Western Classical music. In this, and through a setting that is almost exclusively situated in London and metropolitan Europe, the novel stages a total departure from the narrative content and subject matter of A Suitable Boy. Notwithstanding this apparent turn from the genre of the “great Indian novel”, the writing of An Equal Music was, on the author’s own account, enabled by the phenomenal commercial success and critical visibility of the previous work.3 Despite its marginal place within scholarly commentaries on Seth’s oeuvre, An Equal Music was anticipated through frenzied marketing campaigns, domestic and international, that exploited its near simultaneous publication with Rushdie’s novel of musical travel between the subcontinent and the West; both novels were tagged for a Booker Prize nomination. As a consequence, the work was

122  Formations of the contemporary widely reviewed in the popular press –​where, despite a range of evaluations, it has been criticised fairly uniformly for its sentimentality and an associated lack of narrative credibility. These criticisms come together in a consensus on the work’s apparently myopic cultural focus, which is trained on an unabashedly traditionalist understanding of the Western Classical musical canon (the subject matter thus presents an obvious counterpoint to both the “popular” and the “classical”, as explored by Rushdie and Chaudhuri respectively). The charge continues to inflect readings of An Equal Music as no other work in Seth’s diverse corpus. Both scholarly commentaries and press reviews suggest that the novel’s inconsistencies derive from the narrative’s setting (London, also Vienna and Venice), or otherwise, from its subject matter (largely, the early Romantic period of Western Classical music). While critics attribute the novel’s uneven quality to these different dimensions of the narrative, they typically assume a disjunction between its content and thematic concerns, and the possibilities of its dominant narrative voice, which belongs to the fiction’s protagonist, Michael Holme. Isolated, emotionally volatile and insecure about his socio-​economic origins, Michael’s identity, as an unmarried man in his late thirties and as a professional of modest means, is tenuously held together by his role as second violinist with the London-​based Maggiore Quartet. Narrated through the first-​person perspective, the restricted, expert world of professional chamber music is made accessible to the reader through the protagonist’s solitary thought-​world, which, for all its precarious introversion, is articulated through the novel’s deliberate and extended adherence to a conventional style of realist narration. As a result, An Equal Music’s narrated world –​that of early nineteenth-​century chamber music and its contemporary institutionalisation within rarefied circles of expert performance and dedicated rehearsal  –​is vocalised through unmusical, acutely literary registers that are “self-​conscious[ly] poetic” and perceptibly “higher-​toned” than Michael’s own speaking voice.4 An especially striking feature of criticism on the novel emerges here, in the unfailing association of these (perhaps embarrassing) stylistic inconsistencies with speculations regarding the origins of Calcutta-​born Seth. While the insularity of the novel’s setting and characterisations is duly noted by both Indian critics as well as British and American reviewers –​ albeit for different, and differently, illuminating reasons –​both sets of criticism implicate the lack of narrative credibility to questions of biography. In a consensus on the formal and emotional incongruities that inhere in the novel’s narrative voice, critics locate a contradiction between the author’s cultural and national roots  –​whose highlight is the especially Anglophonic “distinction” of elite Indian and English educations at Doon and Tonbridge Schools –​and the work’s “imported” subject matter.5 This felt inconsistency between the narrative’s “location of culture” (Europe, London, a Western classical musical tradition) and the positioning of the author, as outlined by critical receptions of the novel, is, perhaps, the

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  123 overriding reason for the novel’s neglect by scholarship on the contemporary Indian novel in English. It is the especially ideological impoverishment of An Equal Music, then, that seems self-​evident to reviewers who explicitly bring Seth’s biography of cultural privilege to bear on the novel’s refusal to mobilise (or even allude to) the voice of the “other” in its account of metropolitan culture and identity. Totally comprised of references to Western classical traditions of musical performance and composition, the work’s exclusionary symbolic and cultural context is, indeed, repeated in the narrative, in the spaces and landscape of a strangely “depopulate[d]‌” fictional world (Pandurang, 175).6 Set predominantly in Central-​West London, especially in and around the gentrified residential areas of Hyde Park, the novel is delinked from any form of subjectivity that does not originate in the ethnically and socio-​ economically homogenous cast of its characters  –​white, largely upper-​ middle class and preponderantly male, all of the novel’s characters are, without exception, denizens of the especially self-​involved realm of professional chamber music. As such, if A Suitable Boy sought to transform the novelistic genre of the family saga into the consanguineal idiom of “nation/​ home”, this novel does not merely depart from the historical ground of post-​Independent Anglophonic fiction; its specific treatment of “England”, as well as the course of its own, ostensibly untroubled migration towards a European cultural canon continues to present a peculiar kind of opacity for postcolonial criticism.

Absolute value: Situating the politics of musical equality In “The Complex Case of Vikram Seth: Questioning the International in An Equal Music”, Mala Pandurang makes her own case against Seth’s retrograde affiliation with modalities of Western canonicity by identifying the only passage in the novel that evokes metropolitan Britain through the spatial markers of a culturally and ethnically plural city. In the cited episode, the protagonist makes a visit to Manchester, a city that he recollects happily from his university days at the Royal Manchester College of Music. Michael is depicted as walking a familiar route, “past the Habib Bank, and the Allied Bank of Pakistan, the clothing warehouses, a Jewish museum, a mosque, a church, a McDonalds, sauna, solicitors, pub, video-​ shop, Boots, bakers, sandwich bar, kebab house” (AEM 62, cited in Pandurang, 182). His buoyant gaze discloses a narratorial point of view that relates the specificities of this urban landscape to a plot line that, in significant measure, recounts the origins of Michael’s musical education outside the cultural capital –​such a point of view discretely underscores the aspirational role that music has played in Michael’s social advancement from working lower middle class origins to the metropolitan centre of London. Pandurang, however, emphasises the critical import of this passage somewhat differently to assert  –​rightly  –​that “one cannot help but ask, just where are all the

124  Formations of the contemporary people” in the spaces delineated by Michael’s gaze, as also by the trajectory of his musical Bildung (182). Indeed, to Pandurang’s incredulous question, “[a]‌re the exclusions deliberate?”, the answer can only be “yes”  –​after all, Seth trails together the spaces and structures of a multicultural Britain in this passage to denude them, quite visibly, of their racial markers. For Pandurang, the novel’s single, disembodied allusion to the contours of what she terms “a new Britain” is symptomatic of a larger ideological whitewash, as it were, or a specific cultural positioning that attends the “ new emergent cosmopolitan trans-​nationalism” of the late 1990s. On this view, the novel’s ethnically blank approach (“gori-​fication”) to musical value, and its subsequent valorisation of the location of such value serves to suppress dissonant, syncretising or even deracinated experiences of migration and displacement whose contemporary cultural expressions are marked typically by “ambivalence, liminality [and] conflict” (176). In a suggestive conclusion, Pandurang aligns her contention regarding An Equal Music’s narrative impoverishment with Seth’s decision to depart from the fictional idioms and genre of the “natal order”, developed so consummately in A Suitable Boy’s drama of conjugality and kinship. The tendentiousness of Pandurang’s thesis on a presumed “natal order” of writing is more broadly instructive for our discussion, insofar as it brings together a polemical reflection on the author’s (ethnicised) biographical origins, with contentions regarding the proper form of postcolonial fiction in the era of multinational capital. For critics that share Pandurang’s paradigmatic resistance to the narrative world of An Equal Music  –​a world that is located transparently in a recognisable geo-​cultural landscape but which nevertheless remains oddly removed from its “embodied” readership, whether domestic or diasporic –​the thematic and formal differences between An Equal Music and A Suitable Boy are significant. Ultimately, for this approach, these differences between the two novels speak to the author’s conflation of personal privilege, which rests on inherited (post/​colonial) class distinctions of cultural and physical mobility, with the fully commodified value of textual circulation in the era of multinational publishing. Indeed, narrative depictions of “cosmopolitanism” may be seen to reside, above all, in the novel’s insistence on music’s putative universalism. While Pandurang has little say about this, it could be argued, in the vein of her critique, that the titular reference to an “equal music” does in fact index a specifically nineteenth-​century notion of music and an associated discursive tradition in Europe, through which Classical music came to exemplify a supreme cultural good. In this historical context, the meaning or value of music was believed widely to be immediately apprehensible and self-​justifying, requiring neither exegesis in verbal or pictorial media, nor (therefore) any further “equivalence” with other moral norms: “[B]‌y ridding itself of texts and the expression of definite emotions, music does not degenerate into preliterate vagueness, as was believed in the eighteenth century, but rather transcends language to become a prefiguration of the infinite

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  125 and absolute” (Dalhaus, Nineteenth-​century Music 31).7 In the plenitude of its extra-​verbal significance, music became the paradigm of autonomous art, where the principle of aesthetic autonomy in its multiple historical and philosophical variants is, itself, a historically “constitutive process” of early nineteenth-​century Romanticism. Music’s putative universalism resided in its capacity to preserve and even re-​enchant the older truths of religion or conventional faith while allowing for a non-​denominational, “enlightened” mode of self-​transcendence.8 Especially in its reconstituted emphasis on instrumental music, however, and the attendant stress on proprieties of praxis and disciplined performance, musical experience was seen to be an integral dimension of ethical and existential self-​constitution. As such, the quality of “pure” music functioned as a metonym for the ascendant, bourgeois ideal of autonomy, and for the interlinked post-​Kantian belief in a communal reciprocity that was perpetually deferred from the judgements of a divided worldly context, but which could nonetheless orient and, in effect, educate this world to rise above finite needs and contexts through disinterested aesthetic interaction. Adorno makes the point: “Nowhere does the Kantian definition of art as purposeless efficacy, a definition formulated at the outset of bourgeois emancipation fit its object more precisely than in chamber music” (Adorno, ISM 86).9 According to Adorno, the idea, materials and performance of this understanding of musicality appeared on the eve of the industrial revolution, and was tantamount to the very ideal of (Kantian) aesthetics. In other words, the nineteenth-​century “flowering” of a “Classical” style and repertory of music attested to quintessentially modern processes of cultural rationalisation. In this way, the “classical”, as Pandurang assumes, is indeed of central import to ideological discussions regarding the apparently exemplary historical significance of the European experience, for other, “alternative” experiences of societal and cultural modernisation. Key, in this regard, is the development (both effective and notional) of the “liberal individual”, a figure that reaches its “peak” in the Romantic consolidation of the medium and materials of chamber music, with the appeal to music intimacy. The interiorised subject of chamber music is identified by Adorno through processes of societal and existential individuation  –​freed from the metaphysical and social bonds of a residual feudal order, this subject was marked by the newly found “substantiality” of its privacy. At the same time, and if only in those socio-​economic constituencies affluent enough to be exempted from physical labour, the private individual was protected equally from the imperatives of economic productivity and equivalence that were yet to be generalised into the principle norm of industrial society (Adorno, ISM 86). A citation from the fifteenth of John Donne’s sermons, the title’s allusion to music’s ethical promise of reconciliation, as to the ideological freight of this idea, is worn lightly by the novel. An epigraph from Donne further outlines the Anglican ideal of “one equal communion and identity” through an analogy to musical counterpoint, in which harmonically interdependent

126  Formations of the contemporary voices retain their lines of independence through the contours of pitch and rhythm. Notably, the epigraph is preceded by a coded personal dedication to the violinist Phillipe Honore, Seth’s partner at the time, in the form of an acrostic sonnet. This framing vision of the equality of discrete voices and positions within the horizon of an uncoerced social communion is itself displaced and pluralised by the narrative through a multiplicity of historical allusions. Especially significant in this regard is the narrative’s implicit reference to the nineteenth-​century reception of J.S. Bach’s instrumental (rather than liturgical) compositions, which were identified, anachronistically, as the Romantic prototype of absolute musical value; in this, the title’s reference to a utopic reciprocity might be seen to draw tacitly upon a socio-​ historical context that Adorno aligns (above) with the inception of liberal individualism, and its historic promise.10 Following Stephen Benson’s insight in “Contemporary Fiction and the Music Itself”, Seth’s work adheres quite discernibly in this dimension to a stringently nineteenth-​century evaluation of music, in which Bach’s “pure” (that is to say, wordless or instrumental) music was reconstituted as the consummate instance of autonomous, or self-​justifying value.11 The idea of absolute musical freedom, detached from referential systems of meaning, corresponded with the lived experience of an emergent, if still socio-​economically delimited notion of bourgeois “autonomy”, as with the ascendant political norm of a sovereign, self-​ grounding individual. As such, it is Bach –​or rather, an established (post) Romantic reading of Bach as the secular “apotheosis of an absolute music whose self-​sufficiency offers a model of transcendence” –​that is central to the novel’s exposition of musical equanimity (Benson, 118). As a constructed figure of Europe’s nineteenth century, or, in its early-​ mid-​twentieth-​century guise as the retrospectively acknowledged “father” of chamber music, the oeuvre and authority of Bach is associated in the novel primarily with the late, unfinished, The Art of the Fugue. Featuring as the concluding motif of the narrative, this exemplary work of musical counterpoint comes eventually to fulfil the title’s reference to an anticipated musical reconciliation between voices and worlds, which, like the misaligned desires of the novel’s lovers, have been irremediably divided in life. In this, Seth’s title directs us towards an historically specific “ideology” of European music, which holds that “some forms and even individual works of music [are] valuable in and of themselves” (Benson, 118). The narrative goes on to register this confirmation of cultural value affectively –​and in this sense with historical consistency –​in the “romance” of private, interiorised meaning, played out through musical communication between lovers. For this reason, and notwithstanding the wealth of compressed historical references set in play by the title, the actual musical repertory of An Equal Music turns on a possibly middle brow, even, for some, “fundamentally uncreative” presupposition of the valorised “masterpiece” (Spice, 15). However it is evaluated, Seth’s musical programme underscores a deliberately restorative ideal of “classical” music/​culture, which the narrative, in turn,

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  127 strives to apotheosise through its own textual development. It is perhaps in this manner that Seth’s uninvasive, conventional use of realist style takes on especial significance: Itself an integral dimension of the work’s reconstructive ambitions, the narrative of An Equal Music demonstrates a studied adherence to the secularising, historicist imperatives of the nineteenth-​century realist novel that developed during the same period of this musical history. Seth’s own brand of historicism, then, resides in his subtle designation of the artefactual status of this “nineteenth century”, which is materialised through the various objects of the work’s recuperative efforts. Such an effort comes together in the narrative’s manifestly inequitable attempt to “universalise” its own decisions in the selection of texts that make up the musical digest of An Equal Music, in a “canon” that is pointedly (and sometimes clumsily) established at the expense of competing claims to both the repertory of the “classical” ideal, as to very notion of “tradition”.12 To begin, I suggest that Seth’s narrative style is constructed quite precisely in the image of its historical origins, the “classical” aesthetic, which served as an “apolitical compensation” for the worldly inequalities upon which nineteenth-​century middle-​class cultural practice was actually predicated (Benson, 126). As Adorno, Dalhaus, and, more recently, political economist Jacques Attali have variously contended, the experience of inequality –​which remained ineliminable from everyday life  –​was at once suppressed, symbolically “sacrificed” from explicit representation, and repeatedly “coded” into the democratic promise of Kantian reciprocity that presided at the core of early Romantic music.13 The characteristically “private” aspects of the romanticist development of chamber music (in the intimate interpersonal space of performance and audition, in the small-​scale modalities of compositional form and instrumentation) operate as a veritable transcription of what the music excludes –​a broader, worldly context of class to which the socio-​economic “distinction” of middle-​class musical production and reception attests. Extending as well as displacing this line of critical scholarship, I engage Cameron Fae Bushnell’s proposition in this chapter, which suggests that the politics of the title’s compressed allusion to the idea of deep, integral cultural origins resides here, in an implicit reference to what Homi Bhabha has identified as the “accumulative, continuist temporalities of the pedagogical”.14 For Bhabha, pedagogical normativities operate as the “double narrative” of both colonial authority and the decolonised nation. In the title, Seth already foregrounds musical canonicity as the locus of a self-​consistent, invariant appeal to culture and community –​the “West” of a hegemonic Classical aesthetic –​but, what is more, he also tacitly implicates the narrative regime of nineteenth-​century realism as it travels from colonial to postcolonial contexts, within self-​conserving, pedagogical orthodoxies. While my reading departs from an implicit consensus on the elitism of a novel “written by an Indian” about a “high” European tradition of chamber of music “with no Indians in it”, it nevertheless suggests that Seth’s suppression of the question of “Indianness” in favour of an aesthetics of

128  Formations of the contemporary semblance, anachronism and de-​ territorialisation presents a mutational rewriting of the erstwhile lag between a European nineteenth century and the post-​imperial present (Pandurang, 182). In this dimension, the work might be read in continuity with Seth’s previous “monumental” contribution to the genre of the Anglophonic novel in India, A Suitable Boy whose slyly anachronistic uses of mid-​twentieth-​century realism stood in as an alibi for the effective absence, in the historical present, of the Nehruvian social totality presupposed by its (almost interminable) narrative. Seth’s more recent work excises every residue of the voice (or, to follow Pandurang, “skin”) of the native informant, as of the postcolonial allegory of the domestic/​national interior from its narrative. At the same time, the novel places its designation of the “West” within movable, if historically delimited scales of performance. Through self-​conscious stagings of the praxial discipline and pedagogies associated with the “classical”, the West is configured not only as the privileged scene of “subjective” expression but also, more suggestively, as an internally divided site of accumulated cultural capital. An Equal Music locates competing cultural hegemonies –​Vienna and England, music and literature, German and Englishness  –​as they “lapse” towards each other in mutually diminishing claims upon historical supremacy, even as they strain to enact and naturalise their historical differences within the narrative. The politics of An Equal Music resides in this processual (rather than a contained or accomplished) staging of a cultural destination where the ideality of such a cultural location, the paradigmatic, natural source of value, is precisely identified with the exclusive and totalising authority of the “West”. As such, Seth’s novelistic strategy might be seen to turn discretely on the contradiction between the novel’s various (internally riven) presuppositions of a regulative ideal of culture, and a text that cannot but locate these monumental cultural “powers” performatively –​in “shrunken”, insurmountably minor registers of displacement, diminishment and relative peripherality. The loci of a minor culture remain, in other words, illusory; they are disclosed through textual logics of compression and displacement, rather than in any singular or privileged figure of identity. Eluding positivistic coordinates of identification, difference and presentation, this de-​ subjectified dynamic of the narrative is, itself, the “minority perspective” that Bhabha famously underscores (and possibly re-​ schematises) in his account of the performative contradictions that beset cultural orthodoxies in both the imperial and (post)colonial nation–​those “pedagogies” of the self that insist on transcendence, universalism and organic metaphors of unity in diversity (Bhabha, LC  2–​3). Like the strains of absolute music, or in An Equal Music’s de-​territorialised references to the proper location of its own English medium (comprising the two main dimensions of this chapter’s discussion), the minor perspective is never fully voiced or identified. “Thinned out of existence”, it comes to reside, processually, in Seth’s narratorial aesthetic (AEM 90). Through the deracinating, always exploitable force of such complex textuality, An

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  129 Equal Music continues to invite readings in circumvention of assumptions regarding a monolithic “cultural” subjectivity upon which its own plot and narrative appear to insist and which, in turn, insidiously inform critical reflections on the (in)authenticity of its characters or subject matter. By the same token, the novel deflects conjectural readings that presuppose, and therefore eventually prescribe, the proper distance between the narrative’s semblance of a “European” identity, and the author’s biography. Whether textual or biographical, the politics of identity are recoded within an historically specific epistemology that turns on figures of musical performance, aesthetic semblance and, indeed, in that “stock-​ figure” of nineteenth-​century European chamber music  –​the non-​verbal transcendence of personality or self-​interest through the collaborative “instant” of the intimate musical recital (Benson, 121; Adorno, ISM 87).15 Identity, including questions of authorial biography, is presented through such musical tropes as being irremediably an effect of metaphor, figuration and discursive construction. Paradoxically, and for the same reason, the question of identity returns unavoidably to Seth’s fiction of “pure” music in the delayed form of narrative supplements that the work –​like music itself –​at once solicits and displaces. Benson’s elegant account of the inexorable narrative interference with claims to musical autonomy within the larger genre of “literary music” might be extended here, towards postcolonial questions of place, positioning and authorial propriety. The slippage between criticisms of the novel’s style with appeals to the author’s biography is produced precisely out of the narrative’s considered elision of the category of the nation –​to which Benson has nothing to say –​from its privileged “location of culture”, the site of classical music. Yet it is also for this reason that An Equal Music leaves its map of music open to a host of compensatory imaginings of national origins. Whether via the demands of contemporary criticism that require the narrative to “position” its voice and rigorously identify its historical relation to “the conventional centre and periphery relationship” (which is always outstripped by the novel’s post-​political imagination), or, alternatively, in the narrative’s own, subtle designation of various cultural nationalisms that survive their historical deracination after the demise of Empire, the nation is, indeed, compelled to re-​enter the text as an unspoken yet informing absence. Still a dominant notion of place, the nation returns, however, as a belated, de-​spatialised, and peculiarly immaterial frame of reference for recognising, reproducing and, indeed, “performing” the value of an integral cultural good. In other words, as the exemplary model of an autonomous, non-​referential experience of the self, the resolutely self-​”sufficient gift” of music emerges, paradoxically enough, and along with Benson, as a discursive and socially constituted value. As an analogue to the ideal of an integral communal culture that has outlived its national coordinates, a paradigmatic musicality, too, emerges as a matter of textuality, through processes of negation and formal displacement and in an entrenched narrative trajectory of self-​effacement towards

130  Formations of the contemporary which the expression of the “individual” performer tends. The significance of the ideal and history of absolute musical value is discovered afterwards, as it were, at a degree of remoteness from the “proper” place of its origins –​ whether in narrative supplements, in writerly “scorings” of the page with both coded and unsounded meanings, in the novel’s linkages between narrative forms and the marks of writerly inscription, or in the muted afterlife of musical experience, in deafness (AEM 308).

The plot and romance of canonicity in Seth’s “Western Classical” fiction Making music and making love –​it’s a bit too easy an equation. (Julia, in An Equal Music 136)

An Equal Music is plotted around an illicit affair between Michael Holme and his first and long-​estranged love, a gifted pianist named Julia McNicholl. The novel introduces the thirty-​something Michael as a second violinist in the increasingly successful, London-​based Maggiore Quartet. The reader first encounters Michael between practice sessions in the Bayswater area, his routine of solitary walks around Hyde Park and in his eccentric habit of swimming in the polluted waters of the Serpentine (which, in their subterranean connection to the Thames, lead outwards, perhaps, from their urban, landscaped constraints to a bucolic memory of Michael’s childhood in the north of England). In the space of this obviously contracted itinerary, Michael is presented as a depleted figure whose story has, as it were, gone before him –​he appears to have forfeited his adult years to the protracted aftermath of his youthful love affair. Emotionally withdrawn, Michael lives alone in a studio-​flat above Hyde Park, with the ten-​year-​old memory of Julia. From the outset, this yearning remembrance is presented in music that Michael hears and plays; the early references in the novel to Bach, Haydn and Beethoven are presented as repertoires, literally, of a singular memory. During practice or tutorials, Michael “rehearses” the figure of Julia in the tactile and auditory registers of the piece being played: “As for the one I remember, I see her with her eyes closed, playing Bach to herself: An English Suite” (Seth, AEM 7). A  peculiarly embodied presence within the music while also being removed from the scene of its performance, the half-​ Austrian Julia is first introduced as “the one” inviolable figure of Michael’s past. While Michael plays in an “English” London-​based quartet (all of whose members “live within walking distance of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens”),16 the physical weight of the instrument in his hands and the viscerally registered timbre of its sound recalls his past in Vienna, where Julia and Michael were students and lovers. If London features as the theatre of the present, it is Vienna, in all its historical and ideological privilege, that holds the full significance of Michael’s

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  131 musical life. While the “back-​story” provided to the reader gives a sketchy account of the young Michael’s decision to walk out on Julia during a sudden psychological crisis while they were both students in Vienna, the narrative continually alludes to the memory of Michael’s intolerably difficult relationship to his Austrian teacher, Carl Käll. This triangulation is an especially interesting dimension of the narrative, implicitly affecting Julia’s unreconciled presence within Michael’s still volatile emotional life, and even, perhaps, serving as the novel’s narrative precondition. As a sub-​plot, the Käll story is never quite finished; brief letters from Käll to Michael in the present intersperse the length of the narrative to suggest that the old master is dying. The story involving Käll is insufficiently developed, giving neither a convincing account of Michael’s original motive for abandoning Julia nor a full description of his characteristic erraticism in the present. Read as an off-​centre if unresolved account of authority –​one that pushes on the particularly heterosexual imperatives of the love story without directly entering into it –​these distracting references to Käll suggest that Julia has been forced, almost contingently, to bear the brunt of a particularly masculine drama of socialisation. Michael’s youthful assertion of artistic and emotional independence is, paradoxically, inseparable from a disabling compromise of his identity; having refused to conform to Käll’s style of playing, Michael suffers a near breakdown and walks out of the Hochschule  –​ as on Julia. Detailing the various spaces of Michael’s education, the narrative aligns scenes of educability and conflict with the disciplinary location of his highly specialised musical training abroad. “Vienna”, then, is not only a site of sentiment (whether musical or romantic); it is also the sign of absolute cultural authority, and of the autocratic hierarchies of location and identity through which the force of “culture” is reproduced in the present. Indeed, in Käll, the musical orthodoxies and canons associated with that metropolis are placed above the minor compositional traditions of England –​and almost beyond the reach of the protagonist’s working-​class origins in the industrial landscapes of Manchester and the provincial, now-​suburbanised market town of Rochdale (to be taken up later). As such, An Equal Music’s love story is most obviously an account of Michael’s journey back to Julia; but it is also, and by the same token, Michael’s subterranean return to the forfeited integrity of his character and to the cultural site and shape of its origins. The novel brings Julia back to Michael through a chance encounter in London. Julia is now married to a Boston banker, always civil and especially accommodating to Michael; they have a six-​year-​old boy. An affair ensues during Michael and Julia’s preparation for the performance of The Trout Quintet with the Maggiore in Vienna. During their subsequent sojourn in Venice, Julia ends the affair. In the course of their last night together, Michael appears to repeat his youthful (if, at the time, not entirely conscious) punishment of Julia by marking her violently with his teeth. At once sentimental and misogynistic, this possibly forced narrative detail becomes suggestive

132  Formations of the contemporary in light of the novel’s consistent characterisation of Julia through her ease of access to the cultural and intellectual distinctions associated traditionally with chamber music, which the adult Michael, despite his status as a trained, reasonably successful musician, is never able to fully assume. In this aspect, An Equal Music directly inherits and repeats a discursive evaluation of nineteenth-​century classical music in which the promise of democratic equality, especially as realised in the collaborative reciprocity of chamber music practices, was itself an effect of suppressed lines of class conflict that “middle-​class” music sought to negate in the circumscribed hospitality of the domestic space and in the temporary suspension of the time of labour in the duration of the performance (Dalhaus, 43). Indeed, Michael is always aware of the trajectory of social mobility afforded by his musical education. The first in his family to go to university, his monetarily unprofitable musical education does not feature as a recognisable profession for his family, and has developed over the years from being the object of parental disappointment into a point of tolerated indifference. When Michael laments that “they are tearing music out of the lives of poorer children”, his personal point of view extends across familial relations of mutual incomprehension, to pedantically underscore the impotence of an historically superannuated ideology of musical universalism: “Now children, say your L M N. Literate, Musicate, Numerate. Illiterate, Inmusicate. Innumerate … Leave music to those who can afford indulgences. In twenty years no butcher’s son will be a violinist, no, nor daughter either” (AEM 346). In the digest of historical anachronisms presented above, the contrapuntal model of pure or wordless music was realised belatedly in the genre and medium of chamber music, as the ideal of a reciprocal conversation between equals. Seth repeats this process studiously in descriptions of the Maggiore’s collective rehearsals: “A strange composite being we are, not ourselves anymore, but the Maggiore, composed of so many disjunct parts: chairs, stands, music bows, instruments, musicians…” (AEM 86) and in scenes of tuning in –​or up –​to such a potentially emancipated collectivity: “No matter how fraught our lives have been … no matter how abrasive our disputes over people or politics, or how visceral our differences of what we are to play and how … it reminds us, when it comes to it, that we are one” (10). On this “unitarian” understanding of the ideal of musical equanimity, contrapuntality features out of its own context, and in an historically accurate assessment, as the quintessentially bourgeois norm of equal, cultural citizenship. By the same token, it is also charged with preserving the constitutive autonomy of values of privacy and intimacy that reside outside the family and beyond any investment in organised “politics”, and which are associated formally, in An Equal Music, with the novel’s adherence to the conventions (and inequitable demands) of heterosexual romance. As such the medium and instrument of music, the quartet and the violin, might be seen to mediate Michael’s “characteristic” posture of emotional inaccessibility  –​always tinged with sexual aggression  –​with the ethical

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  133 import of the romance, the story of Michael’s “sentimental (re)education”. Eventually, however, music also divides him from Julia. Michael must find Julia again in order to learn to relinquish her physically –​but this second surrender of Michael’s will must be absolute not only because Julia chooses her family (and retires, perhaps, to her “proper” upper-​middle class origins), but because she is slipping towards a terminal loss of hearing brought on by an autoimmune disease of the inner ear. Resuscitating the high-​Romantic myth (cliché?) of musical deafness, the narrative increasingly pictures Julia from a remove. Watched from a distance by Michael, Julia gives a final concert of the Art of the Fugue to a sold-​out audience at Wigmore Hall. Her masterful performance realises the narrative’s development of music as a “beauty beyond imagining –​clear, lovely, inexorable, phrase across phrase, phrase echoing phrase, the incomplete, the unending ‘Art of the Fugue’. It is an equal music” (AEM 380). In the interim between the affair and Julia’s solo recital, Michael abandons his career and place with the Maggiore even as Julia has learned to master her performance through a tactile memory of the keyboard. In the first place, Julia’s final accomplishment of “an equal music” comes to stand, ambiguously, for a totalised or fully internalised knowledge of the canonical masterpiece that she plays; her playing is produced entirely in lieu of the ability to modulate one’s performance by hearing it in time, or as it ensues. In this, Julia demonstrates a kind of virtuosic inner discipline that is reducible neither to the powers of rote memory, nor to the collaborative efforts of the Maggiore that have previously bridged the hearing world to Julia by accentuating bodily movements of breathing and gesture during a performance. Throughout the second half of the novel, these have comprised visual rather than auditory “cues” for playing in time (resulting, ironically, in a slight but perceptible lag in Julia’s playing, which is jokingly alluded to her “leading from behind”). As a complex system of signs that are mimetic of the various musical subjectivities that make up the quartet, such signals are consistently analogised by the narrative to writerly inscriptions or scorings on a page. Julia’s last concert appearance –​where she pointedly “does not read the music” –​might be seen as an exemplary performance of a “solo” recital. It comprises the narrative’s allegorical gesture towards the auratic nineteenth-​century figure of the solitary musical virtuoso, which would, in fact, supplant the conventions and collaborative spaces of the chamber music genre. Highlighting the utterly interiorised realm of Julia’s acoustical perception, the novel also suggests that she has been “forced to be original” insofar as her music now rises above all residual signs of prior musical experience (whether in historical recordings or in a bodily engagement with other musicians). In this prescient turn, the narrative appears to distinguish most starkly between the ideal of immediate, sonorically unique musical value and its after-​inscription in the material and technology of the fallen copy. Julia’s singular performance is destined to become an archived, indeed, moribund

134  Formations of the contemporary memory of professional virtuosity precisely because it is unlikely to be repeated “live”; the narrative makes it explicit that Julia is increasingly unable to play pieces not previously heard (or, more generally, identify sounds not already experienced), so it is improbable that she will be able to access such a de-​referentialised world of sound on a public stage again. Ironically, this terminal form of loss contributes to Julia’s marketable aura as a “deaf” professional performer within the theatre of a national institution. Her commodification appears to allegorise a depletion of the value and history of embodied musical publics, insofar as Julia’s success coincides with her tragic forfeiture of an authentic engagement, via the recital stage, with collective life more generally. As a last, late exercise of musical memory, the performance at Wigmore Hall inaugurates Julia’s mythic disappearance into an inner world of silence. An unstated but more ambiguous aspect of this allegory of music’s leave-​ taking from the realm of phenomenal experience is the suggestion, advanced discretely throughout the novel, of Julia’s persistence thereafter, past the end of the novel, as an ornamental, conventionally feminised figure in the expatriate finance culture of cocktail parties, Saturday bakes and parent–​ teacher association (PTA) meetings at international schools (to which the narrative makes consistent passing references). In her unrelieved privatisation  –​that is, as a classical figure of banishment  –​the disabled, domesticated Julia bears the symbolic weight of Seth’s teleology of the “end” of the history and value of Western canonicity. Through a complex and profoundly ambiguous economy of erotic erasure and cultural compensation, Seth’s fiction of “absolute” music concludes on a note of tenuous affirmation –​thereby staging, almost ritualistically, the reader’s Orphic return to the title’s anticipation of an atopic, disembodied musical equilibrium. Rendered incapable of playing after the affair, Michael is now an impecunious, de-​professionalised figure. He listens through the first half of the programme and finds an inhuman clarity in music, which stands in lieu of the sacrificed Julia: “Music, such music is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why not hope to grieve? … It is enough to hear such music” (AEM 381). He exits at the interval, and while the possibility is left unstated, the novel’s conclusion suggests that Julia’s final “gift” to Michael is a recovery of his musical abilities, and so also, a restoration of his social identity. Left “incomplete” at the death of its author, Bach’s late work is hailed at the conclusion of the novel as an “inexorable” cultural force presumably because it affords, one last time, the vision of an unsurpassable final transcendence (associated by An Equal Music, therefore, with the conventional post-​Romantic idealisation of an artist’s heroic encounter with mortality and her biographical trace, thereafter, in the reified masterpiece). But there is also the inexorable “echoing” of the love story, which emerges belatedly –​in and as the metonymic remainder of violence done to Julia –​as the “sufficient” value of music. As such, and following Benson, the failed love affair and the

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  135 form of the romance reestablishes as “unending” a textual economy of the “gift”, which is at once violently privative of the canonic value of the Western Classical aesthetic, and a necessary surplus for its reception in another, “unfinished” or inconclusively identified context. To rephrase Benson’s proposition somewhat differently, it is the romance and its insurmountable linguistic ground –​in inequity, corporeal “suffering”, and the ritualised cruelty of cultural erasure –​that confirms the historical finitude of the novel’s own, apparently unsurpassed “location of culture” (Adorno, ISM 95). Following Adorno, Seth’s novel might now be approached against the grain, through prolific counter-​images of narrative intrusion, as a writerly allegory of musical failure. As the “constructive consolidation” of an insentient or “unhearing” nineteenth century, and especially in its recuperation of the style of narrative realism, Seth’s constructivism is itself, manifestly, a part of the historical price [that] chamber music had to pay for sheltering a subjectivity that needs to surrogate no public and stays unimperiled within itself, as it were: a moment of privacy in the negative sense, of petty bourgeois happiness in hiding … [Even when later] romanticist… chamber music works start to objectify themselves in constructive consolidation out of their own substance, [they] show traces of it still …in a tone borrowed from Victorian chromolithographs … Music springs from the split and dubious condition of the whole … If it cannot transcend that condition, … unless it expresses the suffering under that condition … this limitation will limit the music itself. (Adorno, ISM 95; emphasis and modifications mine) In this self-​ abolishing allegory of the Western Classical “gift” of “sufficien[cy]”, the conclusion of An Equal Music does reaffirm a flawed yet processually established reciprocity in the qualified value of discursivity. Yet such value emerges, in these concluding narratorial registers of negation and dematerialisation, as a “limit” condition that is extraneous to and constitutive of a sovereign, irreducibly “original” music.

“In your city, I am adrift”: Landscape, travelling geographies and the realism effect Shrewd readers of A Suitable Boy have noted that Seth’s decision to rehearse (rather than strictly rehabilitate) the conventions of realist nationalist fiction deflates the traditional politics of the genre, which has been historically correlated with the institutions of state-​led modernisation in the era of decolonisation; the same attention to the formal dimensions of An Equal Music is conspicuously absent from both scholarly and popular reviews. Where A Suitable Boy remains memorable as a colossal restoration of the

136  Formations of the contemporary form of national allegory, it was also, less perceptibly, a tour de force of both English and vernacular traditions of a thoroughly “unmagical” or prosaic mimeticism. Staged as an almost interminable form of locution, the “realist” idiom of A Suitable Boy ran in an epic and entirely opposite line to the style and novels of Salman Rushdie, who, by this time, appeared as the acknowledged chronicler of the post-​Nehruvian nation for Anglophonic Indian fiction. Despite such stylistic divergence, I suggest that Seth’s compendium of novelistic uses of representational exactitude in early to mid-​twentieth-​century India is comparable to Rushdie’s fabulist narratives. Perhaps to a greater extent than Rushdie, Seth treats the novel-​form itself as an artefact of a national imaginary whose bounded world-​view has been recently, if definitively eroded by the “globalist” regime of neo-​liberalism. This is to suggest that if A Suitable Boy was celebrated as a consummate use of national realism, it also deployed the genre retroactively –​as a form that persists in the face of its manifest historical redundancy. In other words, Seth’s novel re-​employed the legacies of Victorian social realism in modern Indian literary history not to repeat the achievement of “provincialising” metropolitan representational protocols (after all, that appropriative event too has been superseded by the intervention of postcolonial critiques of national realism, discussed in the previous chapter). Rather, Seth’s heterodox choice of realist style and genres are undertaken at the turn of the millennium during India’s belated if precipitous entry into post-​industrial market economies  –​after the dissolution of the institutional and moral authority of the Nehruvian state. It is significant, then, that Seth’s stunningly loquacious “historical fiction” of post-​Independent India is mirrored by world-​ views within the text that do not quite succeed in establishing a hierarchy of perspectives. I borrow from Dirk Wiemann’s commentary on such narrative “failure” (especially his astute emphasis on the minor character Rashid, who straddles without resolution the “tradition”/​”modernity”, “country”/​ ”metropolis” divide so essential to processes of cultural and societal rationalisation in early to mid-​twentieth-​century India).17 Wiemann proposes that the work’s potentially illimitable and non-​systematic narrative components are linked together by “nothing else than the urgent will to conjoin them, while any totalising category whatsoever”, such as the national horizon, or even a transcendent form of religiosity, “is strikingly absent” (Wiemann, 173). In other words, the novel’s “monumental” content and structure is held together by the formality of a realist perspective, whose premise of a thinkable or cognitively apprehensible social world has become historically tenuous. Wiemann suggests that if Seth discretely simulates (rather than “deduces”) a national totality through the genre of realist historical fiction, it is as a convincing artefact of the present. In an era of transnational capital and dispersal, the integrated subject of Nehruvian modernity can no longer be imagined as a totality; as such, A Suitable Boy stages its “will” to epic totality within the conventions of national allegory, which are, however, retained anachronistically within a properly post-​national, and, indeed,

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  137 post-​secular era. The formal premise of realism in the Indian context –​the once-​dominant notion of “modern” Indian subjectivity –​the liberal secular consciousness of Nehruvian development –​is deployed by Seth as the historical residue of another time. Seth’s “period” novel of Independence sits athwart the formal contradiction between the psychologically “true” or “focalised perspective” of the narrative  –​the location of action in the narrative present of the 1950s –​and the work’s “longing” toward a social whole that has outlived the genre and oeuvre of its articulation, and so remains systemically untextualisable by the novel itself.18 In proposing that the mimeticism of An Equal Music should be read as a continuation of that experiment in indigenous artifice, I  suggest that Seth’s “purely” European novel turns as much on the absence of a categorical totality  –​in this case, the paradigm of a purely musical language, autonomous of narrative forms and beyond verbal description associated with the post-​Romantic traditions of absolute music in the Western canon –​as does his fiction of a “natal” domestic order.19 “Vienna”, “Europe” or “England” –​ these are the key indices of the categorical cultural norm, “music”, to which An Equal Music is ostensibly dedicated. And yet they are de-​territorialised in a manner that might be read as entirely analogous to Seth’s production of an authentic or self-​contained “Indian” realism. Read together through a moment of mutual dislocation (and extending Wiemann’s treatment of Seth, which turns on an exclusive focus on A Suitable Boy), these two novels open up a contrapuntal perspective on the space –​now strangely ungrounded –​of the passage between Seth’s European and Indian postures. An Equal Music runs at a deliberate tangent to its own narrative presupposition of a unified cultural subjectivity  –​whether this is understood as “Europe” as the site of music/​culture, or the identity of the “Indian” writer who chooses to engage such a topic –​as it does to notions of linguistic propriety that “correctly” code this subject’s voice in order to render it legible to a presumptive readership. Indeed, these are the very assumptions that inform critical responses to the novel, which implicate the history (and aura) of Seth’s cultural privilege with the novel’s suspiciously “unaccented” treatment of European music and its spaces. Bracketing the question of (Seth’s/​Michael’s) identity, I propose that An Equal Music advances its own medium as the object of interrogation. Despite the unobtrusive style of it narration and the (uneven) sentimental appeal of novelistic “identification” with characters rendered through the conventions of close psychological realism, it is the work’s use of English that introjects a sense of insuperable distance into the narrative’s temporal and geo-​spatial coordinates. At stake is the novel’s pellucid use of English, and the less obvious matter of the setting of “Englishness”. Suggestively, the cultural origins of what one critic terms an “Englishman’s novel” of music is located less in musical references than in imagery drawn from the late Victorian landscapes of the poet-​novelist George Meredith. (“Poetry to me is dearer even than music”, says the violin-​maker who can restore and quite possibly replicate

138  Formations of the contemporary the sound of baroque instruments using contemporary material; the line is an exact inversion of the author’s afterword, which asserts that “music to [the author] is dearer even than speech”.)20 This would suggest that rather than privileging music over referential forms of language, the novel’s figural use of poetry and music outstrip each other, displacing but also simulating organic assumptions about the “proper” media and cultural place of their respective expressions; a point which is developed in the rest of this chapter. The novel cites at length and repeatedly from Meredith’s lyric poem, “The Lark Ascending” (1883), and deploys the figure of the aural, aerial lark-​song as a recurring narrative motif, and as a competing metaphor for musical transcendence. Notably, however, Seth inverts Meredith’s metaphors of lyrical “ascendancy” in an oblique historical reference to the dissolution of the imperial nation after World War I by identifying the poem’s place –​in passing  –​in the impressionistic composition by Vaughan Williams of the same title (AEM 29, 70). Both references to “national” artists occur in their metonymic link to the lark, which is presented as a figure of disappearing (aural) memory. Yet such “fad[ing]” traces of a national memory are not entirely equated with material redundancy, nor do they feature as details within a neo-​ imperial chronology of civilisational ascent, decline and decrepitude (AEM 253). In episodes that take the protagonist out of metropolitan London to his working-​class origins and the site of his early musical education in the north of England, in the historic market and mill-​town of Rochdale and the industrial city of Manchester, the narrative does suggest that a territorialised imagination of cultural origins has been supplanted by post-​industrial landscapes of either expropriative suburbanisation and depopulation, or the urban immiseration that characterised the “planning blight” of Michael’s childhood (AEM 71). However, despite the observation in the novel that there is “no poetry in the name” or, presumably, place of “Rochdale”, the lark is first recalled here, through an extended recitation of Meredith by Michael’s early musical mentor and wealthy benefactor, Mrs. Formby, who has “no children of [her] own” (AEM 66). Mrs Formby’s “recital” further cues Michael’s recollections of his early musical education, and the poem is thereafter re-​inscribed into other places in the text, in fragmented, cited forms (AEM 130, 70). The lark is a privileged object of cultural memory, but it also a detail of immediate sight and trained vision, glimpsed, more than once, in the incongruent setting of Manchester and Rochdale. During a Christmas visit to Rochdale (an episode in which the extended quotation from Meredith is resumed for the second time), Michael takes a walk on a by-​lane off the expressway and eventually reclines on “the ground”, which is described at length as a subtle chart of tussocks and black earth: hundreds of different grasses, some tipped with feathery brush, some with minute white four-​pointed stars; low bilberry bushes with their berries still green. (AEM 319)

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  139 In the action of lying down, Michael loses sight of “the horizon” to “ nothing but silence and sky” and then hears –​this time, without seeing –​the lark (319). Surrendering Michael’s voice to this textured, indeed, emphatically “writerly” perception of the ground, Seth refers the narrative to a specifically poetic fascination with the lark’s invisible attachment to the soil. The scene is traditionally imagined, turning on an imputed terrestrial link that pulls the bird out from its escalating “aerial song” down to its grassy nest in the soil. In episodes such as these –​during which the reinvented Londoner feels “a bit of his own [provincial] accent returning” –​the narrative localises into verbal and literary registers of an especially English “chain” of attachment. The setting of these episodes within the topology of urban industrialisation (and its aftermath, in allusions to the ecological neglect of the present day), are richly suggestive. They imply that the idea of earthy attachment persists and is possibly even expanded through the shifting periodicities of urban decline, repopulation and renewed acculturations that mark the otherwise denuded physical geography of Michael’s origins (AEM 61, 70). Functioning as an almost documentary attestation to the lived reality of such a sustained “literary” memory, the lark features as both “visual detail” and promissory trope in the text. In the first instance, the bird is presented in terms of what Bhabha identifies as a characteristically “realist index of passing time” within the protagonist’s experience of lived and localised space. Further, by evoking the lark’s mythopoeic significance for English cultural nationalism (Vaughan Williams and Meredith, but also, indirectly, Shelley, Wordsworth and Shakespeare), the narrative preserves a sense of continuity between the protagonist’s personal history, which is characterised by his struggle against both working and upper-​/​middle-​class prejudices directed towards his desire to become a professional musician; and a conservative yet inclusive ideal of a literary Englishness that has somehow survived its physical and historical de-​contextualisation. As such, the lark signals a notion of tenuous self-​sufficiency that is both evidenced in and reproduced by the sheltering attachment to a “national culture”; the narrative’s self-​ referential allusions to the Victorian modalities of novelistic realism and the lyric-​form are a constitutive part of such serene attachment. Ultimately, however, the value of such discursively reconstituted autonomy fails to assert itself on its own terms, insofar as it is relativised and resituated as part of the “minor” contribution of British cultural traditions to the novel’s hegemonic understanding of Western Classical music. Both Bushnell and Benson illuminate the careful chronology of the novel’s programme of “Western Classical” music, plotted exactly from 1785 to 1830; this historical trajectory of musical development is thereby made to rest entirely in a German-​speaking world, one that has progressively surpassed competing compositional traditions identified with early and baroque music (these are pointedly associated in the narrative with Italy/​Vivaldi, and England/​ Handel). Subscribing to such unforgiving historicism, the novel identifies “Englishness” –​as it figures especially in the modest, even elegiac impression

140  Formations of the contemporary of nationalism in Vaughan Williams  –​with a superseded musical culture. The politics of Seth’s narratorial aesthetic is located here, in the temporal and geo-​specific distances that open up between and within the novel’s specification of normative cultural origins. Strikingly, the history of a properly “Western” classical aesthetic emerges immanently from within the linguistic matter and medium of the narrative, as an unremittingly “foreign” possibility. As such, the imagery of lark-​song presents a thoroughgoing counter-​ narrative to the novel’s substantive reifications of musical canonicity. In narrative strategies of verbalism and allusion, An Equal Music mobilises the English medium to delineate the locus and forms of an alternative understanding of self-​sufficiency. Yet in gesturing to the irreducible priority of its (“pure”, musical, German) other, the quality of Englishness discloses its own meaning in metaphorical movements of self-​displacement and negation. As a figure for specifically narratorial logics of reference, deferral and delay, the English lark allegorises a necessarily unassertive, even historically peripheralised location of culture: “But why can the lark not be itself alone, uninvested, uncompared even by those who love it most?” (AEM 319). Indeed, the measure of every “comparison” within the world of An Equal Music resides in its exacting periodisation of Western Classical music. The conservatism of such a precise chronological account of history is reinforced through the narrative’s tacit reminder of the Austro-​Hungarian Empire of this period as an historically unsurpassed sphere of “cosmopolitan” mobility. A place of residence, transition or patronage for every important composer of the early Romantic period, as Bushnell reminds us, “Vienna” is accurately conflated with the production, dissemination and posterity of the value of “Western” music. As such, the lovers’ return to Vienna does not only stage a particular topography of hegemonic cultural production, it reminds the reader that England’s national composers from any period are bereft, today, of the monumentality that attaches to the First Vienna School. It might even be suggested that the “minor” modernist composer Ralph Vaughan Williams –​who remains an enduring favourite of British audiences –​indicates, obliquely, the embarrassment of the continued dominance of the modernist “Second” Viennese tradition over London in the twentieth century. This is a strategically selective account of global space, one that identifies and thereby dismantles the location of great Western powers by situating these within a decidedly unequal sphere of cultural production and accumulation. Within this frame, the “soil” of English cultural nationalism, as rehabilitated by the narrative, presents a provocative placeholder for the question and status of postcolonial critical practices in the historical present. While it cannot be construed as a reactive refusal of England’s “minority perspective” within the narrative’s deliberately migratory point of view, this particular tradition of lyrical expressivity does allow Michael to recuperate a sense of identity that might be autonomous of (if never unscathed by) the hegemonic authority and history of Vienna (Bhabha, LC 2–​3).21 If the novel conserves a “nationalistic” norm of authenticity, it does so precisely

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  141 by confounding imperial ontologies that turn on historical claims to permanence and superiority. Indeed, like Michael’s chronically insecure sense of identity, the narrative’s “cultural origins” are located precisely in the one area where markers of Englishness operate, effectively, as the especially (post) colonial shame of a “time-​lagged” and diminished history of cultural production (AEM 161). Accordingly, Seth’s signature “Victorianism” –​which is patently denuded of an authoritative presence in this text –​skews the geo-​ political symmetry between these two imperial centres of competition. The postcolonial arrives “post” the model of centre and periphery, as a multiply dislocated perspective that inflects each iteration of the imperial metropolis, diminishing the claim to unrivalled cultural supremacy in one location, this ghostly, “minority perspective” resists the rigidly hegemonic presumptions of cultural accomplishment in the other. Suggestively, as the mnemonic trace of a terrestrial landscape whose territorial identity is effectively “lost on aerial rings” of such migration, the lark-​song signifies the ultimate absence of an historically dominant notion of Englishness (AEM 322). In the textured narration of the grassy ground (cited earlier), which is accompanied by both the sound image and citation of the lark, the narrative preserves a sense of Englishness as a self-​conserving legacy that protects Michael’s artistic and psychological integrity from the deforming authority of normative, “classical” pedagogies associated with Käll’s paternalistic “Vienna” and the “violen[t]‌” imperatives of the imperial “style”. By the same token, however, this reference to the benign nationalism of Meredith and its continuation in the minor oeuvre of Vaughan Williams also displaces London –​ sheltered by the novel as the “ground” of cultural belonging and home-​coming  –​into the always provincial, and now, even exilic margin of Europe/​Vienna. Sharing Bushnell’s proposition that England emerges as both an “insufficient and foundational” designation of identity, I conclude that this alternative account of cultural origins functions even further, as a compressed analogue of the formal, narratorial logic of An Equal Music (Bushnell, 350). Both proceed through the margins of the text’s authorising site of culture, effectively “bursting” the specific conventions that designate the proper “location of reception” of the chamber music genre and the legacy of the English language (Adorno, ISM 87). If the claim to pure musical value was articulated belatedly, through the action of discursive, inter-​ subjectively determined surpluses, “England”, too, takes the form of a dirempted remainder to imperial fin-​de-​siècle teleologies of cultural progression and decline that presuppose the Occident as the compass point of such history. If the deracinated qualities of literariness and “England” are nonetheless affirmed as integral to An Equal Music’s concluding, depleted “gift” of a Western cultural legacy, they also inscribe the location of this West with the sign of lateness. As a counter-​image to the driving motif of musical equality, writerly “investments” in a Victorian literary legacy are discovered as denuded,

142  Formations of the contemporary particularly discursive remainders to the novel’s own insistence on musical absolutism. The implications of such delayed, extra-​ musical surpluses for Donne’s vision (“there shall be … no noise nor silence, but one equal music”) are ironic in the extreme –​indeed, to a degree that Benson’s fine account of narrative demystification fails to acknowledge  –​effectively emptying the prayer for a hypostatic reunion between lovers into the abjection (Demütigung) of a world that endures without accent or intonation. As the absolute negation of the difference between sound and silence, Donne’s “equal music” is disclosed –​from the secularising perspective of the work’s literary, inscriptive “ground” –​as an atopic space, bereft of both distance and location. This, perhaps, is the overriding image of the profound deafness to which Julia, as the ultimate agent and object of such narrative substitution, must eventually succumb.22

Postcoloniality after place: the politics and practice of listening Aber welche Demütigung, wenn jemand neben mir stund und von weitem eine Flöte hörte und ich nichts hörte oder jemand den Hirten singen hörte und ich auch nichts hörte… –​  Julia. (AEM 153) The new words sink in one by one, recruitment, tinnitus, sterocilia, the organ of Corti, the basilar membrane, tympanometry, degeneration of the stria vascularis, membrane ruptures, neurofibromatosis … (AEM 156)

In her rich and to-​date isolated invitation to read An Equal Music as a postcolonial fiction, Bushnell emphasises how the novel’s compressed account of changing standards of tuning in the history of Western Classical music subtly underscores the historical flexibility with which this tradition has been actually heard, received and reconfigured over time.23 Key to her discussion is the encore from the Art of the Fugue that wins the Maggiore their impressive recording contract. In this episode, Michael alters the usual intervals that make up the 12 equally distributed “steps” between notes in the standard system of Western harmonics; despite the heterodox intonation and pitch of his instrument, the authenticity of Michael’s rendering of the piece is strikingly manifest to his audience and opens up the collective opportunity for the group to arrange and perform the work in a new way. Bushnell emphasises this development to suggest that a moment of practiced deafness is constitutive of established tonal norms of performance and audition, insofar as the “proper” pitch of the instrument is governed and ultimately determined through the exclusion of non-​conventional tonal orders. On the other hand, precisely because of Michael’s disciplined adherence to the daily habit of “fine tuning”, his ear is attuned to the slightest off-​key sound that might be generated by his

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  143 finger placement the strings; the perceptibility of such normally outlying tones opens onto further artistic and interpretative opportunities (Bushnell, 341). As a consequence, Michael’s exercises in tuning exemplify the pedagogical force of “close listening…in compliance with Western norms [of intonation]”, where such disciplined audition occurs through the auditory suppression of other tonal ranges and sonic meanings that might be construed in terms of an alternative order of sense-​giving, “musical” meaning. Such sharp listening is, therefore, placed in a symbolic continuity with physical deafness –​and the figure of Julia, for Bushnell –​insofar as it requires a “daily practice of conscious psychological deafness” (337). On the other hand, and perhaps more suggestively, such auditory acuity also permits an implicit, individualised sensitivity to the “large number of possible off-​tones in play [during tuning] and so opens up the reverse possibility [that] exists within such practice: standards may be dampened in order to hear the non-​normative tones” (341, 337). More broadly for Bushnell, and pace Bhabha, the capacity for skilled individual performance in adherence to authoritative norms of proper cultural expression affords “tactics of insubordination” that emerge from “an invested position” within these same norms (341). Crucially, to accomplish such disordered, counter-​hegemonic listening, the subject must willingly disorient himself from the ground of secure auditory perception, and thereby surrender his identity to a decisive moment of metaphoric as well as “psychological” deafness to the cultural norm. As a mode of textual performativity, narrative continuities between motifs of tuning, deafness and the articulation of new musical production, as detailed by Bushnell, serve to open up two critical functions within the narrative. First, these episodes comprise the most explicit instances of the work’s attempt to detemporalise the established history and norm of professional performance, as it dominates both the narrative present, and our own cultural modernity. The accomplishment of an artistically (and possibly historically) authentic rendering of the piece, as well as the subsequent “interpretive freedom” in approaches to the canonical work, is achieved through a departure from the “well tempered” modality of tuning that is followed by most modern instruments of the Western Classical repertory today. This is, of course, the praxial standard that underwrites the identity of the early Romantic canon privileged by the novel as well as the authorising norm for competency and professional excellence in associated forms of musicianship. On Bushnell’s account, Michael’s idiosyncratic rendition of the Bach contrapunctus shifts the ideological emphasis of the novel toward the unforeseen effects of an individualised performance of cultural orthodoxies. Resulting in an unanticipated, richly expressive mode of intonation, Michael’s experiment serves to remind the reader of “a period when tuning standards were more flexible and less standardized” (Bushnell, 335). As I will argue, such temporal instability at the core of the “classical” discipline

144  Formations of the contemporary is redoubled insofar as An Equal Music is meticulous in identifying as originary, the historical anachronism by which Bach came to figure as foundational for this canon; after all, the specific genre and medium of performance of chamber music was both materially and ideationally undefined in Bach’s own lifetime. Second, I suggest that Seth exploits the multiple implications of such historical destabilisation in an extended plot line that details the divergence between the musical material of this canonised work, and its sonoric actualisation in the present. The narrative locates and mobilises the implicit non-​ identity of Bach’s “unfinished” work by staging at length the Maggiore’s necessary task of instrumentalising the work as a whole for the chamber music medium. While Michael is able to tune his violin down a fourth, the work’s part for the viola becomes technically impossible to perform, insofar as the distortions in frequency required to tune down the lower registers of the viola accordingly “fall below the compass of the instrument” and cannot be accomplished without rendering the strings “impossibly slack”. Suggestively, in this exploration of the transpositional limits and possibilities of the work for chamber music, the viola’s sound becomes chronically delayed in comparison with the rest of the instruments, opening up a temporal distance between the physical action of performance and the moment of auditory perception (“… you had to coax the sound out. It took hours from the time the bow was in motion till you heard the note”) (AEM 120). By rendering the “swift flowing syllables” of Bach’s very signature into the sign of the work’s inherent temporal heterogeneity, the narrative relativises the ostensibly decisive instant of performance to insert an ellipsis, as it were, between the music and the event of its reception. Bushnell’s proposes that through the trope and the material of “the instrument” of subjective expression, the musicians of An Equal Music exemplify an empathic, embodied “double consciousness” that may be learned and further cultivated through the “perspective gained through an object of art”. Insofar as the “contrapuntal … interact[ion]” between “individual and supra-​individual consciousnesses” serves anthropomorphically in the narrative to “attribute ideas to the instrument”, this travelling extension of the corporeal self to an other “compliment[s]‌‘native’ or ego-​ driven thought and broadens and complicat[es] self-​knowledge [to] inspire a psychological distance from centred self-​conceptions and values, such as is necessary for a critique of ideology” (342). This complimentary “second sight” of musical experience is aligned with an ethics whose critical articulation is traceable to the postcolonial genealogies of “double consciousness”.24 While Bushnell’s insight lends a powerfully “foreign” cast to the interaction of the Western classical instrument and medium with its subject, it is striking for the purposes of this discussion, that her conceptualisation of the perspectival, dialogical, other-​directed politics of the “work of art” repeats the foundational Romantic discourse of aesthetic education and a musical democracy  –​the very values that are named by the novel in its title, and to

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  145 which the ethical assessment of the chamber music genre –​conceived of as the ideal practice of democratic listening  –​was constitutive. While I  will return to the richly circular nature of such a musicological approach to the ethic of postcolonial listening, let us note for the moment, that Michael’s provisional experiment in retuning his violin puts in play a series of acutely textualised figures related to the technicalities of performance. These range from the marks and gestures of musical scoring and reading, the transpositional movement of the “work” across (historical) genres, and the material identity of the “classical” instrument. Connoting the simultaneous fragility and physicality of its integrity, the instrument is a trope for the materiality of the forms to which the novel subscribes; and through which the English medium has itself been disseminated over time. In other words, by underscoring the praxial aspects of musicianship, An Equal Music opens up an especially discursive counter-​narrative to its own reification of the canonical master-​text. Rehearsing the technical dimensions of musical performance within its own forms, An Equal Music might be construed, at its most ambitious, as a revisionary re-​constellation of the proper “subject” and “object” of that epistemological totality signified by “Western Classical music”. In the first instance, the potentially dispersive, even conflicting historical origins of the normative “Western” subject are recuperated through traces of their negation from the textual present. Bushnell’s postcolonial angle on the motif of tuning emphasised acoustic perceptions that typically fall outside the established intervals of the Western tonal order, so that these registers of non-​sounded meaning appear allegorically within the text, as “foreign” moments of cultural inaudibility. The trajectory of such textually immanent silence might be construed even further, as rifts within the particular aesthetic forms to which the novel as a whole is self-​consciously indebted. In light of this hypothesis, I note that the narrative underscores the almost violative force that must be applied to the body (“guts”) of the instrument in order to pitch it towards an “imported” tonality; at first, the required tension for the strings causes the viola’s “plate to stop vibrating … [so that the instrument] completely clam[s] up”) (AEM 160). Here, as elsewhere, An Equal Music gestures to an unequal division of labour presupposed by the work of art, which is thereby revisited as a consolidated object of cultural capital. By the same token, the material registers of aesthetic silence acquire reverberating significance, referring the reader to the historical specificities of a particular cultural geography, in which the material spaces of manual work and industry were at once approximated and spatially distanced by the privileged “sign” of the chamber music genre (Adorno, ISM 86). Altogether, these rarefied traces of an unsounded, unequal “outside” cut through domestic ideologies of place and identity on which the narrative explicitly turns –​thereby transporting the reader, through a restorative narrative turn, to the original locale of music’s reception, where the desired supersession of such inequality comprised the “thinned out” or idealised content of the music itself. If the

146  Formations of the contemporary figure of cultivated bourgeois interiority underlies the historical origins of the chamber music genre, such an indigenous “inside” is exposed speculatively –​through the arc of An Equal Music’s narratorial constructivism –​as a space of lived contradiction. Accordingly, I argue that the implicitly testimonial value of music is accomplished not through an emphasis on the intentional subject of expression, but through an embodied mediality that is neither entirely initiated by a particular, individuated cultural subjectivity nor terminated in it. Both instrument and agent of musical performance communicate through degrees of pliability and resistance, not as centred selves but mimetically, through the intractable opacities of their respective, material specificities (in “hair [and] gut”, through the tactile finger or the vulnerable interiority of the ear, and through the limits of the work of transposition or translation, in textually inscribed moments of hermeneutical opacity).25 By reflexively aligning its own medium to the corporealised process of performance, the narrative operates prosthetically, as it were, as an expressive, “non-​ normative” addition to the “orthodoxies” of disciplined cultural expression. As such, the figure of the prosthesis –​the material “instrument” rather than sounded music  –​touches metonymically on integrally deficient powers of audition that make up the properly acculturated subject of Western music. Held at a distance from its capacity for direct expression and identity, such a depersonalised musical “self” is affirmed through a narratorial (rather than psychologised) aesthetic of non-​identical resemblance  –​or equivalences  –​ with other educable, deformable cultural bodies that remain anonymised within the text. The polyvalent relation between the novel’s explicit reification of musical canonicity, and the narrative’s expository denegation of this norm of immediate (musical) meaning might be viewed as a writerly mimesis of chamber music itself. On Adorno’s reflections on the form as a conversational genre, chamber music replicates its historical preconditions in the competition inherent to market-​driven norms of capitalism. In the contestational exchanges and interruptions internal to the composition’s musical parts, the genre simulates the activity of socially useful labour; and yet what they do is merely an impotent and innocuous copy of such labour, a production process without a final product. In chamber music, the sole product would be the process itself… The activity has been turned into pure doing. (ISM  86–​87) In other words, the early capitalist norm of (unequal) competition is circumscribed, both sonorically and visually, by the form of chamber music insofar as there is no heroic, solitary performer upon whom the audience might fix its aural and visual attention. Striking is how Adorno’s evaluation of this dialogical genre gestures to an alternative genealogy of the nineteenth century itself, insofar as the genre is discussed in contradistinction to the

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  147 development of the concerto; in the latter, a large orchestral body yields to the dramatic centrality of the soloist, and thereby reifies the economic imperative of self-​preservation that historically subtends the “spiritualiz[ed]” ideal of liberal individualism. By eschewing the triumphalism of a singular vocality that “wins” the competition, the efficacy of chamber music, in contrast, has always turned on the quality of response demanded from the listener, where, moreover, such active attention is moderated by the inflections and pauses during the musical exchange between each part of the ensemble. To the extent that chamber music exemplifies the social formality of civil, “self-​limiting reflection” in the course of an unfinished exchange, the performance extends itself to a similar “practice [of] courtesy” in the listener (87). The audience is invited into the aural space of a productive labour between relative equals that provides neither a final release (in the thrill of the musical climax) nor a resolution of the conversation (in the “emancipation” of a single performer over and above the vocalisations of the others). Sonorically and corporeally, the form enacts music as “process”, for Adorno, and so stands in lieu of an assertive, culturally neutralised “product” (whether understood as the soloist or the canonised masterpiece). And as to the temporality of this alternative account of the genesis and development of the nineteenth-​century individual: As “pure doing”, the duration of the chamber music recital resists the “teleology of the ending”, the progressivist imperative of capitalist modernisation that eventually orders and integrates the work of music into a rationalised economy of production, exchange and consumption (Leppert, “Commentary” 524).26 But Adorno goes much further in his sketch of this other, competing history of musical development. In their indifference to the “end product” of absolute musical value, the performative conventions of chamber music eventually develop the genre’s inherently simulative aesthetic to a catastrophic limit point. Departing from their function as a culturally representative mode of expression (of paradigmatic nineteenth-​century “bourgeois individualism”), these conventions tend historically towards becoming purposeless “copies” of themselves. Put differently, as “process itself”, that is, precisely as an oblique imagining of a sociality that would have no need for winners and losers, the genre dematerialises its relationship between its constitutive conventions –​its civic proprieties, its invitation to privatised musical experience through the manner of formality –​and their contradictory socio-​ economic preconditions in competitive inequality. Or, what for Adorno is the same:  In this ineluctable tendency toward de-​historicisation, chamber music incubates deeper temporal logics of deferral and delay identified elsewhere (and more precisely in the account of Beethoven’s last quartets) with “late style”.27 While Bushnell is right to suggest that physical deafness does not feature as an artistic choice for any character in the novel, this qualification demurs from engaging the extended narrative trajectory through which the figure of Julia is forced to operate metaphorically as an exceedingly profitable

148  Formations of the contemporary trope  –​one that eventually secures the cultural myth of transcendence in the novel’s final reference to absolute music (a circularity that perhaps continues, residually, to inform Bushnell’s own account of an “aesthetic education”, albeit this time towards the cultivation of postcolonial heterodoxy). After all, deafness is the sign of a terminal silencing in the novel, so that the merits of Julia’s final performance become virtually inseparable from her removal from the worldly context of the novel. In a conclusion that saves the tradition of music only by sacrificing its constitutive sociality to gendered, privatised uses in an acutely competitive present, the novel appears to confirm the compensational and so deeply ideological “product” of the cliché of musical reconciliation. Read against this “productive” conclusion, and as the site of intractably delayed reception, Julia’s damaged ear –​rather than Julia herself –​features as the ethical crux of what is ultimately the novel’s privative, “monolingual” narrative economy. Frequently spatialised through reference to the “serpentine cochlea” of the inner ear, the organ tropes the text’s involuted approach to the coordinates of “inside” and “outside”, and draws these (as in the extracts that head this section) towards prolific, soundless signs of inscription and silent reading. Here, the value of musical self-​sufficiency is established only by “scoring” the “first-​language” of musical meaning with the signs of writerly notation and –​by the same token –​the tactile traces of textual effacement (AEM 347). Significantly, as the affair ensues, the lovers communicate through faxes typed in German; this expediency is undertaken not only to avoid detection by Julia’s husband, but also, and more fundamentally, because of the increasing onset of Julia’s disability, which prevents her from communicating on the phone or hearing messages left on the answering machine. While Julia and Michael’s shared bilingualism (a “natal” inheritance in one case, learned in the other) is plotted through figures of writing that serve as an intimate language between lovers, such coded discretion operates ideologically, as a typical postcolonial textual strategy. By inscribing moments of hermeneutical opacity into the text, the narrative mobilises a selective, relativised stoppage of the reader’s access to any conclusively dominant nomination of a first language. Whether this is understood as the culturally privileged “German” of the location of music, or the work’s literary endorsement of the English medium through an exploitation of its historical forms, it is the movement of language itself that is exposed; the specific efficacies (music, literature) of each type of “national” language emerge not through logics of identification, but through a partial “deafening” or textual expulsion of the proper subject of its respective address. Visually, these sections of the text appear in the form of typographic media (the electronic fax) or in chunks of italicised, partially untranslated prose. Perhaps most significantly, the signature of Julia’s “auto-​immune” aural experience  –​-​in which the ear eats away at its own interiority  –​ appears under the deliberately notated sign of Bach. As the lovers attend mass at a church in Venice, Michael is struck by the aesthetic proprieties of

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  149 the ritual. Nonetheless, he is bored, recognising that his atheism prevents him from sharing in Julia’s faith. Such belief is actualised for Julia in the sense of a “clear good end”, articulated through the moving power of the liturgy (of which the church music is, of course, an organic part) (AEM 286). Immediately after the episode, Julia performs the first contrapunctus of the Art of the Fugue for Michael, but cannot remember well enough to play it through. She subsequently presents Michael with a hand-​bound book, in which she has scored the music in a “fluid, unlaboured” hand; “not one note is crossed out” (288). Further, Julia has inscribed it (in German) with a note of gratitude to Michael. Benson illuminates this episode to suggest a thesis that cuts against the grain of the novel’s conclusion. The personalised, scored markings of the work are what remains of the music itself insofar as such writing stands –​like a debt –​in lieu of both the sonoric and historical immediacy of the value of faith, as of the eroticised presence of Julia to whom Michael may no longer have a title. In this way, for Benson, Julia has literally “written herself into the music”, as, indeed, into the transcendent ideal of music to thereby secularise its value for the present (Benson, 129). As such, the book stands as a synecdoche  –​and an irreducibly discursive ­figure –​for Western Classical music’s historic claim to universalism. While indebted to Benson’s insightful account, I  would suggest  –​in a departure –​that the long “credit line” of the work –​in the displacements of debt, gratitude and the gift as they unfold in excess of their original media –​ persists even further into a decisive figure of soundless meaning. For Seth, the master trope of the love story is, quite strikingly, the act of reading itself. When the affair ends, the bereaved Michael deliberately dampens his fingers to “trace and blear” the signs on the page (AEM 347). The action is memorable as a peculiarly self-​abolishing gesture. In its very tactility, Michael’s anguished attempt to read the music erases its scored inscription from the page, taking with it, the last material signs of Julia’s embodied presence in the work. “Writing” now marks processes of dematerialisation whose path manifestly “seeps into neighbouring voices, onto pages not yet traced or smeared” (347). Returning Benson’s thesis to Seth’s metaphor of a watery effacement of ink on paper, I suggest that the device of the book preserves the original ethical evaluation of chamber music even as it “notates” the departure of the form from the conventions of the narrative present. Notably, Adorno, too, ties his analysis of the ethical virtue of listening in chamber music to the possibility of a formal dissolution that inheres immanently within the genre’s constitutive modalities. It is only from the point of such afterness that Adorno reclaims for chamber music its original “secularising”, anti-​ideological promise:  “Heralded as a consequence of the practice [of listening] is the silence, the passage of music into soundless reading, the vanishing point of all musical spiritualization” (Adorno, ISM 87, emphasis mine). We could add that the history of musical “spiritualisation”, considered from a materialist perspective, is nothing else than the long dialectic between bodily sacrifice and the intensified production of generic

150  Formations of the contemporary codes of substitution, suppression and recodification that contain, discipline and render musically meaningful, the “interfering” noise of violent social and corporeal exclusion. In light of such a proposition, Seth’s image of “the book” appears as the paradigmatic cultural form for such a “vanishing point” of the disembodied, ultimately punitive ideal of cultural sacrifice/​sublimation (ibid.). At stake in this Adornian “note to music” is not only the presentist ideology of an “unending”, purely acoustic experience of music that rises above the contingencies and inequalities of worldly practice; nor even, following Benson, the scripted immanence of the notes on the page that restores the music to living forms of sociality. While encompassing these references to specific cultural formations and their canonic repetition over time, the “worn-​down Braille of … fingers” trace the “dissol[ution]” of all such claims to presence so that “silence” itself might be disclosed as the privileged object of the norm of legibility (AEM 347).28 If Julia’s eventual, absolute erasure from the aural territories of the novel also restores the “gift” of music to the present, such belated aesthetic compensation is accomplished through logics of disaffiliation  –​the value of an original cultural inheritance is placed at an insuperable distance from the “proper” forms and locus of its reception, rendering the work into a contemporary allegory of mobility and cultural transposition. In this alternative reading of the novel’s conclusion, I suggest that the ethically significant moment of musical reception described on its final pages resides not in the music per se, as Bushnell still suggests, but in Michael’s movement of stepping away from its immediate scene. By exiting before the completion of the performance, Michael “extend[s]‌the silences” that are the formal provenance of the chamber music genre into the materiality of the text itself (ISM 86). Paradoxically, his self-​effacing gesture enacts an active form of listening whose value resides in its implicit estrangement of the wider cultural norm of liberal individualism. By disassociating himself from the ties of “publicity” that surround the auratically individuated soloist, Michael “learns to step back” from the enthralling sonoric display of music far enough to align himself –​as a momentarily silenced element of the music –​with the traces of erasure with which “the book is inscribed and scored” (AEM 347). Approached in this way, the romantic convention of crossed love affirms the novel’s consistent narratorial ethic, which insists, in its prosaic approximation of music, that “to play chamber music well … is to learn not to thrust oneself forward … What makes the whole is not … self-​assertion … but self-​limiting reflection” (Adorno, ISM 87; Benson, 129). By withholding an overtly allegorised reference to subjectivised modes of deafness, whether in Michael or Julia, An Equal Music “scores” the complexities of its romantic counter-​narrative with alternating figures of sonoric suppression and muteness. In this manner, the novel alludes to the historically dominant figure of artistic genius, whose powers of transcendent musical expression are biographically associated with the catastrophe of deafness. This, in order

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  151 to bypass the mythology of the individual masterpiece, understood as an iconoclastic resistance to convention. Through such a writerly redux of Romantic idioms of musical deafness and accomplishment, Seth re-​establishes the authority of Eurocentric cultural norms not as an organic “whole”, but as an aestheticised possibility whose intended destination remains provisional and incompletely realised within the terms of the present. While the historical link between musical deafness and textual “mastery” is depicted with troubling transparency by the novel in Julia’s final, successful performance, the very facility of this portable idiom suggests that its legibility within the work presupposes a culturally literate subject –​one who is viscerally, and sometimes punishingly disciplined by his or her cultural and historical location (Bushnell). It is the case that An Equal Music’s accessibility –​indeed, its conventional elegance as a mode of clear realist narration  –​is due in essential part to its rehabilitation of recognisable European myths of individual resistance and musical return. Yet it also aligns the figure of musical genius (in the Romantic cliché of artistic deafness, in Orpheus’ momentary rescue of insentience through music, or, indeed in the auratic figure of the solo performer) with the story of Michael’s anguished break from standards of professional and cultural expertise. Michael’s act of self-​disablement –​his effort to “unlearn” his prescribed musical part and privilege in the acoustically immanent “whole” –​becomes implicated in a specifically readerly practice. An Equal Music thereby indicates the “location” of its music/​ culture not in the banality of “aesthetic transcendence” but by staging it textually, through the medium of the narrative, in an experience of profoundly interiorised estrangement. The metaphor for this rehearsal of an epistemological self-​ loss and othering is not another, subordinate culture; it is, rather, the ascriptively “blank” image of social death in silence. Following these scored marks of silence, Michael, as much as Seth’s reader, returns to an ethic of listening that inheres within the discipline and discourses of canonicity, which otherwise organise the metropolitan and post-​imperial loci of their respective articulations into ideologically continuous “interiorities”.

Triangulating distances: Said, Seth and Adorno Anachronism becomes the harbinger of things to come. (“Bach Defended against his Devotees”, Adorno, Prisms 142)29

The so-​called Bach Renaissance that began in the last decades of the eighteenth century was pivotal to a larger, restorationist impulse that led to a fundamental reconfiguration of the norms of Western classical musical performance and interpretation.30 Via widespread familiarity with works such as the Well-​Tempered Clavier, the nineteenth-​century imagination of Bach transformed his instrumental works into the exemplification of the norm

152  Formations of the contemporary of musical freedom, and, as such, into the actualisation of the ideal of aesthetic autonomy that dominated the post-​Kantian imagination of early to mid-​nineteenth-​century Germany. In this tradition, the individual’s ability to recognise the value of self-​ contained truths through the profoundly personal experience of music became a central idea, effectively displacing the ecclesiastical origins of the music into a “pan-​confessional [putatively] timeless ideal of church music”, thereby delineating further, the figure of the enlightened, self-​actualising individual (Garratt, 219).31 An Equal Music is ambitious in its attempt to model a narratorial aesthetic reflexively, on the various implications of this history. It underscores especially a resurgent, particularly “performa[tive] emphasis” in Romanticist appropriations of a past, which, on the eve of the industrial revolution, had become properly “unimaginable”. In other words, Seth redoubles the bourgeois, historicist cooptation of musical history that comprised the “second life of music” in the nineteenth century. The text’s stringent concern with canonicity  –​ including its own stylistic adherence to the conventions of the realist novel –​ is fully implicated this recuperative movement. Seth’s aesthetic of “constructive consolidation” is replete with ideological significance once it is approached as a strategic exploitation of the multiple ironies attending the Romantic afterlife of music. In his authoritative study of nineteenth-​century music, Dalhaus underscores how, through the very process of its consolidation, Bach’s repertory emerged as the index of an insurmountable “historical distance separating the present from the “true” church music of the past” –​the restorative world-​view of the early nineteenth century inadvertently secularised the very past it had sought to auraticise by rendering it into an object of studied ‘ “longing” (Dalhaus, 30). As such, another “unlikely upshot” of the Romantic aestheticisation of older contrapuntal and polyphonic models of music is its inextricable linkage to the nineteenth-​century emergence of historicism (understood loosely, through its emphasis on cautious periodisation and a hermeneutical or contextualist reinterpretation of cultural works). As Bach to early Romantic music, so also, the nineteenth century to Seth. For both, canonicity and the attendant “tone of reconstitution” that is placed so demonstrably upon performance emerges as “proof” –​inadvertent in one case, discrete in its demystification of reified chronologies of culture in the other –​“that restoration is more self-​conscious than successful” (Dalhaus, 30). Proposing that Seth’s novel is “subtly demystifcatory” of, especially, the class contradictions that underpinned the idea of absolute music (and its historical realisation in the materials and medium of chamber music), Benson suggests that the figure of Michael, as much as An Equal Music’s conclusion, is “heir” to a narrative tradition that might be aligned with the nineteenth-​century convention of the “novelistic orphan” (Benson, 127). Indeed, the narrative of An Equal Music might be seen to turn on a deliberate metonymy between the lateness of various musical inheritances and the

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  153 ethical trajectory of Michael’s own, belated coming-​of-​age story. Michael’s first, chanced glimpse of Julia on a bus, her almost immediate disappearance in the moving vehicle, and her delayed return into his life is prefigured through the discovery, accidental misplacement and anonymous return to Michael of a rare musical recording of an obscure Beethoven arrangement for string quintet (of the early Piano Trio in C minor, associated sentimentally with Julia), of whose historical existence Michael has been hitherto unaware. Benson illuminates the concluding “gift” of musical enlightenment as a fulfilment of the “strange action” of generosity first initiated by the record’s return (Benson, 124; AEM 55). Such extra-​musical narrative action functions as an analogue to textual logics of historical dissemination and reception that were, paradoxically, constitutive of the Western European epistemology of “pure” music. To this must be added the literal legacy that comes to Michael from his childhood musical companion and lifelong benefactor, Mrs Formby, who bequeaths him the Tononi violin on which he has so far played on loan, and which he struggles, financially and emotionally, to replace through the last sections of the novel. It is the violin’s material presence –​and monetary value –​that secures, in turn, the narrative priority of Julia’s final, transcendent “gift”. Together, these interlaced figures of rescued musical inheritance, material and immaterial, operate as an almost mythic guarantee of Michael’s restoration from the story of his social death. In this regard, I note that Mrs Formby’s gesture of posthumous generosity is excessive in every sense, not only because she unpredictably changes her legal will (and thereby subverts the expectations of both her family and the reader), but because it underscores the ethical import of the subject’s constitutive indebtedness to an underlying economy of symbolic meanings that remain beyond the purview of individual calculation. More specifically, as an exemplary modality of cultural capital, music, in this metonymic economy of loss and compensation, finds an operative and quite precisely “pedagogical” value within Michael’s existential and social self-​constitution: It features as a normative precondition for Michael’s powers of expression, a function that he himself can neither directly represent, nor judge. In Michael’s delayed, decisive acceptance of the “gift” of Western Classical music, that is, in his final reconciliation with the “inexorable” force of its historical “hope” and “grie[f]‌”, An Equal Music situates the entrenched ideological efficacy of such music as an apolitical form of compensation for worldly inequalities … Comparisons can be drawn with the ostensibly humanistic aspirations of the nineteenth-​century novelistic orphan:  Jane Eyre, for example. Although the subject of an egalitarian narrative… the underpinning ideology goes unchallenged, contradictions intact, with the late uncovering of a hidden inheritance only working further to stress the maintenance of a status quo. (Benson, 126–​127)

154  Formations of the contemporary Seth’s frangible reproduction of the simultaneous promise and wound of such compensatory humanism is inseparable from the quality of “Englishness” itself, which devolves from the figure of Mrs Formby, through the fragmented forms of late Victorian lyric poetry, into the constituents of an alternative account of the narrative’s “proper” cultural inheritance. In the aspect of its specific literary debts, An Equal Music invites a further retraction of the novelistic myth of the nineteenth-​century English orphan-​inheritor from its ostensibly organic place within the narrative context, a convention which may now be displaced outwards, in a departure from Benson’s discussion, towards Edward Said’s extended genealogy in Culture and Imperialism of this same figure.32 In an analysis of the origins and development of narrative realism in the English novel, Edward Said diverges from the paradigmatic critical emphasis on time (as established by Lukács) to emphasise, instead, the manner in which geographical space is “interiorised” into the work through a narrative reflection on established patterns of lineage and filiality. At stake is the moral “right” to such space, which might then be properly redistributed and further governed by the “executive disposition” of the novel’s reformist, egalitarian imagination (CI 106, 110). Said’s own tour of canonical nineteenth-​century texts moves from discussions of the form’s “pre-​imperial” origins in Jane Austen, across its consolidation within the Victorian imperial nation in the works of William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens, to Rudyard Kipling –​the moment in which the continuist horizon of an “uncontested empire” are inscribed anthropologically into the territory of the colony  –​ becoming, thereby, an “irrefragable part” of that indigenous space (CI 100, 162, 175).33 If historical processes relating to the appropriation and administration of territorial dominions remained physically and indeed perceptually extraneous to the English nation in the early decades of the nineteenth century, this “outside” is speculatively revisited by Culture and Imperialism and disclosed as both the material precondition of the later history of the imperial nation and, also, its antecedent in the (post)colony.34 As such, the novel-​form is more than a homology to the constitution of a domestic cultural interiority; it “encodes and does not simply repeat” (as a sociological document might) the priority of the imperial regime within the affective constitution of an “interiorized” self (CI 116). Rephrased through Said’s uses of Raymond Williams:  As a self-​sustaining “structure of attitude and reference”, the novel interpellates an embodied reader, who might otherwise have no physical or socio-​economic access to this outside into “the orbit of British dominance … thus conserv[ing] … the colonies” abroad while also anticipating subsequent redistributions of authority within the metropolitan domestic order (89, 88). Hence, the centrality of the trope of the delayed inheritance, and the interiorised or properly individuated subject of its reception, to the “moral geography” of the nineteenth-​century English novel (112). In a socio-​economic context determined by “direct inheritance and legal title”  –​in a landscape where property is possessed

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  155 through the accident of natal “propinquity” –​the disaffiliated orphan “must earn the right” to cultural space. While the novel typically achieves a fictional equilibrium through the equalising device of the late legacy, these domestic “fictions of resolution” are integral (and not merely analogous) to the deeper exigencies of cultural literacy required to “maint[ain] … the style” of imperial governance both at home and abroad (115). So, in Said’s paradigmatic treatment of Mansfield Park, the aspirational trajectory of “small-​scale domestic movements” within the form are shown to correspond to “larger, more openly colonial movements” that may find only tangential representation within the text (in Said’s memorable reading, these are found in the novel’s “lightly stressed allusions” to an invisible Antigua and the Leeward Islands). In order to actualise the future “promise of wealth” the protagonist must learn to play –​from a physical and representational distance  –​the role of Empire’s “indentured servant” (Said, CI 106). “In extreme cases” of exile or displacement –​for Said, the exemplary instance is the disaffiliated Fanny Bertram, but this figure opens up a further line of dissemination from Pip to Kim –​this subject must become akin to “transported commodity” before she might decisively “inherit” the moral space that the novel imagines as home (106). An Equal Music presents a deliberately “consolidated vision” of its own nineteenth century through competing, disparately located figures of musical and novelistic self-​ sufficiency. Compressing relations of affinity and distance into these figures, Seth advances “the nineteenth century” as, itself, a hegemonic idiom of cultural memory that cuts across the cleavages of metropolitan centre and province  –​whether domestic or colonial  –​to integrate these distances/​differences into a globalist norm of sovereignty as it operates today. Citing the Marxian historian of imperialism, Victor Kiernan, Said reminds us that as a result of close national competition for more colonial acquisitions, “all modern empires imitated one another” by the turn of the century (CI 7). An Equal Music’s own aesthetic of imitative revivalism is ultimately significant because of its subversive exploitation of the contradictions attending processes of de/​ re-​ territorialisation  –​or processes of material, spatial and existential mobility that constituted the “integral” Western European value of self-​sufficiency within the reality of international competition (Said, 7, citing Kiernan). So far, I  have situated Seth’s work within the expanded context of its formal allusions to a style of politics associated historically with imperial geographies. We can now suggest that in its acutely historicist sensibility, the novel repeats –​or, more correctly, comes after –​the period we might associate with the postcolonial “voyage in”. As such, An Equal Music may be positioned as a properly contemporary allegory of continually developing processes of global mobility and attendant modes of cultural literacy and self-​governance discussed at the start of this chapter (and whose preconditions reside in the fractured and inherently unequal discourses of citizenship inherited from the previous century).

156  Formations of the contemporary Said’s idiom of the voyage-​in, as described in Culture and Imperialism, codifies a certain species of postcolonial intellectual practice in which “Third World” writing migrates and successfully integrates into metropolitan First World institutions. Also a metaphor for acts of postcolonial reception, repetition and displacement, Said’s excursionary use of the voyage idiom inverts the narratological direction of imperial knowledge-​claims as they make their way “in” to the Third World through the project of colonisation. (While Said obliquely references the biographical fact of his own lifelong engagement with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the idiom might also allude to Woolf’s narrative of a “voyage out” from the margins of a patriarchal imperial nation.) As such, Said does not only describe the appropriative act of “writing back” to empire, in Rushdie’s now emblematic phrase. More powerfully, Said’s idiom for intellectual mobility opens up reversible as well as tangential lines of departure (as Bruce Robbins has argued in a notable and much contested defence of the model of the “voyage in”) –​this view suggests that patterns of cultural authority are inherently unstable because dominant cultural forms and practices can, and do, migrate across the boundaries that separate First and Third Worlds, colony and province, to yield unpredictable ideological effects.35 Not least of these effects is the illumination of a space that appears residually, beyond the historical contact zone of coloniser and colonised, in “new configurations” of cultural forms and practices (CI 295). Put differently, Said describes cultural forms in their materiality, as a transfer of cultural capital that results in a “surprising … hybridization” of the traditional distinction of the critic/​writer; following Robbins, I underscore how the model thereby also opens onto the ideologically contested status of the upward intellectual mobility of the Third World writer, once she or he is incorporated into the cultural idioms and institutions of a metropolitan canon (Said, 295; Robbins, 30). For Said, this particular figure of the non-​ European artist-​intellectual is privileged –​always at “the risk of negotiating ‘elitist’ ” or authoritative cultural discourses  –​not merely because of her access to cultural resources that are used towards a reversal of the direction of address from centre to periphery. That this interstitial intellectual figure is publicly visible at all continues to demonstrate the tenuousness of racial or cultural markers through which the threshold between these two locations is regularly held in place by the pedagogies –​orthodoxies, really –​of multinational capital and the neoliberal nation. The voyage in, then, constitutes and especially interesting variety of hybrid cultural work. And that it exists at all is a sign of adversarial internationalization in an age of continued imperial structures. No longer does the “logos” dwell exclusively in London or Paris. No longer does history run unilaterally, as Hegel believed, from east to west, or from south to north, becoming more sophisticated and developed, and less primitive and backward as it goes. Instead, the weapons of criticism have become part of the historical legacy of empire in which the

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  157 separations and exclusions of “divide and rule” are erased and new configurations spring up. (CI 295) Seth’s musical fiction takes up the power of imperial knowledges from within the centre without any apparent “framing” by centre–​ periphery models of hierarchy and difference –​as if this position were, in effect, an unspoken writerly prerogative for even or especially the putatively “third world” writer of Anglophonic Indian fiction (in a period when this figure was reconstituted, somewhat ironically, as the paradigm of a “global” literary subjectivity). By placing the novel in, or rather after Said’s account of the voyage in, I suggest that Seth’s posture of apparent indifference to the “separations and exclusions” that consolidate the configuration of “Western classical” traditions cannot but be understood as “coming after decades of independence” and the “basic gesture” of “separation” that marks the post-​ war perception of metropolitan culture in the non-​Western world; in other words, its positioning both presupposes and is enabled by the epistemological and formal premises of such a history (Said, CI 295, 303, 302). An Equal Music’s ostensibly hermetic account of Western European culture, and its unsettling adoption of a narrative perspective that is fully internal to such a world, is misconstrued if reduced to a biographical presumption of the author’s personal and cultural privilege, or, otherwise, to a retrograde form of “third-​world” writing that extrudes the question of history from its representational content, as from the various loci of its reception and circulation as an object of multinational capital. The novel is better approached, in both its closures and possibilities, as a gesture towards the contemporary possibilities of the tradition of the voyage-​in. Enacting the disciplinary imperatives that constitute a Eurocentric cultural subject and from which it is, in effect, never really free, An Equal Music deterritorialises the meaning and identity of this “self”, thereby allegorising the work’s own conditions of possibility in the transport of cultural capital across authoritative boundaries of the Global North and South. Whether ultimately effective or otherwise, Seth’s expertise with the norms and media of a hegemonic notion of “classical” European culture –​at once unremarked and demonstrable –​is a provocative intervention into the imagination of “Europe” (and, indeed, the conflation of Europe with the modern “subject” tout court) in a post-​essentialist way. Especially in the obliquity of the novel’s address, Seth stages an implicit challenge to the assumed propriety of who might legitimately speak to and from a tradition that has been hitherto archived and rehearsed as an originary realm of culture. Here, Said’s challenge to the sanctity of “London or Paris” appears, in equal measure, as an allusion to assumptions about the proper division of intellectual labour between these centres of cultural production and their (necessarily “vernacular”) Third World counterparts. It is precisely through an unmarked use of the English medium that Seth’s novel consistently stages a reflection on its own positioning and relation to an

158  Formations of the contemporary imperial “logos” –​whether understood as English itself, the prerogatives of Englishness, or the critic’s distinction of accessing a unified body of Western “classical” traditions –​a discourse whose itinerary and effects can no longer be construed as “unidirectional” in either its chronological or geo-​political progress. Following Said’s model, this “question of constituency” of the proper subject of metropolitan culture also entails the politics of address, or the “question of audiences” (CI 309). On both counts, Seth’s novel might be plausibly construed as an “adversarial internationalization” of cultural capital because of its pervasive dislocation of the relation between centre and presumptive periphery (CI 295)  –​in both its positioning and uses of the medium, An Equal Music effectively splits the centre by inhabiting the inherent contradictions and heterogeneity of the narrative’s own, authorising “location of culture”. This is accomplished through the incompatible metropolitan destinations of the narrative, “London” and “Vienna”, and the historical legacies of the British and Hapsburg empires respectively, which fail to come together in a coherent designation of identity in the present. The effect is a peculiarly immaterial notion of (“Western”) cultural origins, which is at once maintained and uprooted by the novel’s development. Deferring the identity of the proper subject of its address, the novel sets in motion a process of mutual and relative minoritisation between the linguistic (English) and cultural (Viennese) spaces of the imperium. Even further, by obliquely staging the formal dissolution of the especially “intimate” genre and locus of chamber music through the externalising marks of foreign notation, inscription and erasure –​where such writing is itself the work of a travelling, deracinated English medium that comes after Empire –​Seth renders the properly literate subject of both a European musical canon and postcolonial writing into the shared coordinates of a “vanishing” cultural formation (Adorno, ISM 94; Seth, AEM 87). The crux of this ideationally shared modernity might be related to the form and historical fate of the principle of liberal individualism, tied, as it is, to the ascendancy (and disappearance) of representative public spaces that once derived their authority from norms of sovereignty, reciprocity and equal cultural citizenship. For Adorno, chamber music’s characteristically egalitarian appeal to a “balance between art and reception that society denied elsewhere” was integrally linked to the early nineteenth-​ century imagination of “bourgeois democracy”:  If “publicity” on the eve of the industrial revolution was integral to emergent notions of democratic representation and equality, Adorno also reminds us that the “property distinction and educational privileges of this democracy r[a]‌n counter” to the promise of a properly public “national” culture. In light of this presupposition, Adorno’s sociological treatment of the genre highlights the manner in which the contracted scale of the chamber-​musical stage both distils and refuses this contradiction at the heart of the “liberal individual”. Yet this characteristically Marxian analysis of the ideal of equal cultural citizenship is ultimately directed by the implications of a temporal anomaly –​already

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  159 inherent –​in the relationship between the musical material of this medium, and the spaces of its presentation. If the middle-​class presupposition of free time and the leisured spaces of the chamber music recital were the preconditions for a utopic envisioning of (democratic) equality  –​an ideal that subsequently would be “parod[ied]” in the market-​driven publicity of the “monumental” concert hall and the reified aura of the solo performer –​ ruined prefigurations of hypernationalism and the mass public rally from Adorno’s post-​war perspective –​these phenomenological preconditions for chamber-​musical production and reception were also, always, the materialisation of socially lived inequality. Therefore, in “dispensing with publicity” altogether, chamber music symbolically encoded a desire for the very equality that the material spaces of its own staging could not –​in its own time –​realise. This is the equivocal appeal of “intimacy” in the classically romanticist conventions of chamber music, a subjectivist quality that inadvertently indexes the “split and dubious condition of the whole”, and which, in a resonant parallel to Seth’s recuperative “Victorianism”, mars even the sober, “constructed” classicism of a composer like Brahms with the stigma of failure (Adorno, ISM 95). Such disjointedness at the very core of the Western European “cultural interior” was to prove quickly unsustainable, eventually “bursting the last assured locale of musical reception”  –​the nineteenth-​ century interior of both “the bourgeois home” and its once “substantial” subject, “the private individual” (91). Though the micrological spaces of interiorised, recessively privatised affect, Adorno discloses how “[t]he genre of musical intimacy was not even fully established before it ceased to feel at home in its home” (90, emphasis mine). By approaching the chamber music genre as a late formation in which the genre’s conventions are chronically out of touch with the ethical imperatives of its own period –​here, the “early Romantic” nineteenth-​century –​Adorno accentuates the constructedness of historicist chronologies of cultural development. His own essayistic development of the compositorial progress of chamber music serves to dishouse the very category of periodicity from such a history. In the genre’s flight from its formal and historical origins in the early nineteenth century, as from the “natal order” of its proper spaces in the bourgeois “home”, chamber music nonetheless “pays tribute” to what it decisively “aboli[shed]” –​a social totality that was historically inseparable from pre-​modern musical traditions, and the hierarchical spaces of a feudal, liturgical community (87).36 The democratic civility of the chamber-​musical ideal –​a quintessentially modern “totality” comprised of an equal conversation across plural voices –​“owes” its tenuous autonomy to such a foundational moment of spiritual and structural disburdenment. Paradoxically, by demurring from a direct representation of a surrendered social reality and the once sacrosanct spaces of music’s publicity, chamber music dedicated itself, as a genre, to a secularised approximation of such “lost objectivity”(90). In the mid-​twentieth century, the form does “remain possible” for Adorno –​but not in revivalism, or the “artisanal” effort that seeks to adequate musical

160  Formations of the contemporary material with “indigenous” spaces of performance and sociality (EM 140, 271, 277, 478). Running its conventions against the “facade” of a nativised musical whole, chamber music persists by “extending” musical experience from “mere sound” into acoustically unrealised possibilities. In a stunning reversal, Adorno removes the category of periodicity altogether from the genealogical approach of his essay. In the final analysis, the historical latencies of music reside not in an acoustically immanent presentation but in the work of inscription –​in the disintegrative whole of “handwriting organized so that all contexts and interrelations” obviated by present standards of performance and reception “are justified in the compositorial reality” (ISM 96, emphasis mine).

Post-​European fictions of home The music finishes, I read on. (AEM 156) The struggle is to construct fields of coexistence rather than fields of battle as the outcome of intellectual labour. (Said, Humanism and Democratic Culture 141)37

An Equal Music’s musical fiction might be approached as a variant form of such a redemptive “compositorial” artifice. In its acutely writerly dimensions and pace Adornian “handwriting”, Seth’s dissimulation of musical canonicity serves to demystify the apparent immediacy or transparency of language, whether of “pure” music or the novel’s rehearsed style of realist narration. As if to accentuate the belatedness of all cultural knowledges, the novel insists on troping its own uses of the English medium with an ambiguous reference to an attachment to native soil –​ambiguous, because the ground of such attachment fails to appear within the novel’s regulatory notion of culture; where “culture” itself is evoked spatially and linguistically, through fully discrepant references to “Vienna”, the German language, and “Europe”. As such, the novel turns on degrees of separation between a “love of earth” (AEM 70) –​specifically national origins associated with the English language through extended citations from the poet George Meredith –​and the irony of an irreducibly externalised location of a “Western” tradition overwhelmingly aligned with the narrative’s subject matter, music. Staged through recusant or inherently incompatible cultural origins, the narrative suggests that the proper time and place of culture, even in its most recent or acutely remembered forms, is never accessible as an immediate object of language. As such, the work’s specifically “adversarial” positioning resides not in the production of an alternate “cultural” or ethnically marked subjectivity, but in an Adornian aesthetic of semblance (Schein). This is the allegory of a cultural location that is somehow already fractured and forced to

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  161 engage textually, through its very matter, with the generative event of delay (Said, CI 115, 295). Following Adorno, my reading has turned on this allegorised inability of both the English medium and the novel’s musical subject matter to abide simultaneously within the construct of “culture”. Further, as the emotional and existential “centre” of the protagonist, this perpetually externalised location of identity appears as a horizon of expressive possibility even as it remains insurmountable by, or, what is the same, unsayable within narrative conventions of characterisation and subjective expression. If, in its own words, An Equal Music sets out to specify a “variant reading” of normative or hegemonic cultural identifications, this position is not described through a figure of physical dislocation; it is enacted textually through the excursionary movement of language as it takes flight from its historically intended rhetorical and cultural destination (AEM 193). In lieu of an explicit subject of migration, exile or even cultural “hybridity”, Seth advances, instead, an ethic of “soundless reading” through the motif of deafness; whose effect is to powerfully unsound musical references, and to return the classical lexicon of “ineffability” to the non-​human matter and image of the “instrument” of expression. Figures of vocality from which the question of subjective origins or intent has been erased are thereby linked, metonymically, to signs of writing. As such, questions of cultural identity, voice and a “minority perspective” raised by critical reviews remain decisive for understanding the work, even as these escape nomination through subjectivist modes of expression (where “expression”, as disappointed reviewers of the novel suggest, is fully audible only when coded through prescriptive ethnic, racial and linguistic accents for a prefigured other/​reader). To the extent that the identity of this cultural agent is readable within the narrative –​in the given name “Michael”, in the determinate meaning of London or Vienna, “in the German” or as Englishness  –​the novel opens up a new, interstitial space of meaning from within its own medium. Strategically mobilising the anachronisms that repose within music’s claim to “sufficient” cultural origins, the novel conserves the value and propriety of (musical) form within extraneous writerly or discursive supplements. An Equal Music’s conservatism is, in this way, at once post-​ideological and postcolonial. It renders the claim of “culture”, the figure of its proper auditor, together with the geo-​political ground of accumulated value, into ciphers of historical obsolescence. It thereby subjects the fiction of an integral past, along with the history of its ideological contestations to the momentarily disabling or, indeed, “exilic” effort of listening and unlearning (Said, HDC 143). By reconstructing the “classical” in the hiatus between sounded meaning and extirpative silence, or, indeed, through the coordinates of an asymmetrically organised space of global accumulation, “music” delineates a map of “overlapping yet irreconcilable experiences” for the present (HDC 143).

162  Formations of the contemporary The work lays claim to the humanistic inheritances of Empire  –​in the exigent, absolute good of music, in the “sheltering” national language of English, in the derivative possibilities of the nineteenth-​century realist novel –​in order to redirect these formal legacies towards a hitherto unsignified cultural recipient (Adorno, ISM 95). Following Edward Said in “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals”, an essay written roughly a decade after Seth’s novel and the appearance of Culture and Imperialism, this task of a reconceived future might be construed in terms of the mutuality of Empire /​Independence. As overlapping failures, these oppositional locations of culture become discernible as internally fractured realities within the disharmonious whole of our globalist conjuncture, their legibility as such, emerging only “in the aftermath of the classical empires, the end of the Cold War, the crumbling of the socialist and nonaligned blocks, [and in] the emergent dialectics of North and South in the era of globalization” (Said, HDC 139).38 At this point, and towards the conclusion of this posthumous collection, Said returns to Adorno on music to suggest that the “intellectual’s provisional home” is akin to the “intensely … crafted form and content … of modern music” (Said, 143, 144). Both locations of culture materialise their preconditions in the history of lived inequality, not, however, through “combative” opposition but in the idea of a national legacy as an inassimilable counter-​space, one that can offer neither a place of “retreat” nor programmatic “solutions” (143). In its ineliminable difference from the “society that produced it”, the “precarious realm” of Seth’s musical writing opens a space of “intransigen[cy]” to new orthodoxies of “official memory, national identity and mission” that today supersede the territorial coordinates of “classical empire” in both metropolitan and postcolonial contexts (Said, 141, 143, 144).

Notes 1 Vikram Seth, An Equal Music (New Delhi: Viking Penguin India, 2000), 242–​ 243 (hereafter cited in the text as AEM). 2 These include Chaudhuri’s three musical novels, later collected in Freedom Song (2008); the style and subject matter of these works have since been reprised in the acclaimed, The Immortals (2009); and Rushdie’s paean to the diasporic force and legend of Bombay, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2000), conceived as an aspect of a travelling culture-​industry. Significantly and like Seth’s allegory of musical loss and recovery, the latter also references the Orpheus Eurydice myth. 3 Whereas, in Seth’s own words, A Suitable Boy was awarded the “ludicrous” advance of £250,000, the sum was doubled for An Equal Music, no doubt because the previous work succeeded wildly in establishing itself as both a best-​ seller and a hallmark of “serious” post-​Independent fiction (Flood, “Vikram Seth writes A Suitable Boy sequel”.). 4 Nicholas Spice, “Mooching”, London Review of Books 21(9) (1999):  15–​16, www.lrb.co.uk/​v21/​n09/​nicholas-​spice/​mooching (accessed 18 June 2014).   For critical reception outside of India, the novel’s inability to conform to the normative category of “postcoloniality” is simply not apparent as a criterion

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  163 for evaluating its form and politics. At issue, instead, is the novel’s intransigent, even programmatic blindness to “Western classical” repertoires that depart from the First Vienna School and J.S. Bach. It is proposed that such a conservative construction of traditions of Western classical music affects Seth’s writerly attempt to speak about music –​in short, in both content and style, the narrative is “imprison[ed]” in a retrograde notion of the canon. In a particularly perceptive critique for the exacting readership of the Times Literary Supplement, Nicholas Spice suggests that by imagining the plenitude of music in its separation from speech, Seth fails to formally exploit the historical as well as semiotic transactions between writing and reading, a claim that will be disputed in detail in this chapter. For Spice, the novel secures the “purity” of the non-​referential language of music by entrapping it in a “sentimental idealism [that is] ahistorical, anti-​intellectual and fundamentally uncreative”. 5 Mala Pandurang identifies Seth’s aura –​as well as the putative inaccessibility of this novel to an “embodied” domestic readership –​with the cultural distinction of an older if increasingly obsolete Nehruvian bourgeoisie. Despite its global appeal and in contradistinction to the San Francisco-​based Golden Gate, this “European” novel remains at a tangent to even the emergence of a global techno-​ meritocracy and the privileges of travel that marked the experience of socio-​ economic mobility in the mid-​1990s for an new middle class. (Pandurang, “The Complex Case of Vikram Seth”, 175). 6 Mala Pandurang, “The Complex Case of Vikram Seth:  Questioning the International in An Equal Music” in Vikram Seth:  An Anthology of Recent Criticism, ed. G.J.V. Prasad (Delhi: Pencraft International, 2004), 175–​183. 7 Carl Dalhaus, Nineteenth-​century Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 31. 8 Dalhaus aligns the “seraphic aura” of “holiness” surrounding Palestrina’s music and Bach’s cantatas as concretising Schleiermacher’s contemporary proposition of a “religion of feeling” (29–​31). 9 Theodor W. Adorno, “Lyric Poetry and Society” in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), vol. 1, 37–​54 (hereafter cited in text as ISM). 10 The emphasis on Bach’s “purely instrumental music” is the basis of Adorno’s rejection of the traditionalist reconstrual of a pietistic Bach in post-​war Germany. In his deliberately anachronistic use of Bach’s late instrumental works –​above all, the Art of the Fugue that features as the primary musical figure of Seth’s novel –​Adorno argues that Bach left the contradictions and, indeed, inadequacies between the musical possibilities of his compositions and extant instruments for and on which he composed unresolved. Bach, therefore, heralds new, unprecedented possibilities in both instrumentation and performance. Insofar as compositional meanings may remain unsounded in the work’s own time, the posthumous possibilities of Bach’s oeuvre are preconditions not only for the chamber music tradition, but its late, radically “secular” continuation in the Second Vienna School. (Adorno, “Bach Defended against His Devotees”, Prisms 142). 11 Stephen Benson, “Contemporary Fiction and the Music Itself” in Literary Music: Writing Music in Contemporary Fiction (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Press, 2006), 105–​140. 12 Figures who are pointedly excluded from Seth’s repertory, or otherwise feature as the object of a deliberately mouthed devaluation/​marginalisation within the

164  Formations of the contemporary context of the “Classical”, are the post-​classical Schumann, his student, Brahms, as well as the classic modernists “Bartok, Shostakovich, Britten [who are] gone by the board” (119). Blatant by its omission is any reference to the Second Vienna School, subsequent post-​War developments in electronic composition and New Music are parodied in the figure of the overly cerebral yet predictably unimaginative preferences of Billy. For a comprehensive discussion of the implications of these references as staging, ironically, the inequality inherent to the novel’s “universalisation of its own texts”, see Benson (119–​122). Pre-​ nineteenth-​century music is consigned altogether to “the early music twilight zone”, with the interesting occasional reference to Handel; a figure, I  suggest, that returns less in its musical significance than as a marker of a (redundant) Englishness associated everywhere else in the novel with literary forms (160). 13 Jacques Attali, Noise:  The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 135. 14 Homi K.  Bhabha, “DissemiNation:  Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation” in Location of Culture (New York, Delhi & London: Routledge, 2004), 145 (hereafter cited in the text as LC). 15 The chamber musician represents a figure of amateurism that is at once inspired and “modest”. Its contemporary obsolescence, as a social and aesthetic ideal, is, perhaps, the point of Adorno’s essay, insofar as the expertise required to perform the repertoire (once staged in the commodious spaces of the bourgeois interior for the pleasure of the player herself) can only accomplished today through dedicated professionalism. As such, Adorno intensifies the aesthetic “instant” of performance by emphasising its disappearance. If, in chamber music, a social totality is approximated in a fictional register as freed of purpose, profit or regulation –​as a semblance of reconciled identity –​Adorno underscores the historical brevity of this non-​competitive, non-​coercive ideal of communication: “It almost seems like a miracle that its period lasted so long” (ISM 87). 16 Seth, AEM 8. 17 Dirk Wiemann, “Unimagined Communities” in Genres of Modernity: Contemporary Indian Novels in English (Amsterdam & New  York:  Rodopi, 2008), 157–​182. 18 Timothy Brennan, “The National Longing for Form” in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, eds. Billy Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (London & New York: Routledge, 1995), 170–​175. 19 Mala Pandurang, Vikram Seth:  Multiple Locations, Multiple Affiliations (Delhi: Rawat Publications, 2002), 28. 20 Seth, “Author’s Note”, AEM 131. 21 In the Introduction to The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha identifies the “minority perspective” with the recognition and refusal of normative, “pedagogical” discourses of polarised opposition. “The overlap and displacement of domains of difference … [comprises] the social articulation of difference from the minority-​perspective … a complex, on-​going negotiation that seeks to authorise cultural hybridity … in moments of historical emergence” (LC  2–​3). 22 Lockwood Lewis, Beethoven: The Music and the Life (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), 115. The citation that heads this section is from Beethoven’s famed “Heiligenstadt Testament” of 1802. Infirm and increasingly despairing over his deafness at the

“Tis love of earth that he instils”  165 time, Beethoven sought to recuperate in Heliegenstadt, an hour outside of Vienna. While the letter was addressed to his brothers, Beethoven kept it concealed in his private papers because, it has been speculated, of the disgust and “humiliation” he expresses over his deafness in the document. The letter was discovered posthumously, only in 1872. 23 Bushnell’s thesis turns on a comparison with Daniel Mason’s, The Piano Tuner, set in the Shan tribal lands of mid-​nineteenth-​century Burma; her reference to the “foreign” sound of microtonalities refers to this text. Where microtonal music refers to musical systems that contain intervals much smaller than the equally spaced semitone of standard Western tuning, it has broader significance, in the context of Bushnell’s comparison, for a range of microtonal musical systems, from the Indian system, the gamelan music of Indonesia, Thai and African musics as well (Griffiths and Lindley, 279–​280). Microtonal variations within the “standard” norm of Western music is also a characteristic feature of African American blues, jazz and spirituals (Cook and Pople, 124–​126). 24 Bushnell’s proposition on the postcolonial genealogy of musical “second-​sight” is incisively demonstrated in references to W.E.B. Du Bois, through the work of Paul Gilroy and Walter Mignolo. 25 So, when Michael cautions Helen against utterly reshaping her instrument (which would have to be remade in massive size to accommodate for the drop in its register) he reminds her of his own, episodic “problems with his fingers” (AEM 122). The allusion is ignored by Helen, but is important to reader, reminding us of the original “violence done to his style” by the “brutal, suffocating energy” of Kall (18, 108). In a catastrophic attack of stage fright, the young Michael found his fingers crippled while performing, as if he were incrementally “coming apart” and “unlearning” his discipline on the recital stage –​while relegated to Michael’s past, the threat and possibilities of “unlearning” is always potentially present. It is nearly repeated in an episode of auditory disorientation in the performance in Vienna, which has brought both Julia and the “shock” of the past back into his life, as into the intimate “labyrinth of [his] ear”. These episodes might be construed further, as repetitions of Michael’s childhood claustrophobia. 26 Richard D Leppert, “Commentary” in Essays on Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 513–​563 (hereafter cited as EM). 27 With regard to the chamber music form, the late quartets of Beethoven become exemplary of such processualism; further, “the idea of new music [as such] ripened in [early nineteenth-​century] chamber music” (Adorno, ISM 96). 28 Despite the incisiveness and insight of Benson’s reading, he nowhere accounts for Julia’s deafness, nor for the idiomatic place that the figure of musical deafness/​ mastery occupies in Romantic musical discourses. 29 Adorno, “Bach Defended against His Devotees” in Prisms, eds. and trans. Shierry W. Nicholson and Samuel Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 133–​146. 30 The lionisation of Bach’s instrumental music followed Mendelssohn’s foundational “rediscovery” and performance of the choral work, St. Matthew’s Passion, so that Bach’s “secular” or instrumental music too, partook of, and in effect further extended a “vague aura of holiness” into the notion of pure music. Contemporaneous with this development was the consolidation also of the “Palestrina style”, in Dalhaus’ phrase, which involved a revival of interest in Renaissance polyphony (31, 182).

166  Formations of the contemporary 31 James Garratt, “Palestrina in the Concert Hall” in Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination (Cambridge, MA:  Cambridge University Press, 2002), 214–​240. 32 Edward W.  Said, “Consolidated Vision” in Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 73–​229 (hereafter cited in the text as CI). 33 For Said, the especial significance of the English novel in the mid-​nineteenth-​ century as the dominant cultural expression of Britain –​both domestically and in comparison with other competing intellectual institutions in Continental Europe  –​is integrally related to the “continuity of British imperial policy throughout the nineteenth-​ century”. Itself “in fact a narrative”, policies of uninterrupted expansionism and settlement were “actively accompanied by this novelistic process” (Said, CI 88). 34 Incidental novelistic signs of the “ ‘out there’ … frame the genuinely important action here, but [do not stand] for a greater significance. Yet these signs of ‘abroad’ include, even as they repress, a rich and complex history which has since achieved a status that the Bertrams, the Prices and Austen herself would not, could not recognize. To call this ‘the Third World’ begins to deal with the realities but by no means exhausts the political or cultural history” (Said, CI 111–​112). 35 Bruce Robbins, “Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions”, Social Text 40 (1994): 25–​37. 36 In a remarkable instance of detailed materialist insight, Adorno informs us that in the eighteenth century, the removal of the “figured bass” from the scoring of music entailed physical and structural transformations in the media and spaces of performance. Literally moving out from the church and the vast, polychoral performances associated with the Baroque era  –​whose various parts and disparate placing within the church was compressed into the “short-​hand” of the figured bass-​line  –​music entered the privileged territory of a cultural interior, understood as both the “home” and subject of a rationalised Western European bourgeoisie. Genetically, if paradoxically, the form is seen to develop from an originary gesture of ideational and material contraction, which is associated, in this line of argument, with processes of secularisation. In other words, chamber music is originally already a semblance, an approximation of a communally audited whole that is in reality, fully subject to the logic of redundancy. The genre is an index of what, at the time of its origins, it could not possibly foresee –​ the decisive outmoding of social organicity with the onset of industrialisation (Adorno, ISM 87–​90). 37 Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2004), 141 (hereafter cited in the text as HDC). 38 The essay was first published in 2001, in The Nation; its republication as the concluding essay of this posthumous collection suggests its renewed significance for the American university in the post-​9/​11 context.

4  The art of disappearance Reading Adorno in the house of Dayanita Singh

Of myself –​thanks to that privilege which does not last but which gives one … the faculty of being suddenly the spectator of one’s own absence –​there was present only the witness, the observer, in travelling-​coat and hat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that automatically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph.1 (Proust, from The Guermantes Way (Remembrance of Things Past 2): 141)

Over the better part of the last two decades, Delhi-​based photographer Dayanita Singh (b. 1961)  has featured increasingly as a major presence within the contemporary spaces of international art exhibition. At the Gwangju and Venice Biennales (2008; 2011 and 2013); in a much-​ anticipated appearance at the German Pavilion of the latter alongside Ai Weiwei, Romuald Karmakar and Santu Mofokeng (2013); in solo shows which include critically acclaimed exhibitions at Berlin’s National Gallery at the Hamburger Bahnhof (2003) and the Serpentine and Hayward Galleries in London (2008; 2013); and after a major retrospective at the Huis Marseille in Amsterdam (2010), Singh’s career attests to the propulsive global visibility of Indian artists in this time. While Singh’s oeuvre can be conventionally periodised within the context of post-​liberalised Indian art and its spectacular, if relatively recent entry into multinational circuits of production and exhibition, the particular trajectory of her career, as well as the ensemble of formal choices that currently comprise her oeuvre, strains at both national and globalist frames of such contextualisation. Ascriptions of gender and nationality sit uneasily with the artist herself. In an interview in 2013, Singh suggests as much by deflecting a question about her artistic persona, towards a characterisation of the photographic image as an index of “loss”. In this oblique appeal to the stock-​modernist idiom of photography as a work of mourning, Singh asserts that the experience of “loss” –​presumably like photography itself –​“has [no] nationality”.2 The statement is doubly suggestive, linking temporalities of both loss and creative

168  Formations of the contemporary opening to a possibly privative, or otherwise superseded understanding of “nationality”. By the same token, the comment foregrounds the difficulty of fixing Singh’s artistic choices (and identity) to the traditional parameters of the photograph, considered as both still-​image and as an enclosed work of artistic value, within the context of modernist representational practices in India. Suggesting an art form that outlives the losses it nevertheless conveys, Singh raises the question of what photography might still have to offer after the digitalised dissolution of its medium. The implications of such a “post-​ national” hypothesis are suggestive both with regard to the possible creative gains for artistic practice that emerge from such an historical conjuncture, as for any critical appraisal of Singh’s oeuvre as an instance of properly contemporary artistic practice, which reflects the historicity of its own forms by measuring the distance between the spaces and traditions of the modern, and the current explosion of global sites of art exhibition and circulation. Bearing these implications in mind, I note at the outset, that any introduction to Singh’s work would be incomplete without reference to her anomalous socio-​political status as an “Indian woman photographer”. Trained at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and at New York’s International Centre of Photography, Singh started out in the 1980s as a photojournalist for national and international publications; her extended assignments from this period demonstrate a significant commitment to questions of social justice, especially as they bear upon corporealised experiences of social suffering. Singh’s vertiginous artistic success from the mid-​1990s onwards is inextricable from her exceptional, unfolding artistic commitment to the relationship between the photographic medium, and the historical possibilities of its form. As such, Singh’s career together with her ongoing multimedial practice presents a notable outlier to norms that, four decades later, continue to bind Indian photographers –​ especially women –​to the hegemony of news reportage within a prolifically mediatised public sphere. Singh’s oeuvre, too, continues to evolve in unanticipated directions despite having developed, in its photographic foundations, almost sequentially across subjects and uses of genre. At the turn of the millennium, Singh established herself through exemplary works of photo-documentation; notable is her series of 21 black-​and-​white images, titled I am as I am (2000), which chronicles the secluded communality of young female novices in a Varanasi ashram. Destabilising the copiously photographed subject of Varanasi from the visual codes of both ethnography and coffee-​ table tourism, the work is significant for anticipating the consistent obliquity of the photographer’s approach to questions of culture, place and (sexual) identity. In elevated camera angles, Singh frequently segments the open interiors of the ashram’s terrace from the surrounding, riverine landscape of the city, alternating the view of one massively buttressed space by implicating it in the perspective of another. In its subject matter, the volume comprises of powerfully individuated frontal portraits of novices taken in moments

The art of disappearance  169 of leisure, in scenes of collective discipline or in the momentary vertigo of personal pleasure. Yet in individual compositions, and across the pages of the volume, the architectural spaces of I am as I am acquire a significance that exceeds the function of context or setting for the portrait –​the built environs of the ashram’s enclosure are mobilised into the means of a visual relay between a style of the body, as captured in the collection’s powerfully embodied portraits, and a corresponding style of privacy within the secluded communality of the ashram. While this early volume subscribes unambiguously to the genre of the photo-​documentary, I suggest that its images accomplish a paradoxical mode of visibility –​it is, perhaps, the presence of massive opaque walls, or the surface of an architectural partition, that seta in play the series of portraits that comprise the volume. The coherence of Singh’s style reposes, already, in the enfolded contiguities between structures of enclosure and the arresting action of an embodied disclosure (a stylistic integrity, I suggest, at the outset, that also informs the artist’s more recent intermedial installation work). I am as I am was followed by the ground-​breaking, Myself, Mona Ahmed (2002), a photo-​narrative of the migratory life of a self-​castrated hijra (literally “eunuch”, transsexual) from Old Delhi. Myself, Mona Ahmed might be approached as the limit term of Singh’s investigations of the body –​whether in the manner of its iconicity or incommensurability –​as elaborated through the photographic construction of space. Alternating between portraits of Mona and her self-​narration in e-​mail correspondence with the artist and the book’s publisher, the volume comprises a visual chronicle of Mona’s peregrination through the city of her birth, an account of motherhood (and loss), and Mona’s choice of an enduring domicility on the margins of the medieval city, on the grounds of a decrepit Muslim cemetery. Myself, Mona Ahmed establishes the body as the intimate contact point between the media of its representation, and the spatial distribution of this image in itineraries of migration, dwelling, kinship, (dis)affiliation and abandonment. As a narrative, the work emerges by dismantling generic differences between visual chronicle, the dramatic arc of character-​driven narration, testimony and the auto-​fictional possibilities of dialogue (in which the presence of the artist-​interlocutor, in turn, finds legibility in the traces of print or electronic typescript). Though uncategorisable by the standards of any of one of these genres –​the artist refers to Myself, Mona Ahmad as a “visual novel” –​the volume is, in this element at least, an affirmation of the narratological possibilities that repose within the book form. As such, Mona’s via dolorosa displays the history of an always technically mediated sense of “intimacy” –​ or a sentient history of proximity and distance that unfolds as much between artist and model, as subject and reader, and whose episodes are played out in eroticised registers of pain, communion and self-​ revelation.3 Singh’s exemplary uses of portraiture remain notable across the narrative, serving everywhere to undercut the camera’s demand for a recognisable narrative of sexual confession/​transgression –​an expectation that is at once solicited and

170  Formations of the contemporary outstripped by the narrative’s relentless frontal identifications of an abject, tender and excessively expressive body.4 In a departure from the photo-​documentary genre that first established her career, the collections, Ladies of Calcutta (1997–​1999), and the critically acclaimed Privacy (2004) and Go Away Closer (2006) develop the artist’s intensive engagement with portraiture –​a form that Singh stretches across exhibited collections and their published volumes from this period, into arrangements of especially feminine ensembles of lineage, affiliation and physiognomic resemblance. Already significant in these works are ongoing inter-​ textual references between exhibited collections and their book publications; critical reception from this time conjectures on how Singh’s corpus is able to develop almost “seamlessly” through movements of self-​ reference and reconsolidation (presumably, also between photographic exhibits and their rearrangement for publications).5 Images from these collections frequently pivot around the genre of the family portrait, an associated exploration of conventions of the sitter’s self-​presentation and an alignment of the family grouping with feminised performances of filial welcome and leave-​taking. (This intimate world of feminine inclusion and departure is thematised, perhaps most powerfully, in compositions that “narrate” the poignancy of bridal leave-​taking enacted in public streets in full dress or through the empty spaces of wedding pandals (stages) encountered by night. The 2006 series Beds or Ladies of Calcutta already interpolate such moments into allusions to conjugal bereavement in the persona and daily accoutrements of the Bengali bidhawa (widow); the traditional figure of feminine remembrance, also an enduring construct of the nineteenth-​ century Bengali literary imagination.) Dislodging the subject of the portrait from its habitual setting, the focus of Go Away Closer and Privacy initiates Singh’s ongoing preoccupation with the dwelling space itself, or the interiors of a built environment which would otherwise serve to “frame”, “set” or “hold” in place the photographic subject, in this case, the image and historical presence of the sitter. While this possible slide of focus from figure to ground enters even into Singh’s most forthright uses of traditional portraiture (as in the affable sunlit interiors of Ladies of Calcutta), its effect is felt most powerfully in the depopulated, intensely enigmatic spaces of Go Away Closer and Privacy. These continue to retain the conventions of the genre while displacing or even extracting the human figure from its setting, thereby affecting the viewer’s perception of both the subject and space of the bourgeois interior in peculiar ways. For the purposes of this discussion, these provocations might be approached through two broad, interrelated directions. First, by rendering a notional “sitter” into the erased/​able yet necessary precondition for the photograph’s legibility, these images specify “home”, in the details of the domestic interior, through departure  –​or the traces of disappearance. The effect is to confront the viewer with a sudden apprehension of empty space, as it opens up between the richly detailed materials and objects of the interior. As the

The art of disappearance  171 readings in this chapter will suggest, in moments of such unsettling perceptual reversal, across images and collections, the photographic operation itself becomes an object of visibility. Second, by emplacing visual metaphors of the photographic apparatus within the compositional space of the image, Singh’s images from this period already invert orienting distinctions between what is properly internal to the photographic frame, and what is relegated to its outside. By introducing such recessive, ongoing discrepancies between the moment of photographic “capture” and the means through which such visibility is accomplished, Singh’s images add time to our assumptions about photographic instantaneity –​thereby disclosing the photographic “shot” as, itself, as an exemplary technology and artefact of lateness. This suggestion has implications for critical methods involving questions of artistic biography and oeuvre, and bearing these in mind, I move this introduction forward, to Singh’s contemporary installation works, which have garnered exceptional global salience since the publication of these photographic volumes. In 2012, Singh conceptualised her first presentation of the “museum” installation, a modality of art installation that informs ongoing innovations in her current practice. Titled File Museum, the installation presents a dramatic excess of black-​ and-​ white photographs, featuring overflowing, palpably degradable paper documents of government agencies. These are placed within the cabinet-​like frames of a teak-​wood structure similar to a room partition, where the panelled surface might itself be further unfolded (or retracted) through hinges that attach to smaller, recessed spaces  –​ pigeonholes, in which a further plethora of a hundred and forty photographs are sequenced and stored. Suggesting near-​illimitable sequences of identities and histories, the screen/​cabinet honours the subjection of ordinary lived experience to labyrinthine systems of bureaucratic identification and authentication across India’s (post)colonial history. But in its own retractable possibilities, the installation also serves to release the plurality of everyday life into potentially countless manifestations of the display object –​where the “object” might be said to range across the writerly mark on paper, the heaped and unruly contents of the box file, as well as the photographic image of such devices of documentation and containment. Altogether, File Museum postulates a speculative archive, open, through the incorporation of chance and the unexpected action of the individual viewer on the collection, to incalculable combinations of histories and their narration  –​a potentiality that would be literally inconceivable outside the makeshift stability of the screen, and its construction, within the exhibition environs itself, of a sheltering space for the photographic encounter. As a curated intervention, the moveable structure of File Museum also implicates the touch and judgement of the collector; the artist’s own collection of photographs over the preceding three decades are selected, emplaced, and possibly anonymised as notional “objects” of the file museum. Implicating the photograph in a potentially unbound series of renarrations, the installation suggests the

172  Formations of the contemporary unprogrammed, even disordered manner in which institutional memory might actually exist. Akin to the fan-​like structure of display, memory-​forms (museums, archives, but also something like a family album) might be opened again, reassembled or invoked through alternative points of contact –​especially in contexts for which the traditional function of the exhibition space tends, like the overvalued object of art, towards disuse. Whether because of the moribund cultural status that now attaches to the official document, or the object’s self-​enclosure from public life as a “work” with discrete artistic or personal value, the materials of display in File Museum reappear through the very processes of museolisation to which they have been subjected. In this way, the curated existence of both the photograph and the traditional spaces of its display reacquire the power to fascinate. Fascination –​which dispels the immediate evidence of our senses to draw us, rapt, into the haunting details of everyday life –​remains the enduring signature of Singh’s photographic art as it moves across collections into evolving forms and other materialities. As the readings comprising this study will propose, this quality of absorption is essential to Singh’s art, serving to still realist vectors of “actual” or empirical space and time within the photographic frame. Dilating our horizon of perception, Singh’s images arrest us in our search for what is properly interior to constructs of visibility. Through uncanny inversions of the compositional coordinates of inside and outside, perception is redirected towards an unverifiable, properly unspatialisable outside. This capacity of form –​of remaking interiority by making it into a mystery, of rendering alterity within the tangible structures and conventions of presence  –​imbues the everyday architecture and tactile surfaces of the home, the cabinet recess, the frame or the household item of the storage cupboard with a powerful affective charge. Singh’s ongoing practices with modalities involving the “file-​museum” or the temporal “binding” of combinations of photographic narration to the materials of the book cover, affords, above all, a reopening of the photographic object to the individuated agency of the viewer and the postulation of an as-​yet unidentified user –​even as the visual appearance of all such objects become saturated with the signs of finitude, in evidence of material degradation and museolisation. From the perspective of this study, historicity –​at least in Singh’s world –​ is nothing less than this moveable relation between art and everyday life –​a relationality without guarantees that also haunts the moribund structures and institutions of public memory (as in File Museum). In uses of the museum–​ cabinet–​ partition structure, Singh’s contemporary installations conjoin monumental public archives to the fate of disowned “case histories”; the grand scale of history, in other words, is visibly reduced to its entanglement with countless anonymised individual lives and ordinary biographies. Notable is the 2013 exhibition series comprising File Room Book Object, which was reconceptualised and produced as the book, File Room [http://​ dayanitasingh.net/​file-​room/​] in the same year. Displacing the still-​image from its frame, Singh mobilises the photograph, as both composition and

The art of disappearance  173 medium, towards the bound-​book cover and so, towards a different order of spatial as well as artistic containment.6 Implying the literary “binding” of the photograph and its reproduction to narrotological structures of time and space –​to divergent “storylines” set in motion by the same material –​File Room appears to accelerate the dissolution of the traditional frames and genres through which the photographic image is received  –​a potentiality that will be applied, retroactively, to readings of reflective technologies as we find them in the works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Altogether, the inflection point between the photographic collection and its possible iterations as file/​book/​object displaces no less than a suggested history of photography into the space between various media. As we will see, it is the distance between the photograph, the book and the historiographical trace that is placed in relation to the “hinge” –​and so given form. Above all a mediatic device, the hinge, whether photographed or a part of the wooden structure of display, lends visibility to the object while also licensing the viewer to reorder images in potentially unfinished sequences. In light of Singh’s most current practices, this chapter revisits the artist’s photographic uses of the domestic interior, together with the conventions of portraiture, with a particular focus on selections from the collections Privacy and Go Away Closer.7 If excerpts from these works feature as a point of focus in the commentary, it is because the photograph already militates against a chronological history of its development, whether in an account of the artist’s oeuvre or in the speculative history of the form suggested by her current practice. In their intricate compositional integrity, the images comprising these photographic collections anticipate the scope, force and provocations of Singh’s contemporary installations, in particular, her ongoing uses of the modality of the museum–​book–​file-​room installation. Images in these collections become perceptible through the quality of intimate recognition, say, in the suspension of time that imbues the “still” with the power to fascinate, or otherwise, in the uncanny exposure of architectural surfaces to the outlines of “negative”, inverted or inexistent space; the affects that accompany such points of recognition are unsettling, suggesting to the viewer how the structures of photographic interiority, including those of identity and presence, are already in transit towards an unnameable outside. Singh’s unfolding corpus of works is a continuous reconstellation of the question of the right distance (Abstand) between ourselves, in our particular historical situation, and the photographic object. We have already encountered this question, in previous discussions, through an interrogation of the Denkbild (thought-​image) in the written text –​or the still-​point of the allegorical image, in which we witness the dissolution of historical guarantees related to sovereign values of freedom, autonomy, identity and, through this, the inoperability of critical criteria that would allow us to decide, with certitude, on the “correct” perspective to take before the disintegrative image. How do we inherit the object-​world of the twentieth-​century

174  Formations of the contemporary photograph? Can the entwinement of that photographed world with the historical structures of the museum, the archive or the public icon still touch us, today, as a claim that extends past the various “endings” through which these founding national forms are narrated in our post-​historical conjuncture? As the photograph slips from its holding frame to other devices of exposition, appearance and unanticipated recognition, what orders of futurity are opened to us –​as much by the possibility of an artistic practice that emerges through the ongoing dissolution of its own medium, as through the action and choices of visual re-​possession by an unforeseen user?

Legacies of the real: Contextualising the interior In their most accessible or “realistic” aspect, Singh’s interiors document the visual resplendence that attaches to depictions of leisured domesticity. While these images focus on the contemporary spaces of upper-​/​ middle-​class Indian metropolitan life across communities and cities, their wealth of detail, together with her sitters’ pronounced capacities for an individuated self-​presentation, invites explicit comparison with depictions of the bourgeois interior in the modes of European and colonial realism. Despite differences in consumption patterns, both modes of narrative realism were articulated at a shared historical and material conjuncture, in which the representational codes of descriptive realism were articulated in and through descriptions of the middle-​class interior. In the transition from modern mercantile capitalism to industrialisation, or the era that Adorno identifies with “incipient high-​ capitalism” in his own analysis of the bourgeois interior in Northern Europe, the accumulation of value on the Continent remained inextricably tied to Empire and competitive nationalism –​and therefore, entangled with the birth of a colonial modernity elsewhere. If “high” commodity capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century “involve[d]‌a new valuation placed upon the world as a collection of objects in use”, the domestic interior constituted a privileged locus for the consolidation and arrangement of such an object-​world across a “global … empire of things” (“Phantasmagorias”, Chaudhuri, 173, 178).8 In her compelling genealogy of nineteenth-​century realism, Supriya Chaudhuri aligns the habitus of conspicuous consumption (“expressed as wealth or taste”) in domestic fictions of nineteenth-​century European and American realism, with the contemporaneous adoption of “new living styles by [a semi-​feudal] colonial bourgeoisie” in Bengal, the site of the earliest experiments with realist representational codes in South Asia. For this new class of a consuming, aspirational elite, the expression of leisure was “closely related to the display of wealth”  –​as it was to world of the realist novel itself (176). Comparing the linkages between interiority, affect and representations of the interior in novelistic realism, Chaudhuri demonstrates how the norm of the “well-​furnished” bourgeois interior became the locus of various (often contested) forms of bourgeois

The art of disappearance  175 self-​verification and consolidation in both Euro-​American and colonial contexts in this period.9 We might approach the furnished interior, first, as a paradigmatic site, and signal, of middle-​class modernity in the context of the rapid expansion of commodity markets (across these comparative loci). Accordingly, the interior is, among other things, a style of the modern to the extent that it at once actualises and individuates logics of commodity exchange and transfer through personal consumption. Second, as one itinerary taken by capital’s universalising drive, the history of the private interior is significant, in this period, for reflecting changes in the values of political economy itself: Within the domain of leisured privacy, a consuming middle-​class acquired the accoutrements of a domestic interior and thereby, a social exterior “for the very purpose, as it were, of self-​ substantiation, of making representation work for the individual: that is for the ends of possessive individualism” (Chaudhuri, 174). In his classic account of realism and the inherent instability of its representational codes, “The Reality Effect”, Roland Barthes famously privileges “insignificant” details of the nineteenth-​century interior (in the wall barometer and “the little door”, in Flaubert and Michelet respectively) to suggest that the most innocuous detailing of objects in a narrative setting acquire the force of a singular ideological claim –​they declare, “we are the real”.10 The naïve reader encounters these stray details in the flow of the narrative –​ whether fictional or historiographical –​as largely “useless” stopgaps. But in effect, these notated objects ascend everywhere to the privileged status of signification. Slipping from their denotative function in the text into a forceful connotation of reality per se, the “world of objects … arrange[s]‌” itself as a habitat –​an enclosed, symbolically articulated world, in which “men inscribe themselves upon space”.11 The plethora of “useless” material detail that fills the domestic interior is essentially a rhetorical excess within the writerly codes of realism, which, in its residual (rather than strictly representational) function signals the uncontainable material referents of the world of commodity-​driven consumption and exchange. Following Chaudhuri’s reconstruction of Barthes’ thesis through Marxian exchange theory, realism mobilises a superfluity of detail in order to internalise a bewildering, market-​ driven world of commodity relations, whose plenitude must be constantly reasserted and harnessed towards the end of self-​substantiation and individuation. The multiplication of “useless” detail in the domestic interior –​whether as richness or redundancy –​suggests the intolerability –​ and perhaps terror –​of a space that can be left neither “unattended” nor vacant (Chaudhuri, 177). In the absence of any overarching signified, the excessively notated details of the interior do not so much describe the phenomenal richness of the world as much as simulate such an imagined existential whole through the daily banalities of consumption and use. As such, the thesis on the reality effect goes less to the descriptive social realism of the nineteenth century itself –​which after all, attempted to substantiate a moral subject, who sought to put representation to “work” in the service of

176  Formations of the contemporary “possessive individualism” (Chaudhuri, 174) –​than to the form’s contemporary inheritors in the era of late commodity capitalism. With the penetration of the market into every sphere of life, commodity culture renders the phenomenal world “abstractly” by incorporating the sensuous particularity of objects into logics of exchange and equivalence. Even further, under conditions of advanced industrialisation, all items of consumption are consigned to a “shelf-​life” even before their actual production, so that the object is already inscribed by the cessation of its use value. In an exchange with Benjamin on the latter’s theory of the domestic interior, Adorno claims that at the very moment the object “awakens to appearance” as “what is newest” in the market-​driven world of commodity relations, novelty takes the form of “detritus, remnants, ruins”.12 Read through this disintegrative proposition on the interior, Chaudhuri’s thesis suggests that the reality effect is already incipient in the original mode of colonial nineteenth-​century realism (as it was in the topos of Barthes’ concerns); such a claim might be extended towards the formal provocations and historical specificity of Singh’s works insofar as these bear on the viewer’s presumption about the materiality of things collected within the class-​inflected styles of urban Indian interiors. So, while the object settings of Singh’s interiors do refer the viewer to the lived experience of their owners, or otherwise feature as items of posthumous remembrance collected around the departed figure of such a hypothesised “owner”, these collections of domestic detail appear as oddly insubstantial forms within the photographic frame –​as if their phenomenal “reality” were somehow undercut (or, frequently, cut up) by the very devices through which their appearance is captured and transmitted, and to which they owe their continued life. Whether in the pristine surface of the art object, or in the ruins of the mid-​century proposition of a sphere or style of “national culture”, Singh’s reliquaries of privileged interiority serve not only to depict a world of bourgeois consumption and privilege (specified in their various metropolitan locations, in the cities of India’s postcolonial modernity). In insistent reversals of perception, they also remind us that our apprehension of such generational continuity is premised on a visual apparatus that effectively effaces the very origins that it seeks to manifest and relay into the present. A cursory glance through the 31 tritone plates comprising Go Away Closer [http://​dayanitasingh.net/​go-​away-​closer/​] reveals how Singh establishes the photographic claim to verisimilitude, and therefore, to self-​ verification, through profoundly irresolute figures of visibility: Is the work before us a finished product (the accomplished image, like the painted portrait or the commodity object on display)? Or is the work the technology itself (the reflective screen, the lens that magnifies or separates, the open “shutter” reflected on an opaque wall)? Do the gradations of artificially illuminated space bring private rooms to light, or are these the darkroom of their production? And if Singh’s abandoned interiors are possessed by traces of a posthumous presence –​captured in passing in the movement of turning

The art of disappearance  177 one’s back to the reflection –​does the photograph document life as its referent? Or does “life” begin in the negative, in inversion and cliché, through writerly processes of inscription, delay and inorganicity? These undecidable questions are staged through the resonant incoherence of Singh’s uses of the photographic metaphor, which places the (undeniable) attraction of Singh’s descriptive realism under question. Especially implicated in this moment of strain is the image’s “insiderist” appeal to chronicles of lineage, historical affiliation and physiognomic resemblance; we might plausibly identify this form of interpellative address as a loose reference to the performative tradition of national allegory, which, in the preceding century, was played out across the spatialised distinctions of the “home” and the “world”. Here, such imputed continuities, whether generational or representational, appear to the viewer only after they have been interdicted by processes of de-​materialisation, or in the delay that was already coded into the commodity world of (post)colonial interiority. The acute historicity of Singh’s vision of the interior, then, is found in such retroactive uncertainty about the status of what we see, together with the codes that authorise how we see. Despite the riveting details of documented interiors and their inhabitants, Singh’s realism transmits the quality of perceptual doubt into the medium of visibility –​where mediatic devices (the shutter, the window, the darkened room, the action of the frame or the cut), are, in turn, cast off as eroded forms into the recesses of the archive. In the manifest unavailability of any formally instantiated relation between inside and outside, Singh’s constructions of the bourgeois “interior” become visible as a discrepancy between their descriptive content and the instant of their formal presentation: Given the predominantly feminine registers of generational memory in Singh’s uses of portraiture, such a contradiction within the representational codes of the photograph implicates, perhaps especially, the (post)colonial specification of the distance between ghar and baire. Nevertheless, as Singh’s critical biographer Aveek Sen suggests, the precise meaning of the exchange between a historically specified “outside” to the construct (and furnishings) of a privatised interiority remains essentially “inscrutable” to the gaze of the viewer (Sen, 153). Such an elided exchange between the interior, and its preconditions in “the ‘public’ or ‘the ‘historic’ ”, withdraws the image from interpretation and accounts, in no small measure, for the mystery of Singh’s compositions (ibid.). Or otherwise, the proper contact point between an (existential, spatial) inside and (a socially determined) outside is felt precisely in its failure to enter the pictorial space. Hence, the startling gaps that open up from within the image frame of Singh’s photographs. (The gaps between inside and outside are further postponed and exteriorised through Singh’s more recent artistic choices, which install this photographic archive within the nested, recessive spaces of the wooden frame.) The intimate touch, or pressure, of such formally uninstantiable reciprocity is, however, deeply felt –​this is one way of considering the acute emotive intensities attending Singh’s “domestic dramas” of proximity and separation.

178  Formations of the contemporary Before proceeding on our examination of the figure of the interior, across the exchanges between Adorno and Benjamin, and its departures, in the work of Singh, I underscore Chaudhuri’s caution against any universal methodology that would overstep the “historical differences in patterns of consumption, even if there appears to be  –​today  –​a global movement towards an ‘empire of things’” (Chaudhuri, 178, emphasis added). In the metropolitan context, metonymic detail proliferated the world of nineteenth-​century realism, filling its spaces with an illusion of depth and substance, because the form could presuppose a “social practice of self-​substantiation through the possession and deployment of material goods” that had evolved over several centuries (177). In the case of colonial modernity, however, realism was a European import; from its inception, the “genre itself [was] a participant in the assimilation of new modes of … self-​representation” under conditions of momentous socio-​economic change (181). If furniture, like women’s dress, was vital to the distinction between “inside/​outside”, or the distance between the phenomenal world and the social life of things through which contestations over the modern were enacted, so also was the very idiom of realism. Within the context of such struggle, the object-​life of the interior was detailed through a deep-​ seated “ambivalence” regarding the “sumptuary codes” and practices of consumption itself  –​the equivocal value of consumption also extended to the consumption of the realist image (179). In the period of merchant capitalism, such ambivalence was typically troped (and so contained) as an aspect of colonial intrusion into the domestic sphere of “tradition” (recall Chapter 1). Consequently, the ideological valences of the bourgeois interior of postcolonial modernity are at once comparable to, and disparate from its European analogues (179).13 Singh’s sitters might indeed indicate the increasing incorporation of cultural and historical distances into the “global movement towards an ‘empire of things’ ” insofar as they display no evident “strain” in enunciating the relationship of the physical world of things to the social life of commodities (Chaudhuri, 178, 181). After all, so much of the attraction of these portraits (as well as their implicit ideological force) resides in the suggestion of globally contemporaneous scenes of family life, which undercuts ethnographically inflected assumptions about “cultural” differences between the middle-​class interior in the Indian metropolitan context and its “Western” counterparts (see for example the facing plates on webpages Privacy, http://​ dayanitasingh.net/​privacy/​) Nevertheless, the posed and theatrical nature of the setting of high/​bourgeois subjectivity is stressed in such a way as to compete with, and sometimes engulf the easy presence of their owners –​thereby implicating the conditions of their legibility, and our perception of the specificities of these images, in preceding regimes of realist representation. (Consider, for example, the unoccupied, high-​backed chairs or the colonial bedframes that are a hallmark of Singh’s photographic oeuvre; these are distinctly reminiscent of early studio photography, and also the mid-​century

The art of disappearance  179 period films that Chaudhuri places in a direct line of continuity with their nineteenth-​century precedents.) The fascination of Singh’s interiors derives, in no small part, from the viewer’s continuing interpellation into a recognisable tradition of realist representation, immersed, as it is, in associations with the domestic materials (and mediatised image) of the well-​furnished interior. Once the site of a historical struggle over the modern, the space of the domestic interior and a repertoire of related representational forms, played a pivotal role in the articulation of various styles of national realism encountered in previous discussions. In collections such as Privacy and Go Away Closer, moments of such recognition –​alternatively compelling and fleeting –​are, to a great extent, citations of (such a) tradition, as of its integral link to aesthetic technologies that range from the novel form to the camera. Singh’s interiors confront us with the vanishing residues of a history of artistic representation as it “awakens to appearance”, for a second time, as superfluity (Benjamin, BSW3 63). This proposition bears, especially, on the refractory image of the photographic apparatus as it occurs within the compositional frame, in oblique visual allusions to the role of photography in the historical framing of the modern. Altogether, the captivating detail of Singh’s compositions afford us a speculative historical method through which we might encounter some of the closures that confront traditions of realist signification in India –​ traced, through different routes, in the preceding ­chapters  –​and, therein, their renewed possibilities for this moment.

Towards a method: Reflection, reversal and “the semblance of things” in Adorno’s Kierkegaard The living room is small, comfortable and like a cabinet. (Kierkegaard, Diary of a Seducer, cited in Adorno, K 43)14

In the section of the exposé of the Arcades Project titled “Louis-​Philippe, or the Interior”, Walter Benjamin sites the emergence of the nineteenth-​century domestic interior in the transformative separation of social life into private and public spheres. From a spatialised distinction between the living space and the place of work, there emerges, for Benjamin, an unprecedented if thoroughly ambiguous construction of modern privacy. If the workplace (the office) was where the individual had to account for everyday realities of market-​driven competition and self-​advancement, he now “requires that the interior support him in his illusions” of escape from such compulsion (CB 167; Arcades 19)15. As an anonymous refuge from the expectations that attach to the individual’s social exterior in public spaces, the interior comprises, for Benjamin, the site of a fantasy that becomes integral to the “universe” of the private person (Arcades 20). Through an imagistic analysis of metropolitan or “big city” spaces, Benjamin’s thesis famously proposes

180  Formations of the contemporary the “phantasmagoria of the interior” (ibid.) –​a proposition that rescales the fantastical character of the commodity in high capitalist culture, established through global commodity logics, into the value of privacy. In the anonymised privacy of the interior, the individual regales the commodity fetish into a projection of enduring psychological depth and substance. Benjamin aligns the “phantasmagoric” (physical and psychic) spaces of such interiority with dramatic metaphors of recessive internalisation and enclosure. As such, the interior is not just the universe of the private individual; it is also his etui. Ever since the time of Louis Philippe, the bourgeois has shown a tendency to compensate for the absence of any trace of private life in the big city. He tries to do this within the four walls of his apartment. It is as if he had made it a point of honor not to allow the traces of his everyday objects and accessories to get lost… He has a marked preference for velour and plush, which preserve the imprint of all contact. In the style characteristic of the Second Empire, the apartment becomes a sort of cockpit. The traces of its inhabitant are molded into the interior. (Benjamin, 20, emphasis added)16 While the domestic interior emerges as a place of amassed personal value, such accumulation impresses (“moulds”) itself onto the surfaces of the interior in such a way as to close around and assimilate the individual into its object setting: The “etui” man emerges, thus, as both the agent and object of such capture. The turn towards fantasy, as underscored by Benjamin’s analysis, suggests that such an assimilation of the coordinates of inside and outside entails, in particular, a process of self-​effacement insofar as the difference between the owner and the object –​the vectors of “possessive individualism” –​disappears. This possibility –​of the incremental disappearance of the values of autonomy and self-​differentiation associated with bourgeois individualism –​is premised on a prior, sociologically “objective” reality that succeeds in erasing the “traces” of social production from the surfaces of the object itself (ibid.). In this way, Benjamin rearticulates the cultural logic of commodity fetishism, as it appears originally in Marx: The mysterious character of the commodity-​ form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves… It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. (Marx, Capital 164–​165)17 For Benjamin, the etui man, the “true resident of the interior”, is specified in the persona of “the collector” (CB 168; Arcades 19). It is the collector

The art of disappearance  181 who properly internalises (and so lends affective meaning) to the profusion of commodities in the outside world in a bid to individualise these objects; or, what is the same, to “preserve” them from corrosive logics of commodification (ibid.). But the desire for such a form of individuation is itself symptomatic of the ubiquitous principle of commodity fetishism under conditions of advanced capitalism; the collector’s attempt to rescue objects from the bazaar of replaceable interchangeable things, is also the moment in which he must necessarily “succumb” to the erotic charge of the inorganic (Abbas, 220).18 By emplacing the commodity in the interior, the collector “struggle[s]‌against universal commodification”; he attempts to reinscribe the object with a value that is autonomous of its market worth (ibid.). With the same gesture, and in a moment of entrenched irony, the collector puts an end to the object’s use value, dis-​housing it, absolutely, from its origins in prior social purpose. Hence, the object (and by extension, its use as detail within the private apartment) is one form of the “phantom” or surrogate interiority that passes, now, under the sign of “individualism”. Under socio-​economic conditions that dictate the increasing impoverishment of individual experience, interiority is premised on physical distance not only from public spaces regulated by logics of work and the marketplace but also from older, “traditional” ontologies in which the social life of objects was directed by an active awareness of their “origins [in] human interaction” and communal purpose (Vogel, AN 17)19. By putting the object to work in the service of a “phantasmagoric” space of origination, the collector links its “restoration” to a fabricated past. Amassing the remains of this imagined past, the collector re-​orders them through the exercise of amateur “preference”; he is incapable of a rigorous understanding of the object’s place in history (Benjamin, ibid). In his ignorance about the origins of the object and its authorising social purposes, the enthusiast enacts the ambiguous possibility that history itself now amounts to a decidedly “minor” effort; it is comprised not of works of enduring mastery, but of a strategic, practicable reconstruction of materials that failed, in the first place, to “make it” to the status of a “cultural treasure” (Abbas, 1988, 223). Following Abbas’s comprehensive account of these implications, the collector saves or preserves the object by “strip[ping]” it of its commodity character but in the process, he also deprives the item of any use value –​he identifies it as a work of art. The upshot: art, like the curated elements of the past, “turns into [an] object of mere contemplation” (Abbas, 220). As the object of personal taste, connoisseurship, or what Pierre Bourdieu discusses as (middle-​class) “distinction”, the artwork is downgraded, as it were, into yet another type of commodity. Over the course of their 13-​year-​long correspondence, Adorno advanced several, stringent responses to drafts of this aspect of the Arcades Project. In particular, Adorno expressed dissatisfaction at the elliptical nature of Benjamin’s insights into the oneiric world of the nineteenth-​century interior, urging further historical specificity regarding the relationship of

182  Formations of the contemporary the commodity to both spatial and existential constructs of interiority in the era of “world trade and imperialism” and more exposition of the ambiguities that attended Benjamin’s proposition of the etui man (Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 3).20 In the so-​called Hornberg letter of 1935, which Adorno addressed to Benjamin while on holiday in the Black Forest, Adorno refers Benjamin (somewhat insistently) to his own habilitation thesis, Kierkegaard: The Construction of the Aesthetic (1931), and its lengthy discussion of the bourgeois interior in Kierkegaard’s philosophical work. In a concentrated postscript to their correspondence, Adorno further clarifies his position by making implicit reference to Benjamin’s early work on The Origin of the German Mourning Play (1928). In this focused if unresolved comment, Adorno proposes that if, under conditions of advanced industrial capitalism, the object-​world of the interior was essentially an evacuated form, turning only on the illusion of duration and substance, such a fantasy was invariably inflected with ambivalence. In the inorganic fetish item, “desire” tends to be driven, compulsively, into registers of “fear”: “While things in appearance are awakened to what is newest, death transforms the meanings [of the new] to what is most ancient” (Adorno, BSW3 63). For Adorno, such mortification was not a matter of metaphysical necessity but an historical feature of the termination of the object’s use value –​the very point of Benjamin’s proposition of the etui man –​which Adorno had himself sought to elaborate in Kierkegaard. In that book, Adorno reads Kierkegaard through a set of images that unfold through the eminently optical metaphor of reflection. Demonstrating how the nineteenth-​century interior could be viewed through a plane of “revers[al]”, Adorno sought to disclose the constituent forms of interiority in their negative imprint, as it were, in ruined appearances of “detritus” and the “prehistoric”(K 39; BSW3 60; K 46). In fact, in elaborating the ideal of nineteenth-​century privacy through the traces of its remains in the historical present, Adorno had already referenced Benjamin’s proposition on the “powerful cipher”-​ like possibilities of the commodity’s appearance (K 45). Directly citing Benjamin’s thesis on the “petrified, primordial landscape” of allegory in his own study of Kierkegaard, Adorno located the disposition towards fragmentation and inorganicity at the heart of his genealogy of bourgeois interiority and its contemporary crisis in early twentieth-​century Europe –​ thereby also aligning the optical apparatus with his own, redemptive critical methodology (K 54).

Reflection He who looks into the window-​mirror … is the private person, solitary, inactive and separated from the economic process of production. (Adorno, Kierkegaard 42) To change the direction of this conceptuality, to give it a turn toward non-​ identity, is the hinge of negative dialectics. (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 12)

The art of disappearance  183 Within the decidedly materialist premises of Adorno’s study of Kierkegaard, the spaces of the mid to early nineteenth-​century interior are revealed in their historical relationship to the (belated) emergence of an industrialised modernity in Northern Europe. Beset by the collectivisation of labour on the one hand, and by the penetration of the routinised time of labour into family and leisure and on the other, the lived spaces of a financially independent bourgeoisie became increasingly identified with the collection of objects, or the possession of things in use. A  site of commodity exchange and value transfer, the nineteenth-​century interior also “disguises” –​in the sense of Marx’s “character mask” –​its vitalist origins in the escalating velocities of capital’s circulation.21 As such, the birth and consolidation of the domestic interior is identified by Adorno as one of the primary instruments of the reproduction of capital:  The interior is the site of the commodity fetish, which is pressed onto the figure of the private man and thereby, into the service of a projected norm of a psychological interiority. The intangible habitus of the “apartment”, then, is a material precondition for the ideologically ambiguous “person” of Kierkegaard (i.e. his multiple philosophical personae), and also the primary means of this subject’s social presentation. Adorno’s “Kierkegaard” is the “personification” of the tenuous positionality of cultural proprietorship at the threshold of “incipient high-​capitalism” –​ understood, in Adorno’s conjuncture, as a period inaugurated through the decline of a sphere of experience that had, however briefly, been inured to the imperatives of both market and labour (K 39).22 With the onset of industrialisation in Germany and much of Northern Europe (in their relative underdevelopment with France or England at this time), a rentier class emerged through its historical exemption from participation in a public life; by the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the rentier’s relative autonomy from the cultures of labour and market had become increasingly subject to regulation by the universalising drive of capital. The inhabitant of the domestic dwelling place and the genealogical origin of the liberal-​bourgeois norm of privacy is thus identified with a cultivated, if ambiguous personhood, that was involved “neither in the creation of economic value nor in capital accumulation” (Sherman, 19).23 The stakes of Adorno’s treatment of the rentier-​persona turn on the fate of this twofold cultural privilege of financial/​aesthetic autonomy, identified, now, with the rentier’s increasingly untenable claim to freedom from market-​driven logics of exchange and equivalence. As the subject of uncertain, even dubious privilege, the rentier is discoverable, for Adorno, only at the limit point of the relation between inside and outside; hence, Adorno’s decisive emplacement of introversion, or the value of privacy, in the cloistered, increasingly dematerialised space of the bourgeois “apartment”. In the section titled Interieur, Adorno identifies the central conceit of Kierkegaard’s constructs of bourgeois interiority with the “window mirror”. Referenced in Kierkegaard’s Diary of the Seducer (1843), this fashionable optical device is tacitly (and anachronistically) treated by Adorno as the apparatus of the camera obscura. A  commercially popular oddity in the

184  Formations of the contemporary domestic spaces of the mid-​to late nineteenth-​century apartment, the “spy” was attached to a widow frame in order to bring the reflected external world of the street into the apartment. At once a means of specular contraction and extensive pro-​jection, this device allowed the resident of the interior the redoubled pleasures of solitary self-​reflection and social surveillance. Adorno exposes the contradiction in any claim to an authentic private individual, here, through a focus on the duplicitous partitionings/​incorporations of the window mirror within the artificially magnified spaces of the apartment. The emblematic privacy of Kierkaard’s self-​sufficient subject appears through its spectacularisation for a distanced, and equally insubstantial, other: The window mirror is a characteristic furnishing of the spacious 19th century apartment … [Its] function is to project the endless row of apartment buildings into the isolated bourgeois drawing room; by the mirror, the living room dominates the reflected row at the same time [as] it is delimited by it… The window mirror testifies to objectlessness –​it casts into the apartment only the semblance of things –​and isolated privacy. (Adorno, K 42, emphasis mine) Insofar as subjectivity participates in the object-​world through labour and social production, the predicament of such aestheticised (stylised) isolation attests to how the actual relation between subjects is experienced –​through registers of remoteness and failed contact  –​what Chaudhiri, in an analogue with early realist depictions of the colonial interior, identified with ambivalence (Adorno, 39). In the context of industrial capital, and Adorno’s concerns, the result of such “objectless interiority” is an atomistic agent who veers between the will to “dominate” the external world, and the interiorised compulsion toward psychological “subordinat[ion]” (30, 42). Hence, the window mirror never operates as a means of specular reciprocity; rather, it is, itself, an image without ground, a pure reflection of a tautological present. Citing from Diary of Seducer, Adorno demonstrates how this device of (self)visibility operates, in effect, as a screen; it produces a plethora of signs, but these are no more than an alibi for the absence of any referent in the “real” or phenomenal world. The “lamp shaped like a flower”; the “dream orient”, fit together out of a “cut paper lampshade … a rug made of osier”; the room an officer’s cabin, full of precious decorations greedily collected across the seas –​ the complete fata morgana of decadent ornaments receives its meaning not from the material of which they are made, but from the interieur that unifies the imposture of things in the form of a still life. (Adorno, K  43–​44) It is not only that the mirror effaces all trace of exchange between projections of interiority and its own material origins (qua its status as a commodity) in the world of social production. More forcefully, the manifold operations

The art of disappearance  185 of such erasure is sited, for Adorno, on the very surface of the reflective technology. Here, Adorno reverses his polemic against Kierkegaardian aestheticism to redeem its implicit truth-​claim: As a simulacrum of presence, interiority is an existential nullity and a sociologically “real” index of cultural production under the sign of the commodity fetish. The “apartment”, and its details into which the window mirror projects, prismatically, the “semblance of things”, is reconfigured through Adorno’s re-​reading from a passive reflection of the times, to its most refractory image. Reflecting on the ideological stakes of an established philosophy of inwardness for the present, the image of the interior exposes to time –​or as we watch  –​ the particular mode of subjectivity that underlies such a value system –​what we “see” through the multi-​faceted reflections of the interior is both the accomplishment of the value of bourgeois privacy and its increasing relegation to superfluity through the magnified emptiness of its historical forms.

Reversal The utmost distance alone would be proximity. (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 57)

Significantly, this moment of representational or expressive disintegration is the turning point against the “organ of the eye”; the perspective of the discarded object enters into the text through a purely “mechanical” opening within sequence of technologically produced images (K 44, 52). The (re) turn of such “sudden historical figures” is indicated, in Adorno’s cinematic treatment of the interior, through knowledges that exceed intentional models of “expression”, in the unsolicited affects of “distress”, nostalgic “yearning”, in the figure of an “organic” body subject to withdrawal and eventual disappearance or, otherwise, through the somatic “grip” (Greif, from Angreifen) of the rejected object, as it returns to perception (K 39, 43, 44, 45, 51). In reversed and inverted form, the mirror image, or the apparatus of reflection, no longer reduplicates a world that disguises itself as transhistorical and natural in “naïve realism”, or in a “philosophy of objectivity” that reverts to an additive, description of sociological facts (ND 184). Nor does it project us back out into a purposive future ordered by the imperatives of “progressive” development and synchronicity, or the sway of the “most recent” into which (any) society might exist equitably, and in equivalence, if only its constituents were granted an entry point (ND 184). Indeed, it is only in the mediatic image of an abandoned future that “mute things speak” to us anew (K 44). Revisited through such a speculative standpoint, the image apparatus “constructs” the predicament of temporal and formal non-​coincidence into the principle of its own visibility (ibid). A construction, then, not only in the sense of being “ideological”, in its partiality and inadequation (to the empirical reality, “out there”, of which it is an effect). The image is a construct, rather, because of its conceptualism –​because it comes to light as the

186  Formations of the contemporary composite abstraction of its forms, distancing us from both the immediacy of lived experience as well as the sociological preconditions for such experience: “This is what makes the text a cipher. Implicit in Kierkegaard’s metaphor of scripture is the unalterable givenness of the text itself as well as its unreadableness as that of a ‘cryptogram’ composed of ‘ciphers’ whose origin is historical” (K 25). In the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Aesthetic Theory, the trope of the “hieroglyph” is directly related to a mediatic encounter with the screen. Adorno’s immanent critique and rescue of the optical image is outlined, itself, as a delayed inscriptive move. Here is a writing that strives to redeem both the “realism” and “objectivity” of the image by rendering it not in its depictive grasp over a substantial moral subject  –​the interiority of the modern individual –​but as the mirror-​writing (Schrift) of its vanishing forms. The optics of inversion, screening and a withdrawal from the frame of representation are processes that give rigorous form and visibility to the possibilities of an aesthetic of negative or “empty” space, as we encounter them in Singh’s photographic oeuvre. The point of comparison is, perhaps, more significant when inverted:  When passed through the actuality of Singh’s photographs of a profoundly fictive interiority, the figure of Benjamin’s “poor collector”, and the constructs of the late nineteenth-​ century etui-​world, become available for new artistic, ethical and historical reconfigurations (Abbas, 1988, 226). To put this another way:  Singh’s artistic repertoire might be deployed as the action of “reversal” enacted on and through finished forms of ideation and expression, towards their exposition for new contexts and audiences. Adorno associates such movement with the redemptive force of critique. From the perspective of a different historical moment, through the specific urgencies of postcolonial lateness, Singh’s photography redeems what remains implicit in the quarrel, itself, between Benjamin and Adorno –​“interiority” signals the uncertain threshold between histories of commodification, and the incremental erasure of the value and capacities of bourgeois autonomy not only for the object of “cultural criticism” (in the image-​based contentions that pass between Adorno and Benjamin); but also for other formations and related traditions of the modern as they come to be constituted, in their historical specificities, under the law of the commodity fetish. Or again: The “thought-​image” of interiority signals an unresolved, even transformative relationship to inherited objects and the history of their degradation under logics of advanced capitalism to the extent that subjectivity (“interiority”) becomes released from the eroded individualistic values of proprietorship and mastery.

After cultural history Culture never has the translucency of custom. In effect, it is the very opposite of custom, which is always the deterioration of culture.

(Fanon, “On National Culture” 161)

The art of disappearance  187 What appears to be the decline of culture is its coming to pure self-​ consciousness … Only when neutralized and reified does culture allow itself to be idolized… (Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society”, Prisms 24)

Biographical annotations to Singh’s work remain preoccupied with the question of Singh’s artistic identity as it relates to the (sociological) verisimilitude of her representations of the upper-​/m ​ iddle-​class domestic interior. Hence, the content of Singh’s photographic interiors is tacitly or inadvertently aligned, for this view, with a fin de siècle threshold in which the historical prerogative of elite self-​representation in the postcolonial nation turns (nostalgically) back on itself to document the passing of its enclosed world of privilege. Yet, by turning over the pages of Privacy and Go Away Closer, we glimpse, everywhere, how the putative “subjects” of Singh’s portraits appear not in themselves but through inverted images (of reflection) that place the object-​world of leisured domesticity, as well as its owners, under the sign of semblance. Especially in the works Privacy and Go Away Closer, the object-​dominated settings of Singh’s interiors are charged with such intensity that they do not so much surround the sitter’s figure (wherever this is present) as proclaim a value that is apart or even beyond that of her own. Characterised by a near-​hallucinatory attention to detail, the urbane object-​worlds of Singh’s collection waver above the viewer’s awareness of their socio-​historical function, suggesting how their affective content might have outlasted the life and presence of its original owner –​our sense of their “reality” is inflected by an emotive awareness of the absent perspective of such ownership. Casting an enigmatic hold over the frame of visibility, items of middle-​class use become aligned with the very spaces of their consumption –​the family apartment or the private bedroom –​even as such projected space moves to assimilate the depictive content of Singh’s portraits in ways that resist the biographical tendency in critical commentary. In Privacy and Go Away Closer, scenes of private life appear themselves in the form of metonymic partialities, in gestures towards a larger photographic or “narratorial” horizon that is never entirely elucidated by the series. So, photographs of the domestic interior are mixed with interrupted snatches of mid-​century civic history, where such an imputed social whole is in turn related to images of empty theatres or cinema halls, or, perhaps, to mediatic rituals of collective spectatorship and performance. Furthermore, each implied “episode” of private, public or communal cohabitation in these works is indexed by the possessions of a missing presence. In unoccupied chairs, on the surface of fastidiously made-​up beds that are watched over by their deceased users, in interstitial gaps between hanging portraits, on the remnants of wall space or in the perishable spillage of archival documents, things acquire a refracted form of visibility. The affective intensities of these images are a measure of the excessively private meaning that all such abandoned objects might hold for the viewer, once she is introduced

188  Formations of the contemporary into the spaces of a posthumous survival. But these objects also operate as framing devices within the space the composition, imputing their historical meaning to technics of visibility that are properly “remov[ed] from the … subjective dynamics of expression” (Adorno, Missa 576).24 In this aspect, Singh’s interiors do not so much represent a given social world or a way of life, as much as internalise the possibility of its absence into the media and “mechanics” of the reflective apparatus (Adorno, K 52). Suggestively, Singh’s specifications of empty space frequently align the missing figure of “proprietorship” with recurring allusions to the proverbial Father of the post-​Independent republic, Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru is thus referenced as a departed, if vital presence within the play of kinship, conjugality and historical affiliation that informs Singh’s “narratives” of the bourgeois interior. Invoked through the remainders of preserved personal effects or through the living spaces of his home at Anand Bhavan, now a museum in Allahabad, Nehru’s strikingly iconic features are often juxtaposed, in the form of public portraiture, against the anonymous interiors of Privacy and Go Away Closer. Frequently withheld from identification altogether, his person is signalled metonymically, through the distinctive modernity of its attending objects; these items are archived today, within the publicly accessible interiors of his family home. In their manifest detachment from utility (as museum items) the rooms and objects of Anand Bhavan appear through signs of recent departure or abandonment. Insofar as these two collections are also interspersed with artefacts alluding to other, equally posthumous figures of ordinary domestic life, the photographed spaces of Anand Bhavan serve to both recall and deflate the public memory of Nehru (specified in these images in the functional, socialist design of the public spaces of a national culture, or as the style of mid-​century elite self-​fashioning). The arrangement of images in these collections might be approached as an attempt to level the privileged historical gaze. In elegant paratextual essays on Singh’s collections, Sen approaches the Allahabad images, in particular, as forms of contraction that reduce the viewer’s experience of the museological space to point of unshakeable perceptual doubt. Drawing the viewer away from the city-​space into the physical environs of the family home, Singh’s photographs of Anand Bhavan proceed to involve the (real as well as notional) museum-​goer within incrementally reduced frames of representation and display. The series of images in this collection move almost sequentially, from the archive into the bedroom, and eventually into the acutely recessed spaces of the cabinet. Such an increasingly “privatised” relationship to space serves to confound the distinction between the means of historical incorporation, collection and display, and their purported content. The diminishing scale of presentation discloses to the viewer how the “containers” of museological space are as much on display as the personalised objects of acquisition or ornament, which are the ostensible focus of the exhibit. Such an implied withdrawal of historical experience into the minutiae of everyday life –​a predicament of which both Benjamin

The art of disappearance  189 and Adorno were acutely aware –​also characterises the visual itinerary of the camera. Rather than disguising its presence within the arrangement of such interiorised space, the camera’s “look” is registered through such a processes of withdrawal, in signs of dematerialised or insubstantial presence. In the first instance, the objects of Singh’s photographic archives acquire their visibility only after they have been stripped of immediate function; by the same token, they also appear to be immobilised by the camera’s gaze, acquiring renewed significance within spatial contexts (like the museum) that have been emptied of human presence. Like relics or the arrangement of a still-​life, this kind of visibility is premised on the viewer’s pronounced inability to decipher the context of their appearance  –​in a disconcerting visual detail, the scripted historical references of the archive or the catalogue are seen to remain physically attached to the items on display. If, as Sen suggests, the camera documents the hospitality of austere, “hauntingly ordinary” spaces of inhabitation and departure in all these ways, such an increasingly interiorised experience of (physical, photographic, ideological) space eventually turns upon itself. In a reversal for the viewer, “the very ordinariness of the rooms become sharply strange; their privacy, their capacity to draw us closer to intimate silences are wordlessly turned inside out on to the realm of the “public’ and the “historic” (Sen, 153, emphasis mine).25 In the course of such involution and displacement, it is the apparatus of visibility –​ the camera, the photographic image, or the frame –​which is illuminated in its “collusion” with archival processes of periodisation, documentation and monumentalisation (153). The photographic encounter is thereby disclosed as an unnerving intrusion into the realm of intimacy  –​both the archive and image are implicated in a forcible appropriation of the remnants of lived experience, which are “neutralised”, in Adorno’s sense, into rigidified enumerations of the “preserved and the memorialized” (Adorno, “Cultural Criticism”, Sen 153).26 Such an unresolved movement of “turn[ing] inside out” renders the spaces of the container  –​the room, the cabinet case, the archive itself  –​ into structural homologies of the objects contained. Through movements of inversion and mimetic resemblance, the lost and repossessed object of Singh’s archive emerges as a receptacle itself –​an enclosure that exceeds the materialities contained. The accomplishment of such turning point between inside and outside in these images is nothing other than the location of an unspecified perceptual opening  –​a kind of perceptual dilation that runs through Singh’s compositions –​-​which, for Sen, ultimately breaks into the captured “beauty of ordinariness” to dispel it towards “something that profoundly unsettles … the evidence of our senses” (53). Taking this proposition further, I suggest that the “wordless” touch of “history”, “public[ity]” or the “outside” on the “inside”, is not accomplished within the optical field of the image at all. Rather, by ceaselessly substituting one into the image of the other, it is the photographic opening, or the expulsion of vision, onto a perceptually uncertain horizon of possibility, that comes to

190  Formations of the contemporary light. To resituate Adorno’s method of reversal, that is, of reading through the still point (Punkt) of the reflective surfaces of the interior –​the unanticipated possibilities of perception in Singh’s photographic oeuvre, together with their further installation into the framing devices of the archive, are generated out of the “necessary and legitimate condition” of reification itself (K 39).

“Mirror and mourning”27 Everyone carries around a room about inside him … If one … pricks up one’s ears and listens, say, in the night, when everything round about is quite, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall. (Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebook) The echo of a single footstep takes a long time to disappear… (Kierkegaard, Diary of a Seducer, cited in Adorno, K 46)

In light of such a proposition, I turn to a reading of an unsettling image of Nehru’s collared galabandh tunics [http://​dayanitasingh.net/​go-​away-​closer/​ electronic p.  5; Steidl, 2007)  originally part of the Allahabad collection, the photograph is now included within the many scenes of the “domestic interior” comprising Privacy. Two mid-​length, buttoned-​down and high-​ collared white tunics hang upright within the dark-​wood structure of either a clothes’ cupboard or a museum-​display cabinet; the container is visible in the composition only as a near-​opaque background to the shirts, and no hangers or hooks are visible in that background. The shirt on the viewer’s left faces her directly, the second, its elbow grazing the other’s, is turned slightly away to the right. The suspended trouser-​bottoms of the tunic on the left are visible at the bottom of the photograph, and the shape is duplicated and unfolded in shadows that appear in place of a corresponding trouser set, limb-​like, under the shirt the right. Across the upper sleeve and shirt fronts are dim striations of light, indicating the glass-​fronted surface that presumably covers these suspended objects of display. In the context of Singh’s photographic works, these items of clothing are exemplary of remaindered appearances that achieve visibility as empty openings –​or as ellipses –​with the phenomenological play of appearance and dissolution that comprises the composition as a whole. Suspended in white, weightless and vertical succession behind a glass-​doored cabinet, these apparitional forms operate, in the most obvious instance, as a metonym as much for the man and the private citizen; as for archival methods of collection, aggregation and statistical enumeration. Extracting the figure of human “intentionality” altogether from the forms by which they come to light, these doubly ranged items of clothing resist the scrutinising gaze, which, if we were to paraphrase Sen, inflects perceptual consciousness with an indelibly subjectivist

The art of disappearance  191 cast by bringing both personal interest and the historiographical process into a “collusive” affinity with the norms of proprietorship and mastery. In a somewhat different vein, I suggest that by placing their own inorganicity on display, these hanging forms operate as devices of containment –​as unexpected closures within our line of sight, these do not so much return or even reorient our gaze towards alternate configurations of inside/​outside, as much as confront us with an automatic generation of their en-​shrouding or crypt-​like countenance. To be suspended within this recessive, dimly illuminated interior is to be “encrypted” by the outside, or, in other words, to be en-​“ciphered” by the contact point of such an inassimilable outside (K 126). This proposition might be paraphrased through what Lacan would sometimes term the “extimité”, or the (social, historical) exteriority that is presumed to be outside the intimate core of social and psychologically coherent experience: The contents of the “interior” order of memory are discovered, pace Lacan, in that region of non-​distinction, the “edge”, whose action serves to distinguish between conventional orders of an interior self and a cultural outside, but which also screens over the spatio-​temporal continuum between these distances (Lacan, 150, 152).28 To be touched, inscribed or encrypted at/​by the edge, then, is not only to stand at the threshold of symbolic conceptions of (inner)self and (externalised) other, but to be in the “vacuole”, the empty and atemporal “interdiction at the centre” that generates these spatialised distinctions and yet remains unsymbolisable by all such “bipartitional” relations (Miller, 75, 76).29 Consider how the specular relation in the image of Nehru’s clothing/​ coverings is not captured figurally, but exposed in the sheen of the cabinet’s glass-​fronted doors: Is it not the pure vacuity of such gleaming that is finally revealed to the viewer? –​a gleam that returns the gaze, not in an acknowledgement of the viewer’s presence, but again, to the blind, white surfaces of the two tunics? In discovering herself in the reflection of such an unseeing surface, the subject is alerted to how she is not registered –​not as she presently is, at least –​in the look of the departed. While the empty glances of the tunics return us to ourselves in this way, such a moment of “self-​recuperation” is accomplished only through a grazing of looks –​in other words, in looks that fail to meet directly within the image space. The uncanny, mirror-​like shine of the surface is the space of such a deflected encounter. Its aura, its dim luminosity, is not reducible to the various representational codes of the photograph (history/​privacy, inside/​outside). In the gleam of glass and screen, the photograph accomplishes a counter-​actualisation of these culturally coded spaces of experience –​a point of standstill, to recall the exchange on “objectless interiority” between Adorno and Benjamin, which renders the internal incoherence of the image into the very principle of its appearance. In their indexical aspect, or as physical traces, the tunics appear in place of a deceased human presence; “moulded” into the shape of such absence, they belong decisively to Singh’s other photographic allegories of the

192  Formations of the contemporary poignancy of separation. But in their second register, as the chance moment of photographic ex-​posure, these empty forms stage a paradoxical scene of reciprocity that serves to interrupt closed economies of self-​identification/​ othering. Coming to light as inverted images of the apparatus of visibility –​ rather than as human forms –​the glass and the white tunics are exposed as fully desubjectified presences. Indifferent to our presence, they do not “mirror” us at all. That is, they deprive sight of a stable point of identification; they consign the viewer to a retroactive negation of her presence before the screen. Inscribed into the very means by which the image acquires visibility, such alterity marks a temporal shift in the relation between the subject and the work. The specular exchange that is encrypted into Singh’s cabinet is disclosed as a relation to the non-​relational –​to an irreducible alterity –​ which Lacan defined as the “ethical relation” to that which remains intransigently proximate and prior to socially coded representations of self/​other, history/​interiority, possession/​loss. The absence of the loved one –​here, perhaps, the vestigial “physiognomy” of the idea of national culture, but also the singularity of an ordinary unnamed life –​exceeds all tropes of enclosure and containment. In this instance, reflection casts the viewer towards the impossible picture of her disappearance from “the screen” –​the glass, the light, the white surface, which simply fail to register the viewer in her embodied particularities, thereby opening the field of the viewer’s gaze towards an inexorable, always excessive process of self-​othering. Intimacy, then, is tied to serialised, perhaps even automatic processes of excision, self-​extraction and substitution. By proleptically reaching for this object of lost intimacy, the viewer is, in the same gesture, confronted by the vacuity of her own “internalised” standpoint. Tracing the relay between loss and proximity, absence and recollection  –​or between signs of departure, which is elsewhere, for someone else, an arrival  –​Singh’s accounts of a wounding intimacy cannot but have charged ethico-​political implications. In the first instance, “intimacy” announces a limit to paradigms of aesthetic recovery in which the absence of the departed object might be “worked through” via canons of symbolic refusal and substitution. No doubt a piece that belongs to the genre of mourning work, the image of Nehru’s kurtas is nevertheless an interruption of that form –​it suspends altogether the presumption of an interiorised model of “consciousness”, which would operate as the precondition for identity and its (generational) transmissibility in the wake of loss. In abjuring incorporative logics of inclusion and interiorisation as such, the work addresses the viewer as the empty frame, the evacuated enclosure, the apparatus itself of technologically mediated loss. The “subject” of Singh’s works might be construed through the confrontation not merely of loss, but by the mirror-​like reduplication of such absence, which is registered, in the image cited here, as a moment of inherent pictorial and temporal non-​equivalence. At once insubstantial and undetermined by existing frameworks of hermeneutical or normative verification, the uncertainty of phenomenal experience is resolute. It is specified, through

The art of disappearance  193 the form of emptiness, as the very ground of perception in the historical present. Delineating a radically uncertain horizon of perceptual experience, the image incorporates the symbolic or representational traditions of “loss” and “recuperation” themselves into its repertory of disappearances. It thereby also incriminates traditional models of memorialisation in the “continuum” of “cultural history”, which, as we saw, forgets or even destroys the figure of “anonymous toil” by interpellating it into the work’s production and transmission “from owner to another” (Benjamin, “Theses on History”, Illuminations 265; see also Bewes, 45). Ultimately, Singh’s specification of historical conventions that represent kinship, historical affiliation and generational memory register the impossibility of “documenting” or in other words, idealising such foundational origins through the accomplishment of a disinterested historical truth. Instead, the work’s designations of empty space operate through a formal indifference to the work of symbolisation –​thereby generating a surplus of affective intensities that fail to be “contained” by the various representational conceits of the photographic narrative. That the photograph is an auto-​affective technology is signalled only provisionally by the thematic of “intimacy”; the emotive surpluses that accompany the viewer’s perception of the etui interior are properly unnamable and aleatory, open to the contingency of meaning. Further, by introducing a moment of temporal incoherence into the forms of immediate presentation, the photographic enclosure operates as a kind of haptic “teletechnology”, or what Benjamin identified as the “posthumous shock” of the photographic shot (Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 328).30 In other words, while establishing contact between the distanced coordinates of inside/​outside, the shutter’s snap introduces disjunction and non-​equivalence into the photographic aspiration for instantaneity. Thus, the presentation is always viewed posthumously, or in relation to a present already abandoned by the lost or departed object –​a perspective that thereby invites “the spectre of non-​fulfillment” into each organic presentation of nation, home, family and the structure of perceptual consciousness itself as it stands before the image (Comay, 11).31

Velocities of “national culture”: Disintegration What are the politics of a social world coded through gestures of feminised privacy, greeting and leave-​taking, if this totality is itself looped internally through the vanished authority of the (national) patriarch? And if the human touch remains an intractable presence even within the abandoned arrangements of the domestic interior, why chasten the remnants of such experience by casting it  –​in the uncaptioned, unnumbered pages of Privacy  –​onto the threshold of withdrawal from recognisable orders of identity, presence and class-​based affiliation? These disquieting ambiguities are glimpsed behind even the most familiar presentations of the “family”,

194  Formations of the contemporary whether figured as a globally recognisable model of sociable, middle-​class privacy (Go Away Closer, as only one example) or as a historically identifiable visual archive that links the photographic presentation of interiority to traditions of painterly portraiture (especially as developed through the academic or art-​school genre in the colonial metropolis), allegory and cinematic conventions of iconicity that reach back to the black-​and-​white world of the mid-​century auteur (Ladies of Calcutta). In the first instance, Singh’s “portraits of empty space” from the turn of the millennium might be approached contextually, as a sustained if unresolved reflection on the fate of cultural space in the context of a “politics of disappearance”. This suggestion extends Ackbar Abbas’s notable thesis on Hong Kong at the moment of its handover from one imperial power (Britain) to another form of coloniality (China), to a discussion of the Indian metropolis in the wake of market liberalisation. Without reducing the specificities of one instance of disappearing space to the other, I share Abbas’s proposition that resurgent preoccupations with the image and identity of the (post) colonial metropolis is symptomatic of periods of rapid socio-​historical transition, in which the experience of cultural space becomes increasingly subject to processes of “abstraction”.32 By abstraction, Abbas means, above all, the material and ideological transformation of the erstwhile (post)colonial metropolis into the “global city” (3). Drawing on Paul Virilio’s work on the relationship of “disappearance to speed”, Abbas centralises Virilio’s proposition that “in the wake of electronic technology and the mediatisation of the real”, the experience of “physical dimensions loses all meaning through sensory overload” (Abbas, 9). Where Virilio argued that regimes of enclosed space (in geography or built environments) are destabilised through the intensified force of informatic “speed”, Abbas specifies this thesis for narratives of postcolonial (under)development in the era of globalisation. If postcoloniality might be understood as the historical attempt to “overcome … the colonial condition” through the “promise” of spatial and temporal co-​presence with “the West”, such a chronological imagination of time is itself condensed, under conditions of tele-​informatic speed, into the instantaneity of the electronic image. This compression of the extended history of colonialism into the experience of global simultaneity is especially interesting for Abbas, because it brings to light, as never before, the “strange historical loop” by which the erstwhile spaces of the colonial city are now perceived as “forerunners” to “what the contemporary world capitalist city would become” (Abbas, 3, citing King, 38, emphasis in original). Insofar as the colonial metropolis was “pioneered … to incorporate precapitalist, preindustrial societies into the world economy”, it was also especially capable of accommodating ethnically, linguistically and socio-​economically diverse populations –​a dynamic, even vitalistic feature of the colonial metropolis that “primes” it to “perform well as a global city” today (Abbas, 3). What is brought to visibility in the image of the global city, is then, this history of “unclean breaks and unclear connections” between older regimes

The art of disappearance  195 of postcolonial time, and globalisation. By coming to light as a prefiguration of the “contemporary capitalist world city”, the postcolonial metropolis constitutes a “ ‘hyper-​anticipatory and predictive’ ” form of global visibility (Abbas, 3; Virilio, Aesthetics of Disappearance, 20, cited in Abbas, 22). This proposition bears, in turn, on established concepts of both “space” and “visibility” as they relate to processes of mediatised appearance under logics of late capitalism. For Abbas, spaces of visibility in the colonial city can no longer be related to “ ‘colonialism” (per se); they must be related to “changed and changing space, this colonial space of disappearance that in many ways does not resemble ‘colonialism’ at all” (Abbas, 3). By reducing the scale of postcolonial speed to the registers of lived experience within the “changed and changing space” of the urban milieu, Abbas’s study of Hong Kong on the threshold of decolonisation demonstrates how in the course of the city’s transition from colonial metropolis to global city  –​or in its introduction into multinational circuits of tele-​informatic information and financial competition –​perception itself becomes saturated by signs of such anticipated “world-​historical” transfiguration. In light of this thesis, it is significant that since the liberalisation of the Indian economy in the early nineteen nineties, urban renewal projects first initiated by the state have been narrated by both corporate interests and an economically enfranchised middle-​ class citizenry, as centrepieces to the remaking of a national future.33 Marked by a violent expansion and reorganisation of urban space, these processes have been considered in extended and dedicated detail by Ananya Roy as an aspect of a new ethos of “political entrepreneurialism” –​under the imperatives of such a “homegrown” order of neoliberal politics, a heterogeneity of interests, ideological positions and actors are accommodated into the aspirational image of “the world-​class city”. Such an ethos of inclusivity is not necessarily imposed by (what remains) a strong and interventionist state. Rather, insofar as such a consensus on the “good city” is “organized as neighbourhood associations and reform movements”  –​very much through the appeal to civic sense and virtue, and in excess of propertied interests –​“it is produced and disseminated through middle-​class politics” (Roy, 266). Under the neoliberal organisation of capitalism, then, an “activist state seeking to open up new spaces for the accumulation of capital” works flexibly with the demands of multinational finance to consolidate the spatial and ideological centrality of the “middle-​class consumer citizen” within the norm of “freed” space. If the “phantasmagoria of the world-​class city” (in Roy’s phrase) requires and further authorises “the smashing of the homes and livelihoods of the urban poor”, it does so precisely by interpellating the visibility of poverty into its own expansive world view. By rendering inequality into a historically contingent feature of lived (middle class) experience, the “Asian city itself” comes to light, as if for the first time, as the proper “subject” of world history (Roy, 260; 27).34 Put differently, the utopist projection of a resurgent Asia requires the shame of “third world” unevenness to come to light, in order

196  Formations of the contemporary that the claims of the poor or the displaced might thereafter be managed or devalorised through “class projects of spatial purification” (Fernandes, 516). Significantly, this reconfigured narrative of postcolonial development proceeds through the appeal to inclusivity and the moral efficacy of civic self-​governance (Fernandes and Heller, 516).35 Compressing the long duration of national development into the promissory image of a globally contemporaneous “Asian century”, such a steeply accelerated narration of postcolonial time represents a significant departure from earlier teleologies of state-​led development. In a cautionary reminder, Partha Chatterjee recalls that in Nehruvian India, “no organic idea of the Indian city of the future was available” despite the state’s emphatic insistence on institutional and ideological centralisation. In the present, the technologies of an entrepreneurial, flexible state are strategically implemented by an empowered middle-​class citizenry; the latter operate as the “personnel”, as it were, for the construction and management of this “city of the future” (Fernandes and Heller, 2006; Chatterjee, 14).36 Not only the most recent fiction of “organic” growth but also, arguably, the most violently incorporative in the history of post-​independent India, the figure of the “world class city” remains embedded within globally dominant practices of “referencing ‘Asia’ ” (Roy, 264). Within the shared coordinates of a millenary imagination, “Asia” comes to light as an ascendant economic and civilisational power on the strength of the presumed or potential vitality of its cities. Domesticating referents to other urban spaces that range from “Singapore”, “Shanghai” to “Hong Kong”, the production of urban space emerges as, itself, a visible attestation to a “world-​class” future in which every trace of historical or socio-​economic “lag” is/​will be overcome. The hyper-​ anticipatory image of the global city relegates the “third world” stigma of poverty to an historical contingency, addressing it as a feature of an aberrational survival or imminent extinction. As such, the image operates as a “regulating fiction” for both policy as well as the self-​narration of a monolithically imagined “middle-​class” (despite its socio-​economically disparate and ethnically stratified constituencies) (Robinson, cited in Roy, 264)37. To follow Abbas’s thesis on disappearance in Hong Kong is also, then, to trace its material displacement into other contexts. Not only a circulating sign, but an effect of the global circulation of capital, Abbas’s city of disappearance might be discovered, for our purposes, within the “homegrown” visibilities of the world-​class Indian city (Roy, 262–​264). Produced through metonymic narratives of “urban emulation” and “serial geographical seduction”, the perception of urban space, and the significance of its visibility for an imagined national totality in India, demands critical reconsideration as, precisely, an accumulated history of damage and violent refusal –​what Abbas associates, in a somewhat different historical trajectory, with the pathology of “reverse hallucination … [a]‌not seeing of what is there” (Abbas, 6). “Disappearance” is not (or not only) a matter of symbolic effacement or even physical extirpation. It is, in effect, a spectacular intensification of

The art of disappearance  197 the experience of time. From the perspective of the animating concerns of this book, it is a process that demonstrates an escalation of the chronological norm of postcolonial development through the planned obsolescence of lived urban space on the one hand, and the ephemerality of preceding regimes of memory, duration and presence, on the other. Benjamin asserted that “anything about which one knows that one soon will not have it around, becomes an image” –​citing this alignment of the image with the perception of imminent disappearance, Abbas argues that the imagined loss of place (in the case of Hong Kong before the handover) “precipitates … an intense and unprecedented concern with historical and cultural specificity” (Abbas, CPD 7). As such, the politics of “disappearance” might be identified with an active practice of “replacement and substitution where the perceived danger” of imminent change or loss is re-​contained “through representations that are familiar and plausible” (Abbas, 7, 8). India’s precipitous entry into globalised or post-​industrial transnational market systems in the mid-​1990s was for many, a delayed eventuality; an ongoing process, this transition has led to the definitive devalorisation of the traditional locus and sources of state legitimacy even while consolidating its force in unprecedented fashion, in other aspects. Such a transformation of the moral authority of the state has profoundly changed the discursive terms of both nationalism and the various subnationalisms of India’s federal system of representation. In this context, it could be argued with Abbas that the resulting dismantlement of twentieth-​century construct of “politics” as such has inaugurated an “unprecedented” suffusion (rather than extinction) of the spaces of cultural visibility in India today (Abbas, 7). Writing at the conclusion of his essay on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson indicates how, under the current organisation of global capitalism, the status of “culture” itself undergoes a radical transformation in relation to other aspects of social relations. This is the point at which everything in our social life –​from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself  –​can be said to have become “cultural” in some original yet untheorized sense. (Jameson, Postmodernism 47, 48; cited in Abbas, CPD 7) Jameson’s hyperbolic claim regarding an “original” transformation in the relation between the spaces and institutions of society, politics and culture (in advanced industrial societies) indicates a momentous “shift in the status of culture itself”; while this implication has been displaced by Abbas towards his own, now celebrated insights into the exceptional case of Hong Kong’s decolonisation, it also invites a conjunctural reflection on comparable tensions and contradictions within metropolitan experience in India today (Abbas, 7). If both national and metropolitan registers of belonging continue to participate in the “phantasmagoria” of postcolonial

198  Formations of the contemporary transformation, the question of “place” is still captivated by older teleologies of developmentalist time, even as the trajectory of these worlding narratives are redirected in new ways. “Place”, in other words, must be understood through its contemporary relation to speed and abstraction  –​those primary descriptors of the image form in the age of media liberalisation. In the Indian situation, an older visual regime of national “borders and sovereignty” has been reimagined (rather than surpassed) within this profoundly altered understanding of the historical present. Indeed, the “renationalization” of cultural identity has been accelerated to an unprecedented degree within the totalised space of media-​visibility (Sundaram, 84; Fernandes, 2000).38 In other words, the media image has emerged not as a means or even aspect of “culture”; it operates as meta-​referent for “all cultural politics” within the ambit of the post-​liberalised nation-​ state (Sundaram, 90, emphasis mine). Whatever the stakes of the range of discussions undertaken within the “contested terrain” of middle-​class subjectivity in India today, these developments suggest the formal transformation of the media itself into an “iconic space” of appearing –​a “monumental” space, in its own right, which both incorporates and dematerialises other contending spheres of socio-​political life into the virtualised physiognomy of a “national people” (Sundaram, 90). If the worlding practices of Indian urbanism/​economic nationalism is one effect of the interpellative force of middle-​class address, these processes are underwritten by the production –​ or hyper-​production –​of the image-​space itself. The latter appears through a superabundance of cultural signs, fully in excess of its discrete representational content, as a placeholder for an “untheoriz[able]” or otherwise cognitively “unmappable” historical moment. In Jameson’s designation, this is the moment in which “everything in … social life … becomes ‘cultural’ ”; by the same token, this is also a description of “abstraction as the contemporary mode of disappearance” (Jameson, cited in Abbas, 7, 9). As the experience of space becomes oversaturated with multifarious, internally incompatible signs, it is the visual which becomes increasingly dominant, as a mode of appearance, under logics of late capitalism. The image is not (or not only) a supplement for the collapsing scales of spatio-​ temporal experience that Abbas places under the sign of “abstraction”, and which Adorno, before him, analysed under through the projections of “objectless interiority”. We misunderstand the ascendancy of the image in such a moment if we construe it, in exclusively functionalist terms, as a kind of compensatory form of identity  –​-​an alibi for the loss of a historically secure standpoint whose unavailability, in the present, is registered in the reversals between “the fast and the slow [or in] the absence of transition between big and small” (Abbas, 9).39 Neither is the virtual a symptom of the formal breakdown of “reality”, as the analogical line becomes increasingly superannuated by a preference for digital abstraction (the dot, the matrix, the pixel). Rather than causing, correcting or even cushioning the lack of the

The art of disappearance  199 concrete in the spaces of lived experience, the media image as the “iconic space” of visibility is the “concrete” form taken by abstraction in our globalist present (Sundaram, 90; Abbas, 9).

Ghosts in the machine As “appearances” whose very perceptibility is “posited on the imminence of disappearance”, Singh’s interiors are historical attestations to the asynchronic loops by which the signs of an older, hypothesised national culture have been repositioned within a globalist conjuncture marked by new semiotic formations (Abbas, 11). These are brought about by decentralised informational “flows”, the geographical remapping of the organisation and values of corporate capital as it moves from traditional, Euro-​American centres of hegemony to the “non-​West” and the consolidation of a transnational elite for whom the value of (national) “culture”, the persistence of “tradition” or even the old, postcolonial claim to spatio-​temporal co-​presence with “the West” emerges as a primary implement of self-​assertion within the arena of multinational financial competition. The thesis on the “politics of disappearance”, or the trajectory of the commodity fetish from Adorno and Benjamin to Abbas, might be resituated within Singh’s images, and the particular historical exigencies their aesthetic presupposes, first, via the manner of the sitter’s self-​presentation. If Singh’s feminine portraits are at once acutely individualised and always in excess of their immediate appearance, this is because her subjects achieve expressivity by way of reference to a pre-​existing visual archive  –​one marked by the historical centrality of the “icon”. Singh’s portraits make copious references to canvases, the accoutrements of classical musical or literary culture, or to feminised continuities in “family” appearance. Like a visual gesture of address or invitation, these enfold the viewer into an intimate or “insiderist discourse” of recognition and distance. Notwithstanding the artist’s own resistance to a “nationalised” identification of her works, and at least in this aspect, these collections might be approached as testaments to the longue durée of modernist presentation whereby the “interiorised” subject reproduced herself, through the various apparatuses of collectively authorised appearance, in an incarnate performance of the disparate, and perhaps contradictory domestic/​external registers of national belonging. Second, if simultaneously, the allegorical paradigm of ritualised narratives of ghar and baire is itself aligned with the velocity of the image; in the age of media liberalisation, it is the screen, the window, the surface itself that comes to appearance. In this aspect, the entire historical saga through which the “protagonist-​performer-​’nationalist’ ” makes herself symbolically available to a culturally determined subject of address is compressed into a reflexive awareness of the means of such production. In a post-​historical moment, the features of an authentic or intimate “interiority” are a chiaroscuro of the medium of their representation –​the disembodied effect of historically

200  Formations of the contemporary specified techniques of iconicity, gesture and a performative style of public address (Rajadhyaksha, 125). Such a prosthetic, even automatised form of visibility comes to stand in for traditions of allegory and iconicity associated with the socialist aesthetic of national modernism. I suggested earlier that by cutting the presentation of “interiority” as such from its empirical relationship to space, Singh’s photographed interiors tend to flatten the depth from which an ethically embodied spectator might gain access to such space. It is precisely the fictionalising possibilities of such immaterial space that suffuses Singh’s photographic enactments of kinship with both pathos and new potentialities, where “intimacy” itself becomes a sign of the ultimate (spatial, hermeneutical) inaccessibility of its interiorised world. This is to say, that as spectacularised scenes of leave-​taking and arrival, Singh’s hospitable interiors are already placed on the threshold of withdrawing space.40 For a previous generation of artists, “the deployment of authenticity for the fictional production of the ‘exemplary’ spectator” was investigated through the ideal of the fully formed subject of “national/​socialist realism” (Rajadhyakshya, 119).41 Determined through traditionally over-​ coded registers of inside/​outside, the historicity of Singh’s photographs of empty space might be located in movements of partitioning and partiality rather than in the accomplishment of symbolic coincidence or intersection. As if seen “through a plane of disjunction”, the interior functions as the visual correlate of a “situation where the facade”  –​rather than the figure of national-​icon-​performer –​operates increasingly as though on stage, as literally performing, with no functional relationships to any real space to which a “citizen” might have access (Rajadhyakshya, 119; emphasis in original).42 Neither a reference to the apparent desertion of hitherto “habitable spaces of circulation” that Virilio associates (nostalgically) with the classical polis, nor a symptom of millenary narratives of cultural survival or resurgence, disappearance might be approached, in the final instance, as a reflexive staging of the production/​contraction of cultural space within the very means of visibility (Virilio, Speed and Politics 6).43 In this alternative aspect, the visual image engages its preconditions in withdrawing or disappearing space without becoming incorporated into the continuum of such an order. This kind of counter-​appearance is misconstrued if it is aligned with a strongly interventionist aesthetic –​as a modality of “resistance” –​insofar as it makes no attempt to correct or reverse the politics of disappearance (Abbas, 8). In Adorno’s “construction of the aesthetic”, the figure who resided within the domestic interior became visible to the reader only so far as the fictional strictures of Kierkegaard’s own text permitted –​that is, if the human figure appeared to us at all, it was because it appeared through the same hallucinatory movement that incorporated an “empirical” social reality into the increasingly contracted horizons of a textual “interior”. As a counter-​figure to both Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous personae and his “real”, historically embodied presence, the ghostly Punkt of the Kierkegaardian interior did nothing more than “reverse the on-​going reversals” between the living and

The art of disappearance  201 the vanished past. As the operation of reversal, the punctuated figure of the ghost emerged as a perceptible, even recognisable presence only by holding apart  –​dis-​integrating  –​the various coordinates of narrative identification (“Kierkegaard”/​“persona”; body/​artefact) that made up the narrative present. Repositioned as an aspect of aesthetic construction, the “phantasmagoria” of an interiorised, authentic subject, comes to light in a negative, or entirely interstitial space of visibility. “Instantiated in the moment of indifference between death and meaning”, or between the redundancy of a mortified form and its inaccessible inner content, the phantasm serves to expose such hyphenated space to scrutiny (Adorno, BSW3 63). Space is longer experienced as the matter of an extant physical environment; rather, it emerges processually, as a movement between the various media of its appearance. “Constellated between alienated things and disappearing meaning”, our sensible entanglement with the image form becomes inseparable from the techniques that stage such an encounter –​visual techniques that are, in turn, seen to produce the phenomenological experience of space. Visibility, then, is attached less to a perceptually guaranteed reality than to the “phantom objectivity” of a world of broken forms in which every analytical or hermeneutical category is punctured by a sense of unrelieved “perplexity” (Adorno, Postscript to the Hornberg letter, BSW3 63; Lukács, TN 23; Benjamin, BSW3 155). The “sociological” veracity of Singh’s images resides here:  Space becomes apprehensible not in itself, as the enclosed, “defensible” totality that Virilio identifies with epoch of the territory and the map, but as a series of self-​displacing “insertion[s]‌into a continuum, … as an interval, gap … an area of non-​coincidence, such as the deliberate implantation of an outsider perspective in a familiar or familial interior” (Entanglements, Chow, 19).44 Consider, in this regard, the photograph of a paved pathway (http://​ dayanitasingh.net/​go-​away-​closer/​electronic p. 9, FundaciónMapfre p. 197), which appears rather unexpectedly in the midst of the various scenes of middle-​class interiority that comprise the 32 tritone plates of Go Away Closer.45 Captured through an indeterminate use of scale, this “grid” of plotted urban space is incrementally absorbed into the reflected light of its watery surface; it is impossible to tell whether the path comprises a truly depthless material plane, or whether its ostensible “shallowness” is the effect of pooled water as it rises up to the surface just at that point where the gradient of the pathway unexpectedly dips away from the walker. As such, the path appears as an ambiguous trope for a point of “public” entry into the collection of images that are assembled within both the built and photographically generated spaces of the domestic interior  –​these include the fragmented references to Anand Bhavan –​as of the wider, worlding practices of the twentieth-​century (post)colonial metropolis that is the “narrated” content of these works. But the photograph also functions as a rigorously optical situation in which the access point to the image, as such, recedes

202  Formations of the contemporary from the embodied perspective of the viewer. Forgoing a linear orientation of the eye, the image flattens its presentation into an experience of space that is cut off from the empirical coordinates of perceptual consciousness. This is an incisive visual account of what Ashis Rajadhyakshya identifies as a strictly “enunciative” mode of presentation. Lacking any referent in “real” space or time, we are confronted by a “purely symbolic relation” to space –​ a trompe l’oeil not only of the (idealised) developmentalist space of the colonial metropolis, but of the very experience of movement as it collapses into the reflective surface of a screen. I would extend Rajadhyaksha’s thesis to note how, by dematerialising our relationship to space altogether, the image accomplishes a remarkable temporal extension of the eye, which is momentarily dislodged from Go Away Closer and Privacy’s ambiguous, figural codifications of welcome and departure. Relinquishing the viewer to a moment of unsurpassable lateness  –​an “afterness” that must abide within the media of perception after all gestures of leave-​taking have been completed – the path itself appears to “take off” –​as if in a line of flight –​ towards an elevated if entirely unverifiable vanishing point located outside the frame. As a particular form of visibility, then, the ghost is only another “image” in the unfolding sequence of images that comprised the Benjaminian model of historical (re)collection and transmission  –​a figure of movement that passes through the violently reified contact points between interiority, the commodity object and the art work. As such, the ghost responds to disappearing space by reduplicating a set of existing conditions that make up the “vanishing present” while also disjoining the moment of its own presentation from these preconditions. By deflecting, redirecting or taking off from the trajectory of historical disappearance, such mediatised acts of staging “enable the epistemic limit of these conditions to become palpably perceptible –​and marked off in their historical particularity” (Chow, 19).46 In other words, rather than contesting the politics of disappearance, this kind of cultural production interposes itself, however tenuously, into the very processes that would reduce the instant of the image’s presentation to totemistic iterations of the archaism and the cliché. Bereft of “authority” –​ as a visible discrepancy within norms of mastery or proprietorship  –​the figure of passing illuminates a point of reception, inheritance and retelling that remains unforeseeable within the frameworks of subjective perception (Benjamin, BSW3 146). Specified as a moment of non-​equivalence within the photographic frame, or as departure from even the outermost horizon of an empirical subject of perception, space, in Singh’s world, is a counter-​actualisation of its own (phenomenal or symbolic) forms. Singh’s architectural constructions of emptiness might be compared, at this point of the discussion, to the brief, “cipher-​like” illuminations of the Adornian reflection (Adorno, K 25). By bringing the phantasmagoria of progressive, developmentalist time to standstill, these photographs involve us in the momentary experience of useless

The art of disappearance  203 space –​rupturing the seemingly impenetrable enchantment of a world-​class destiny, the ruined formations of the historical present confront us with forsaken knowledges of accumulated muteness, failure and “anonymous toil” (Benjamin, “Theses on History”, Illuminations 265). The contemporaneity of Singh’s images reside here: In the returning opacities of the wall, the consumed-​through object, and the exclusionary partitionings that make for the radiant work of art, Singh’s images suggest that the mid-​century attempt to align the practices of art with those of freedom runs, historically, into an insuperable paradox. In every instance, the physiognomy of cultural, class-​ or gendered-​based proprietorship is concretised –​as appearance –​only as the remaindered, incessantly exteriorised effect of the apparatus of visibility. In the unlocatable domicile of Nehru’s ghost, in the flight path that migrates past the horizons of perceptible experience, or in the abandoned wall (unfinished or ruined) that stands in lieu of the home, Singh’s images bear witness to the inability of new apparatuses of state and capital to fulfill their promise to reform and transcend these walls, in this place, through an epochal transformation of time. “Blasting the epoch” out of periodised narratives of “historical continuity”, or the “life” out of reified, biographical accounts of a “lifework”, Singh’s portraits of vestigial space are captivating because they sever us, in intimate movements of self-​excision and partitioning, from the deceit of organic, fulfilled time.47 Transmitting the image of modernism’s exhausted or otherwise abandoned future into the present, Singh’s counter-​ spaces are discovered, in their alterity to every established mode of perceptual or normative certainty, as sheer openings within the horizon of lived experience.

Notes 1 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 2, 141, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1983). 2 Rachel Spence, “Infinite Possibilities”, The Financial Times, 26 April 2013, www.ft.com/​content/​4d9bced8-​a90f-​11e2-​bcfb-​00144feabdc0 (accessed 13 June 2014). 3 Bersani and Philips, Intimacies (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 28–​125. Myself, Mona Ahmed might well exemplify an aesthetic of “impersonal narcissism”, or what psychoanalytic literary critic Leo Bersani identifies an anti-​egoistical model of pleasure, which troubles logics of gratification, premised on closed economies of self-​loss/​self-​recuperation in the other. 4 The story and mannerism of “Mona Ahmed” remains a vital point of interlocution within and between the collections that comprise Singh’s more recent oeuvre. Significantly, Singh chose to represent her exhibit at the 2013 Venice Biennale through abbreviated references to Myself, Mona Ahmed, which was reconfigured for the occasion as a site-​based video installation. Presented through the interactive modalities of digitalised media, Singh’s most recent iteration of the work, Mona Darling (2000), deliberately imagines the collection less as a complete photographic narrative, and more as an electronic/​informational “file” –​thereby,

204  Formations of the contemporary perhaps, casting the portrait of Mona, the genre of the photographic documentary, as well as the modernist appeal to the intimate affiliation between artist and model into the spaces of an unresolved, user-​generated archive of images. 5 As a detailed account of Singh’s career would show, publishing comes to constitute an essential part of Singh’s practice after the various iterations of Myself, Mona Ahmad. From this point, Singh initiated multiple projects conjoining photography and its publishable formats –​a compilation of so-​called book-​objects –​ in collaboration with the German publisher Gerhard Steidl  –​which continue to be sequenced and reconstructed as books, art objects, exhibitions and catalogues. Collections that established Singh as a photographer, including Privacy, Chairs and the critical, Go Away Closer are reassembled through the book’s multiple possibilities for legibility and display; these collections have been followed by the seven-​volume Sent a Letter and Blue Book (2008), Dream Villa (2010), Fileroom (2013), Museum of Chance (2016), Museum Bhavan (2017) and, most recently, Singh’s alignment of her artistic practice and persona with the print form, somewhere between image and typescript, as between art-​object and consumer item, in Pop-​up Bookshop/​My Offset World (2018). 6 The series was published in an innovative format, involving different bound, cloth covers with an “title image” not replicated elsewhere in the series. Involving the viewer/​read/​consumer in chance, Singh re-​employed the format for the Museum of Chance Book Object two years later, sequencing the back and front covers with unique pairs of photographs and thereby expanding the indeterminant value of the art/​object by displacing its claims from those of singular aesthetic artefact to the status of reproducible commodity. 7 I refer to the published collections in the volumes Privacy (Göttingen:  Steidl Publishers, 2004) and Go Away Closer (Göttingen: Steidl Publishers, 2007). 8 Supriya Chaudhuri, “Phantasmagorias of the Interior: Furniture, Modernity, and Early Bengali Fiction”, Journal of Victorian Culture 15(2) (2010): 173–​193. 9 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Furniture” (1840), in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A.  Harrison (New  York:  AMS Press, 1965), XIV, 101. 10 Barthes, “The Reality Effect” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 148. 11 Barthes, “The World as Object” in Roland Barthes:  Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1981), 4. If the object world is at once a dwelling space and a legible “inscription” of a particular way of life, it also the site of what Pierre Bourdieu terms the habitus, a set of dispositions and inculcated values that gives a person’s sense of place and social standing in the world. In their visual detail, the “furnishings” of lived space are the apparatus by which “interiority”, or a socially inscribed subjectivity, is itself articulated and reproduced over time (Chaudhuri, 176). 12 Theodor W. Adorno, “Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno” in Benjamin: Selected Writings, eds. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), vol. 3, 63 (hereafter cited in text as BSW3); Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth-​century (1939)” in The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1999), 20; Chaudhuri, 175. 13 “In her comparison between Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Kopal Kundala (1885) and Tagore’s late unfinished Jogajog/​Relationships (1929), Chaudhuri demonstrates two divergent aesthetic responses, and subsequent articulations

The art of disappearance  205 of a discrepant ethical subject. Exhibiting a shared “ambivalence” with regard to inherited realist representational codes, both texts presuppose a “lack of fit between the sumptuary codes of modern mercantile capitalism and a profound suspicion of the world and its goods that is encoded as an older or ‘traditional’ way of life (Chaudhuri, 179). 14 Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-​Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 24–​47 (hereafter cited in the text as K). 15 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1985), 167–​168 (hereafter cited in the text as CB). 16 Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth-​century”, Exposé of 1939, in The Arcades Project,  14–​26. 17 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. B. Fowkes, vol. 1 of 3 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977). 18 Ackbar Abbas, “Walter Benjamin’s Collector: The Fate of Modern Experience”, New Literary History 20(1) (1988): 217–​237. 19 Steven Vogel, “The Problem of Nature in Lukács” in Against Nature:  The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), 13–​32 (hereafter cited in the text as AN). 20 Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Michael Jennings, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA:  Belknap Press, 2002), 59–​ 61. See Chaudhuri’s gloss on this exchange. Benjamin’s decisive response to Adorno’s charge, that his thesis on the “phantasmagoria of the interior” lacks historical specificity, is located in in Benjamin’s treatment of Poe. An inheritor of the realist novel, detective fiction materialises of the mortification of value –​the “corpse” –​that is always housed within the domestic interior. 21 The term “character mask” was used by Marx through the 1840s and 1860s, and would be appropriated and developed into a dominant conceit in Lukács’ notion of reification in History and Class  Consciousness. Marx argues that individuals exist intersubjectively for each other as representatives of commodities, or as commodity owners, where such representations are normatively pre-​ determined by the relations between capital and labor power: “The characters who appear on the economic stage are merely personifications of economic relations” (Capital, ­chapter  2, 179). Therefore, “it is not individuals who are set free by free competition but rather it is capital that is set free”. Grundrisse, 650–​651. 22 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. B. Fowkes, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 179. 23 David Sherman reminds us that Kierkegaard lived off a fixed investment, as others of his class, and was therefore always “subject to market fluctuations (such as the one accompanying the 1848 workers’ revolt)” (Sherman, 19). 24 “Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis (1959)”, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 569–​583. Hereafter cited as Missa. 25 Aveek Sen, “The Eye in Thought”, in Dayanita Singh (Madrid and London: FundaciónMapfre/​Penguin Studio, 2010). 26 T.W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society” in Prisms, ed. and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber (Amherst, MA: MIT Press, 1983). 27 Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, 42.

206  Formations of the contemporary 28 J. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Seminar VII, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton Books, 1997). The word “extimite” is used in the untranslated Seminar XVI  :  Lacan, Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre (1968–​ 1969) (Paris: Seuil, 2006). 29 J-​A Miller, “Extimite”, in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society, eds. Mark Bracher, M. Alcorn, R. Corthell and F. Massardier-​Kennedy (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 74–​87. 30 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelare”, in Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938–​1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et. al. and eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003). 31 Rebecca Comay. “Proust. Photography, Trauma”, Discourse 31(1–​2) (Winter 2009): 86–​107. 32 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong:  Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 8–​10 (hereafter cited in the text as CPD). 33 The National Urban Renewal Mission was launched in 2005 as a homage to India’s postcolonial moderniser, Jawaharlal Nehru, and makes the case for state and corporate investment in urban infrastructure. Yoking the economic future of the nation to the city, the mission statement predicts a massive increase in India’s urban population from 28 per cent in 2011 to 40 per cent in 2021. The state has since implemented this idea at multiple, and often uncoordinated scales of operation (at national, federal and municipal levels). It deploys a three-​principle “socio-​spatial technologies” to advance the idea of the world-​class city through the deregulation of space. These include slum evictions (undertaken on massive scale in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore as well as the erstwhile Left-​front led Kolkata, since the mid-​1990s, where such a “clearing” of space participates in the broader criminalisation of urban poverty across India); the setting up of Special Economic Zones; and the construction of vast, planned peri-​urban “new” towns. While all of these technologies point to the “activist” intervention of the state, the idea of the world-​class city has been advanced through an informal if consistently maintained compact between the representatives of such a pragmatically “flexible” state, multinational corporate interests and an increasingly self-​ governing metropolitan citizenry. The latter, in turn, interpellate themselves into these worlding processes under the sign “not only of the ‘Global Indian’”, but also increasingly “in the name of the ‘ordinary’ middle class consumer-​citizen” (Roy, 263, 265; Fernandes, 2006). 34 Ananya Roy, “The Blockade of the World-​Class  City:  Dialectical Images of Indian Urbanism”, in Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, eds. Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2011). 35 Leela Fernandes and P.  Heller, “Hegemonic Aspirations:  New Middle Class Politics and India’s Democracy in Comparative Perspective”, Critical Asian Studies 38(4) (2006): 495–​522. 36 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflection on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 37 J. Robinson, “Global and World Cities: A View from Off the Map”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26(3): 531–​554. 2002. While the National Urban Renewal Mission makes mention of China and its uses of Special Economic Zones, the emergence of the post-​ industrial

The art of disappearance  207 “world-​class city” as an aesthetic norm makes is articulated in the policy brief Vision Mumbai, undertaken by the private consultancy firm, McKinsey and Company, at the behest of powerful professional private interests represented by the non-​governmental activist body, Bombay First (2003). The following year saw the eviction of 300,000 slum-​dwellers in Mumbai in a move undertaken –​ independently –​by the state government of Maharashtra in what might now be viewed as the precursor to an ambitious urban “reclamation” scheme, which seeks to clear the “congested” city centre through the redevelopment of slums and mill lands. 38 R. Sundaram, Pirate Modernity:  Delhi’s Media Urbanism (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). 39 For a version of this kind of argument, see Chaitanya Sambrani’s curatorial essay to the important exhibit of contemporary Indian art, “The Edge of Desire” (2007). Locating the anxiety over place (in both popular and aesthetic discourse) in the transformation in public visual culture since liberalisation, Sambrani presents a perhaps overly functionalist analysis of the relation between the “homogenizing force of global capital” that threatens to extirpate all “survival[s]‌” of the local and the emergence of politically authorised forms of fundamentalism in the mid-​ 1990s. The latter is posed as a compensation for the erosion of older regimes of nation and belonging, as experienced in India’s transition to post-​industrial market systems. 40 Hence, perhaps, as Sen suggests, the mystery of “inscrutably private moments that are enacted in public in wintery streets and inside ephemeral and fantastically lit wedding-​tents [pandals]” (Sen, 124; emphasis mine). 41 Ashis Rajadhyakshya, Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: from Bollywood to the Emergency (Calcutta/​Indianapolis:  Seagull Books/​University of Indiana Press, 2009). 42 See, as exemplary images of such empty, non-​functional or dissolvable space, photographs of the wedding stage, typically constructed in Indian metros as a trompe l’oeil of monumental architecture, whether historic or mythological, on pp. 7–​9 of Go Away Closer; the wall, apparently unfinished or abandoned in its construction as an enclosure, from Blue Book (Steidl, 2009), reprinted in Dayanita Singh, p. 147 or the paved pathway, from Go Away Closer, discussed below. 43 Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Marc Pollizotti (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2006). 44 Rey Chow, “When Reflexivity becomes Porn:  Mutations of a Modernist Theoretical Introduction” in Entanglements or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 14–​30. 45 FundaciónMapfre, Dayanita Singh (London: Penguin Studio, 2010). 46 Rey Chow, “Postcolonial Visibilities: Questions Inspired by Deleuze’s Method” in Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 151–​168. 47 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Illuminations, 263.

Part III

Conclusion

5  Automatic intimacies

ActualIy, inheritance is the soundest way of acquiring a collection. For a collector’s attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner’s feeling of responsibility toward his property. Thus … in the highest sense, the attitude of an heir … the trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility. (Walter Benjamin, from “On Unpacking My Library” 66)1

A striking capitulation of the many allusive possibilities of “privacy” in Dayanita Singh’s volume of the same title is an especially perplexing composition of a bedroom arrangement (http://​dayanitasingh.net/​privacy/​ electronic p. 2; Steidl 2004, p. 9). While serving as a powerful annotation to this collection of tritone plates, as a whole, the image is also a striking departure from the thematics of the upper/​ class domestic interior that comprise the book. The room, in fact, is from Anand Bhavan, and the photograph is originally from Singh’s Allahabad collection. Reprinted in Privacy, it follows a short prelude of images that belong either to Singh’s architectural chiaroscuros of the wedding pandal, or to the mode of the family portrait; indeed, the subsequent arrangements of Privacy cluster mostly around these two genres. Something of an outlier to more obvious familial codifications of the photographic interior, the composition does also feature among these prefatory images of the book –​positioned after the artist’s autobiographical note, this particular account of the domestic interior appears as a provocative lead into Privacy’s otherwise uncaptioned collection of photographs. As such, it comprises an intriguing component of the visual “introduction” to the work, at once participating in while also forcefully disaggregating the volume’s titular concern with personal space and genetic affiliation (or the presumptive zone of privacy; which, in the rest of the volume, is negotiated photographically, as a reticence of the image’s subject matter to full exposure). Altogether, its placement alongside the only textual commentary in the volume is especially suggestive. While we are invited to read this odd bedroom scene thematically, within the larger visual motifs and generic concerns of the volume, its positioning implies that it is invested with a possibly “editorialising” function for the published collection.

212 Conclusion First, a description. Immediately before the viewer in the foreground and stretching across the horizontal plane of the photograph, is a bed, pristinely made, with a pillow under the counterpane. The wall on the opposite side of the bed faces the viewer; its vertical surface is partitioned into two visually distinct columns. On the one side of the wall, to the viewer’s right and opposite the foot of the bed, is a tall book cabinet, filled with rows of well-​ handled bookspines. On the left side of the wall, and at the same height as the book case, is a box-​like structure, which appears to be inserted into the room just where the door-​frame should stand; it is positioned symmetrically, immediately to the side of the book case. Here, on the threshold of what should be the bedroom door, stands a group of people, looking in at the empty bed; on a second glance at the elements of this strange composition, the viewer discerns that the box frame containing the people is glass-​ fronted. Closely contained behind this glass window, or window box, are the people, who are quickly identifiable, through dress and physical postures, as a group of rural workers. Visually out of place in the restrained urbanity of the bedroom arrangement, the group is effectively framed by the glass-​ fronted box –​a cabinet-​like structure in itself, which, like the book case at its side, runs to the height of the room’s ceiling. Captured as a tableau, the onlookers are arranged in mannered postures, through striking, even exaggerated gestures associated with the act of looking. In the front, with her face to the camera, her hand raised and open –​as if slicing the air or otherwise gesticulating as she prepares to turn away from the bed –​is a woman in a sari. She is flanked on her immediate left by a man in a vest and lungi; hands on strong hips, he looks straight past the woman’s shoulder directly into the bedroom. On her right is a second woman caught in the action of backing out of the compartment, her body turned away from the bedroom arrangement; as she turns her back on the scene, she looks not at the bed but into the face of the woman who fronts the group. Further behind, in a ring that closes behind the foregrounded figures are three others, incompletely seen by the viewer of the photograph. Pressed together closely at the outer threshold of the boxed structure, they complete the assembly by creating a full circle of onlookers. Sharing the compositional complexity of other images in the collection, the photograph relates Singh’s characteristic concerns with devices of framing, screening and projection, in unusually explicit fashion, to its dramatic visual content. But while the image organises its account of visual space theatrically, around the pressing gesture and various postures of suspended action, its compositional meaning is immediately perplexing. Not quite an image of people, nor even of physical space alone, this is, first of all, the photograph of a museum display –​a standing exhibit of the environs of Nehru’s bedroom, set out explicitly in the mode of national pedagogy for the museum-​goer. In its spatial organisation, but mostly through the intrusive proximity of figures around the bed, the photograph calls attention to the curated quality of the otherwise understated set-​up of the bedroom. We might suggest, at

Automatic intimacies  213 the outset, that Singh presents us with an oblique if comprehensive reflection on the unequal value of space –​the interval that is the bed, the sleeping quarter –​which preserves us, as viewers, from the intrusive press of other bodies. Accordingly, we might conclude that Singh offers, here, an evocative and particularly materialist account of the value of privacy as the class-​ inflected privilege of distance –​the exclusivist value (and romance) of the pause within the demotic spaces of the Indian metro, which, like a thematic, does, indeed, extend to the book as a whole. But such a suggestion does not fully resolve the problematic of visibility, as framed and reframed within this composition. Cut off from the publicly accessible parts of the museum, the bedroom is certainly captured as a sequestered spatial construct even as its mode of appearance –​in the photograph but also within the “real” space of the museum display –​is anything but private. Put differently, the privileged spatial interval and larger value of privacy becomes apprehensible only as a multiply, even compulsively extruded mode of visibility; it’s a paradox that is continually accentuated through our positioning as viewers. First, on the question of spectatorship, I note how no experience of the composition is possible without an encounter with the viewing box, or the box-​frame that encloses the room in its totality; after all, it is the room that is the object of the museum exhibit. Only partially visible in the composition, the box appears to us most evidently in the architectural feature of the viewing window, or the glass pane that so strikingly separates the press of museum-​ goers from the bed. Second, as recipients of Singh’s photographic image, we are compelled to deduce the enframing presence of the box everywhere insofar as our stand-​point, vis-​à-​vis the scene in its entirety, is located well within the sealed interior of the bedroom space. The construct of interiority is accomplished, thus, through at least two divergent perceptual tracks. First, interiority is signified visually, or within the order of what we actually see in the composition, as the allegorical separation of private space from public function. In this first instance, the photograph spatialises the difference between the figure of a collective people –​the subaltern, the least privileged, a workforce, the feminine reproductive body, “doubly eclipsed” by labour and patriarchy –​here, at the forefront of visibility –​and an imputed subject of private repose. Second, and along another line of possibility, Singh’s account of difference finds a comprehensive visual idiom not in any one figure but in the glass screen that separates the bedroom from the group of onlookers. In effect, it is the window screen –​which we “see” only after we glimpse its sheen –​that partitions and so cuts into different figures, the space before us. In other words, the process of cutting is inseparable from the reflective operation of the glass surface: It is the screen that permits us, in the first place, to discern the figure, features and actions of the people as much as it enables dynamic perceptual possibilities of form, ground, foreground etc. Quite apart from the multiplicity of figures (and near-​filmic devices) that are made available within the visual parameters of the composition, interior space emerges as a notional totality. That is

214 Conclusion to say, an integral enclosed whole must be actively presupposed by the viewer of this photograph and this is why she is situated –​across dynamic shifts of perspective and at any point in time as she traverses the different positionalities marked by the composition –​within the enclosure. In sum, the composition “works” in these different directions, in their allusive, even theatrical possibilities, because of the box as such –​that device of the public exhibit, which enframes our point of view to serve as the very precondition of the composition’s legibility. Within the empirical confines of Anand Bhavan, the construct (whether spatial or ideational) of a privileged “inside” is rendered, in toto, into a visual exhibit for mass consumption. The curious set-​up of the exhibition box  –​ really, a larger-​than-​life display cabinet that holds an entire room from Anand Bhavan  –​competes with the animated figures in the composition for visibility. Even further, through our absorption in the inexplicable scene before us, the box frame emerges as the uncanny focus of the composition, the point of spiralling perceptual bewilderment and the attendant effort for clarity. Returning to the question of the photograph’s placement within the volume as a prefatory, perhaps unifying commentary on the images comprising Privacy, I  propose that we see in the surfaces of the viewing box nothing else than a refractory image of the cut and the projection. If technologies of representation involving the screen and the frame marked other selections from Singh’s oeuvre, they are cast in this instance, almost explicitly, as the index of historical experience as it “disappears” into a concatenation of visual signs. If the photograph operates as an exceptionally compact account of Singh’s photographic style  –​as indeed, an anticipation of her more current installation practices –​it is also a sustained meditation on the particular historicity of the contents of the photograph as available to the current conjuncture. Its possibilities belong neither to the iconic legibility of the marginalised or minority figure within the discourse of the (post) Independence period, nor to the compositional suggestion of a hegemonic center of perceptual consciousness that surreptitiously (or posthumously) wields the power “to construct a gaze, an object a world” and which was associated, in the postcolony, with the modernising time of the twentieth-​ century nation (Mulvey, 833–​834).2 The marker of historical consciousness in this photograph is the chiasmus of the screen –​the lucid surface around which disparate yet equivalent spatial possibilities repeat thereby inverting every assumption about who, or what position, constitutes the proper subject of the sphere of appearance. In what follows, I propose we read Singh’s condensed account of “Nehruvian subjectivity” accordingly, as a refractory image of lateness; its particular visibilities are rendered perceptible because they come after the specific postcolonial inflection of the problem of lateness as the condition, whether historical or epistemological, of the late comer. The paradigmatic hypothesis regarding the post-​ Independent Indian nation as a constitutively delayed or “derivative” formation appears, of

Automatic intimacies  215 course, in Partha Chatterjee’s axiomatic formulation, Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World:  A Derivative Discourse? Within the terms of this field-​forming study, “derivativeness” indexed the ideological reversals and contradictions of colonial capital, whereby (ethnically coded) imperial narratives of economic backwardness or societal “lag” were at once negated and resumed within the progressivist enterprise of state-​ led modernisation. Specifically, Chatterjee identified the universalising, secular norm of the (post)Independent nation with epistemic structures that occupied a secondary, or belated position within late-​colonial regimes of intellectual and political practice.3 In order to demonstrate this contention, Chatterjee famously cast a genealogy of anti-​colonial thought, together with the realisation of this “discursive” legacy within the structures of the twentieth-​ century sovereign nation, as processes that resolved the problem of colonial “difference” by positing an integral but unevenly developed national entity.4 For Chatterjee, as for a generation of radical historians of the Subaltern Studies School, the emblematic articulation of capitalist modernisation in the decolonising world is to be found in Nehru’s Discovery of India (1946). At once autobiographical and ethnographic, this is a work that enfolds both text and world into the accommodating, universalist teleology of national development.5 Even while serving as a site of differentiation, the nation (qua the Nehruvian text) features as the singular apparatus of ongoing processes of territorial incorporation, cultural minoritisation and political exclusion. In forward-​moving escalations of the dialectic of primitivity and modernity, the “discourse” of Nehruvian modernisation is, on this view, homogenising in its rhetorical force and institutional effects: It negates nineteenth-​century markers of racial difference, intellectual immaturity and material lack by redistributing these properties internally onto the putatively archaic or un(der)developed world views of non-​modern constituencies. Equally significant is the manner in which this modernity narrates its own contemporaneity  –​or world-​historical “arrival”  –​through ethnographic signs of indigeneity, tradition and hierarchical social organisations associated with the auratic world of faith. As, above all, a chronological norm, the construct of an integral national modernity is consolidated in the dramatic instant (and trope) of mutual “discovery”, the veritable primal scene of twentieth-​ century Indian modernity –​as, in effect, Singh stages it here, between the horizontal axis of a reclining, perhaps dreaming presence on the bed, and the vertical emergence of embodied figures. The account of Nehru’s revelation of a modern “India” before rural masses during the 1937 General Elections campaign, is, itself, a storied episode in the annals of nationalist historiography; in a tradition of critical intervention that extends from Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, and more recently, to the work of Aamir Mufti, this critical episode of The Discovery of India has been popularised once more within scholarly discussions as the crystallisation of a post-​Independent regime of “dominance without hegemony” (Guha, 1997). Recall that in its narration of the transformative moment of “the discovery of India as it was”, Nehru’s

216 Conclusion autobiography affirmed the empirical existence of an autochthonous people even as it characterised the narrating “I” with the isolated consciousness of the moderniser (Discovery 57, emphasis mine). The loneliness of the modern vanguard emerges co-​extensively with the synchronic whole of nation/​text –​ a totality that thereby pluralises itself from within, though the antinomies of authenticity and isolation, indigeneity and modernity, the demos and the nationalist. Interpellating “India” into an emergent modernist consciousness, the text of Nehruvian subjectivity sets in place a series of profound perceptual, experiential and temporal rifts –​differences, in other words, that would at once conjoin and separate popular and expert life-​worlds within the dirigiste imaginary of the (post)Independent nation, thereby consolidating elitism as a systemic dimension of both knowledge formation and political organisation in the post-​Independent period. It is tempting to see Chatterjee’s famous query regarding the “combined and uneven development” of Nehruvian governmentality as an implicit demand for a modernity that might be located outside of its co-​articulation with the intrusive and internally alienating movement of capital. (An exemplary instance of such a conjecture might be found in Ashis Nandy’s uses of a Gandhian legacy, and, as we saw, its implications for his reading of Tagore; the latter, on Nandy’s account, marks an exceptional ethical secession from the coercive technologies of political nationalism.) Nevertheless, we should recall that in its original 1986 edition, Chatterjee’s own, stringently articulated hypothesis was posed as a question:  The interrogative mark that accompanies the title’s reference to a “derivative discourse” continues to suggest that any critical gesture towards “alternative” knowledge systems, as to “parallel” or variegated modernities is, itself, thoroughly mediated through the tracks of capital’s universalising drive. To look back at Chatterjee’s genealogical demonstration of the secondary status of political nationalism within the context of colonial capital is to recognise that in the first place, modernity is a global formation; it is a relation between spatial, temporal and affective entities created and dynamically specified by that interaction. To participate in these integrative and accelerated interactions –​say, in arguments about what is properly inside or outside of temporally bounded notions of nation, text, or culture  –​is, itself, a value and enduring sign of the modern. Hence, in Chatterjee’s analysis, the mutual production of “world” and “nation”–​the baleful dialectic of enlightenment in the postcolony, whose antinomies arose from a prior structural dependence on inherited conceptual divisions between imported or imposed intellectual formations in the period of colonial capital. But this is also to emphasise how the division of lived experience into such intellectualised or idealised divisions was to be formative –​such fractured historical consciousness comprises an irreversible trajectory into modernity to the extent that its revolutionary negation (or historical resolution) was to be found in the emancipatory end of the anti-​colonial nation.

Automatic intimacies  217 If, within the rubric of postcolonial studies, the Subaltern School paradigm has been accompanied by a near-​consensus on the systemic elitism of coercive structures of knowledge formations and governance in the post-​ Independent nation, Arif Dirlik’s proposition of a “global modernity” poses a suggestive contemporary intervention.6 For Dirlik, while modernity “has been globalizing all along”, the realisation of the order of “global modernity” was, until recently, forestalled by intertwined formations that were the historical products of capitalist modernisation itself –​colonialism and socialism. Thus, while “decolonisation since World War II has restored the voices of the colonised, and opened the way to recognition of the spatial and temporal co-​presence of those whom a Eurocentric modernisation discourse had relegated to invisibility and backwardness”, this largely salutary accomplishment of the anti-​colonial demand for universal “recognition” and chronological “copresence” might be viewed –​retrospectively –​as having been enabled by the dominance of “socialism as ideology, and the [historical] presence of socialist states” (Dirlik, 281–​282). Dirlik’s point is less that the discourse of decolonisation might have been epistemically and institutionally derivative of preconditions set in place by a hegemonic Cold War order (and “non-​aligned” positions of dissent within it). Rather, his insight goes to the specific explanatory force of anti-​colonial discourse, and therefore, to the profound moral authority of erstwhile postcolonial ideologies of developmentalism. These were predicated –​if not wholly then in some irreducible part –​on the visible persistence and perception of socialism as a “viable alternative to [free-​market] capitalism” (ibid). Thus, while it is a commonplace that the erosion and precipitous collapse of a bipolar world order in the 1990s opened the way to implementing the globalisation of capital, Dirlik’s thesis underscores how this shift “also eliminated socialism as a crucial obstacle to cultural appropriations –​and, therefore, the proliferation –​of modernities. Dirlik’s proposition of this “globalist” conjuncture notates a profound experiential contradiction within our properly “postcolonial, postnational” moment: The differing scales of a perceived “fragmentation of a single modernity into multiple and alternative modernities” is, itself, one of the most discernible consequences of capital’s universalising urge. In a peculiar reversal of “end of history” speculations, the “questioning of Eurocentric teleology in either the capitalist or the socialist guise” –​ as, indeed, the popular discrediting of teleological narratives of “Nehruvian” national development under imperatives of neo-​liberal capital –​has revealed “modernity in its full historicity and “geohistorical”diversity” (ibid. emphasis mine). Failures of political decolonization, combined with the seeming inevitability of capitalism, have played a major part in the foregrounding of culture, which both provides an escape from politics, and a means to conduct politics by other means. The cultures and the knowledges that

218 Conclusion contemporary [regional or transnational] discourses [such as those of “Rising Asia”, Hindu revivalism or political Islam] proclaim, draw upon native pasts, but by no means point to a return to those pasts, as the pasts now revived are pasts that have been re-​organized already by a consciousness of a century or more of social and political transformation; they are, in other words, not just postcolonial and postnational, but perhaps even post-​global, as cultural contention and competition are played out presently on a terrain that itself presupposes an uncertain globality. (Dirlik, 282; emphasis mine) Does “Nehru’s bedroom”, in its internal details and spatial structure, essay the fate and future of a residualism within such a posthistorical conjuncture? I submit that with Singh’s photograph, we are witnesses to the emergence of an old thought-​form within fundamentally altered conditions of perception and legibility, under the prevalent order of multinational capitalism. The scene of such appearance is staged less as a mode for apprehending forgotten or even unspoken ways of seeing and acting associated with (the fetish of) Independence than as a method for symptomising the value of visibility for our own, “postcolonial, postnational” moment. Around the irruptive if ideologically inconclusive possibilities that attend Singh’s image, we are compelled to ask –​what forms of intellectual or aesthetic value become selected for play and legitimisation in the field of cultural production, and what is the relation of such praxis to the life-​world of labour? Under the reign of advanced capitalism, can we demand that the value of an established idea be extricated from its dissimulation and consolidation through market value? Or otherwise, can the pantheon of “culture” descried by Adorno in Cultural Criticism and Society emerge –​as it seems to in this most dynamic of Singh’s compositions –​not only as the effect of economic competition but as the site of an animated contest for new formations of meaning? Put in yet another way, the focal point of this image is not the (electoral-​political) spectacle of competing postcolonial visibilities but rather that replicable moment of capture by technologies of expression and action under the law of the commodity fetish. As such, the aesthetic focus of the photograph is the viewer’s point of view, subtracted and extruded from its privileged position behind the bed, reduplicated on the high gloss of the screen. And it is from this emergent, de-​personalised point of view that the various spatial constructs of the image find their particular appeal in symbolically dense if fully contingent lines of association  –​the incongruous alignment of the book case with the structure of the viewing window; the edge that then becomes visible to us but which serves as a blind spot for the museum-​goer; the intensification of the people’s line of vision thereby, directed, as it is, to fall on the empty bed and the uncanny, returning pressure of a gaze from somewhere past the bedside. Each of these spatial and figural constructs become present, via dynamic multiplicities of meaning, through their intensive lack of univocity –​as emptiness.

Automatic intimacies  219 Is this not an exemplary photographic commentary on the politics of disappearance, captured as the misplaced encounter between modular aesthetic imperatives (say, the realism-​modernism antinomy of the twentieth century) and peripheral cultural forms (the embodied symbols of a transitional modernity, whether in the figure of insurgent feminine consciousness or the incomplete progressivism of a national vanguard, each on their route to becoming modern)? –​this is a commentary on our present, in other words, that turn in which spatialised or embodied experience, together with an attendant historical consciousness, becomes subject to the incursion of global signs and images; what Pankaj Mishra diagnosed, in our introduction, as the simultaneity of the production and circulation of images against all established chronology in the national present. Put differently, the photograph details an order of virtualism that dispels precedent regimes of presence, memory and historical location, even as it demands a different order of intellection from the viewer. At such a moment, the temporally specific event is formally indistinguishable from the image of the event. But there is also the obverse –​Singh’s uses of the apparatus (and recessive effects) of visibility disenchants. As my reading has suggested, the composition incessantly foregrounds the object of opacity at the centre of spectacularised accounts of how we became modern  –​the visual device appears as the disorienting occasion of our blindness, the blind spot, as Ganguly terms it, in the midst of a spectacularised historical consciousness. Put otherwise, this fully de-​personalised image of mid-century space –​open, in its visual dispossession, to other uses and frames – suggests that the foundational work of history-​making is in some “real”, experiential and therefore intimate sense, never prior to technologies that reduplicate and divide the event into a series of visual mythologies. If Singh’s photograph of the bedroom goes some ways towards providing an exemplary defense of transformative perceptual possibilities that reside within such a moment, it does so not only as a political allegory about the past, or the time and episode of India’s emergence into modernity; an epoch that was symbolically unified by modernism through intuition, emotion, and the will to representation. It accomplishes such a posture, above all, as “a technological allegory” of the various apparatuses that irrevocably mediate our sense of the real.7 As an allegorical reflection on history, the image invites us to perceive the transit of time-​past into the materials of the present. But this particular order of cognition is not available to us diegetically; it is not offered as information, taken from and verified against what is, undoubtedly, a theatrical scene of action. Rather, the photograph suggests that older modalities of meaning and cultural production do not have to be categorically periodised and so extricated from more modern apparatuses (in the most obvious instance, the “cinematic” cut and projection to which the composition alludes; but are we not also, here, asked to reflect on the historicity of the photographic medium itself, inseparable, as it is, from the visibility of the curated or musealised object?).

220 Conclusion If so, we could propose that the writerly and visual emerge as co-​extensive through their formal and temporal divergences. That we are positioned as witnesses to how literary, discursive and representational archives of the trajectory of India’s entry into modernity may be reconstituted in materials and media that belong, more properly, to the contemporary conjuncture. By arresting physical action –​our own spectatorial investment in the need for movement, acceleration and a resolution to the question of “what is happening” in the drama before us –​Singh suspends us within a fully reconstellated order of knowledge. At stake are the organising structures of perception and presentation, which are raised from an apprehension of the physicalised limits and constraints within the frame, to the level of consciousness and historical awareness. Thrown back onto the question of how spectatorship is constituted –​less through “identification” with screen images, it would seem, than through subtle if necessary misalignments between embodied experience and cognitive intention –​the viewing subject is forced to adjust her apprehension of “inside” and “outside” –​this, to the point where she must finally dispose of the consolation of knowing one from the other. The focus of Singh’s composition, then, is the particular knowledge form of the visual medium, as it might exist for us today. The entanglements of narrative connotation, the limits of embodied spectatorship, and categories of historical knowledge pass, in fascination, as a sort of optical unconscious. Not unlike the attitude of corporeal paralysis or historical stasis that characterised allegory, their conventions emerge, again, under the musealised, or fully immobilised sign of privacy. We recall the etui man in the work of Benjamin and Adorno, a figure that absorbed the fearsomeness of the object-​world under logics of late capitalism, and a motif, in itself, of the superficiality of every embodied materiality under logics of fungibility (in the first part of this study, the terror of such a world found emblematic expression in the socially sanctioned violence of sacrifice). In such a moment, the image –​like the fetish object of the interior as of interiority itself –​is “a form premised not on depth, but on exchangeability” (Ganguly, 50). With this premise in mind, let us recapitulate the contentions of this concluding heuristic from Privacy. The anonymised bedroom stages reversals between “the plot” of national modernism –​understood pace Mufti as “the passage … from primitivism to modernity”  –​and the various remainders of such a narrative in the surplus and emergent possibilities of form. So, by relating familiar figural formations to the narrative causalities that underpin their very visibility, the photograph dynamises, once more, the notional place of the leader; the (feminised) step-​forward of a people; and the suspended agon between these specular positions (denoted through the classicising gesture of the woman’s raised hand, as an amicable testing of limits). These components of the popular-​democratic elements of Indian’s bourgeois modernity are related through especially cinematic tropes –​through devices of cutting, forced conjunction and assembly –​as, altogether, the fetish object of alienated experience. What appears to us through the artistic commentary

Automatic intimacies  221 of late style are the foundations of historical consciousness in the postcolony, now, however, as an internally disaggregated element of memory. So, we have again, the representational tension between the burden of embodied consciousness (feminine subjectivity) and historical awareness (the woman as performer of her own modernisation) (Tagore); the historical pitfall between “high” or advanced modernist consciousness and the manipulable materials of governance, the subaltern (Anand); the long duration of the impasse between equality and aesthetic practice, which extended beyond the valorised space of the nation, through the disintegration of repertoires of the Classical, into the unverifiable location of contemporary culture (Seth). As projections that remain open to belief, representation and spatial reconfiguration  –​processes that inspired the icon’s appearances in the first historical instance  –​these figures of the modern, must, of course, be related to the ethnographic and historical data of their visual representation. Situated within the confabulated space of the image, these visibilities are not, however, reducible to such information. Striated by trajectories of disappearance, Singh’s photograph serves to the clarify the scope of this book by recalling the canon and tradition of “national modernism” as the fabled encounter between the point of view of a modernising national vanguard, and the desiderata of what could not be located within the symbolic apparatus (the “demographic difference”, pace Guha, of the subaltern; Lacan’s extimate in the surplus of pleasure that dissembled as privacy; the catastrophically empty place of transcendence, following Benjamin’s exposition of allegory, in sacrifice and disaster). As such, Singh’s rehearsal of the foundations of national modernism are arrested, as if by the raised hand of the woman, at the point of dissolution, opening onto an incomplete confrontation between competing experiences of time and embodiment. Hope  –​for self-​empowerment, advancement, and emancipation  –​the future, in other words –​is analeptically encoded within the empty, almost de-​featured structures of modern time. If the composition brings us right up to the screen, in a face-​to-​face encounter, as it were, with forward-​oriented action, this is a movement of pure recollection; we recall such action as having thrust the nation into the twentieth century. In other words, the future is disclosed, in temporally incongruent and perceptually disorienting ways, through the coevalness of two equally remote presences  –​the other world of production, work, the body of sacrifice and the camera’s modernising look. The value of co-​presence is sited in such a dissociative sensibility, as are the provisional unifications provided by a viewing subject. Nevertheless, in each of its legibilities, Singh’s technological allegory of the production of modern arrival signals our abstracted and still temporally disjointed historical consciousness. As an image of where we stand currently, the composition is neither a revelation of a suppressed ethnographic reality in the midst of a fallen, commodified present, and it is certainly not a resolution of the legacies of postcolonial unevenness in the depiction of a globally “contemporary” aesthetic, which would thus confirm its own

222 Conclusion moment of arrival by relegating subaltern struggle, as “construct”, to the dustbin of (socialist/​elitist) history. The photograph, after all, is never more than the fiction it seeks to stage; it can tell us nothing about the future, and still less, of the future of politics. In the manner of the collector who stood to inherit only after the destruction of values of proprietorship and mastery, this is a phantomatic encounter with a postrevolutionary history that cannot be fully abandoned to instrumental end(ing)s. Just as the cut and fetish of form stood in the absence of embodied experience, it is the visual apparatus that appears at the centre of this composition. What comes to light is the opacity of the representational modes that reside in our otherwise spectacular accounts of the modern –​the inhuman centre, in other words, that automates a “progressive disenchantment with form [itself] … a notion of inadequacy, successively attaching to forms of architecture, sculpture, painting music, poetry and prose” (Bewes, 18). Comparably, and under the law of the commodity form, the parameters of a literary twentieth century are discovered through the force of artificial visibilities that acquire the “luminosity of the still-​life rather than the roundedness of real historical personalities” (Ganguly, 50). Rather than marking out the object of loss and the persistence of Freudian logics of mourning, these representational conventions are brought to standstill, or the point of expressive inadequacy, in service to the dynamic possibilities of form. In our post-​ historical, or properly post-​ independent juncture, Singh’s image calls for new ways of reading insofar as that the problem of form –​in its lack of integral interior content –​is no longer the particular stigma of postcolonial belatedness. Nor is its capacity for abstraction the sign of historically decadent or depleted modes of cultural expression and intent. In the twentieth century, the incremental breakage of forms from the guarantee of perception obsoletes measures of critical failure and canonisation, thereby announcing the exigencies of our own age –​not, however, as the content of “new literatures”, or as the substitution of outmoded artistic formalisms with more active political concerns. Rather, through the irruptive action of late style, formations of the previous century bear witness to a “permanent rendering inadequate of form” (Bewes, 19)  –​thereby foreshortening the various distances we have encountered, in this study, between writerly totalities and their embodied remainders in the scar of feminine in/​visibility or ethnicised labour; between realist content and modernist form; as between Adorno and his historical others.

Notes Iin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1969). 1 2 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, in Film Theory and Criticism:  Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Automatic intimacies  223 3 Nationalism’s justificatory structures (its “thematic”) are that of nineteenth-​ century Orientalism’s, based, as they are, on a perceived ethnographic difference between “East” and “West”; between tradition and modernity, scientifically “rationalised” reason and the hierarchical world of “faith”. The overarching structure of the politics of identity and difference, thus, is the temporal breach separating the isolated consciousness of the nationalist from the vast, underdeveloped world of “the people” within the same moment of encounter (pp. 36–​39) –​ paraphrasing for our purposes, on the subcontinent, “modernity” is this order of an internally uneven simultaneity. 4 In his genealogy of nationalism, Chatterjee assembles three “nationalist” turning-​ points, drawn from across regions. These are periodised as a non-​synchronous (rather than sequentially progressive) historical movement that incorporates mid-​ nineteenth-​ century articulations of cultural nationalism into the paradigmatic resolution of “freedom” in the sovereign, modernising nation-​ state. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya, Gandhi and Nehru’s disparate thinking on the nation are thus narratable as an ideological totality. Accordingly, the nationalist “problematic” is shown to invert imperial discourses of Orientalism to assume, without question, the category of the Oriental–​colonial difference. Nationalism is thus capable of inspiriting colonial subjectivity with an agency that is active and autonomous, even as this novel historical agent is mobilised into state-​formations that require “him” to be passive and non-​participating (pp. 36–​39). 5 Nationalism’s epochal moment of “arrival” appears in the figure of an indigenous “people”, in ­chapter 5 of Nehru’s Discovery of India (1946) –​a collective subject, from the perspective of Nehru, the narrator, which stands on the verge of revolutionary self-​discovery. By dialogically urging the masses to reflect on the meaning of their victory cries to a mythic motherland (Bharat Mata), Nehru, in turn, casts himself as a didact who rationalises an archaic mode of belonging (including mythic references to an ahistorical land and race, “Bharat”) by referring its constructs to the empirically verifiable, territorialised entity of the nation-​state. 6 Arif Dirlik, “Global Modernity? Modernity in an Age of Global Capitalism”, European Journal of Social Theory 6(3) (2003): 282. 7 I borrow the phrase from Keya Ganguly’s account of the emergent modernism of Satyajit Ray, in which a retrospective historical consciousness is understood at a distance from both nostalgia and Benjaminian Trauer, “in its explicitly formal character [as] the expression of an embodied modernism that presupposes its own temporal and technological conditions of emergence” (78). Keya Ganguly, Cinema, Emergence the Films of Satyajit Ray (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2010).

Coda

To invoke one last time the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer narrate the relation of art to science as the divided forms of human consciousness, where both originated in the pre-​modern unity of a magical world to then fall out with each other, and the world itself. In a response to the Lukácsian proposition of the “transcendental homelessness” of every modern work in its relation to the extra-​aesthetic world that first sponsored its appearance, Adorno and Horkheimer tell their own story of the epic loss and wandering that pauperises reason in the historical present, miring the forms of its self-​ narration within intrinsic discrepancy. Thus, science went on in the attempt to control nature through abstraction, reducing nature’s qualities to quantifiable equivalents; so “history” became the properly anonymous history of the massified victims of technology (the expendability of such minoritised or ethnicised losers in the march of progress, disguised as profit or unavoidable necessity). Art, in its turn, embarked on the Sisyphean task of seeking mimetic forms of resemblance and affiliative listening that once belonged to magic, but this time, in a world already dominated by equivalences, and thus, by self-​eroding clichés about bourgeois science, technology, and the other world of magical indigeneity. Consequently –​in the present –​every mediation between nature and human life is experienced as another “wound” of the technological tool, which appears, extra-​territorially, to stand above human history and the natural world (AT 68). These two modes of reasoning, at their point of stand-​off, imprisoned consciousness within the grid of an infinite, unchanging present. The historical effect of such immutable forms of reasoning, however, was to propel even further the continued “ravishing” of the earth and the degradation of human work by incorporating every attempt (via the congenitally belated thought-​forms of “science” and “culture”) to remediate such originary violence. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno argues that while this is, in fact, the actuality of capital’s universal drive, as it moves across the very inequities in cultural and economic accumulation that it creates, it need not be the only way forward. Nor, indeed, must the critique of such a tautological present be

Coda  225 envisioned through a (middle class, technologically) induced fantasy of violation versus escape: The mistakenness of the vulgar antithesis of technology and nature is obvious in the fact that precisely nature that has not been pacified by human cultivation, nature over which no human hand as passed –​alpine moraines and taluses –​resembles those industrial mountains of debris from which the socially lauded aesthetic need for nature flees. Just how industrial it looks in inorganic outer space will someday be clear. Even in its telluric expansion, as the imprint of total technique, the concept of idyllic nature would retain the provincialism of a miniscule island. In a schema borrowed from bourgeois sexual morality, technology is said to have ravished [raped] nature, yet under transformed relations of production it would just as easily be able to assist nature and on this sad earth help it to attain what perhaps it wants. (68; emphasis and modification mine) The temporal stretch of Adorno’s passage, encompassing “telluric” and orbital time into the micro-​figure of little islands of human waste, is stirring. First, as Adorno anticipated but could never have fully imagined in his own time, the petty “bourgeois”, neo-​colonial imagination that dominates the years of the German Miracle (through a repressive sexuality) operates on an inconceivable scale of violence, as an indigenous feature of capitalism in the postcolonial state today. Betraying the latter’s every pretence to coevallness with advanced, postindustrial markets, the triumphalism of change and development since the public–​private enterprise of liberalisation relies, in truth, on an unprecedented level of “third-​worldism”  –​in the accelerated extraction of natural resources; geo-​bribes (not only in the apparent moral aberrance of “political corruption”, but in rationalised policies of industrial corridors, Special Economic Zones, middle-​class urban renewal projects); and forms of primitive accumulation in which sexually coercive forms of labour and bodily expropriation are real. Second, this kind of continuity is interrupted by the point of view of the “some day”, a speculative perspective that uncannily survives Adorno’s text to strike us with its inadvertent datedness. In Adorno’s image, as in our distanced reading of that same passage, the haunting evocation of “some day” is the action of prolepsis, a future conceived backwards, through the “debris” of its historical completion in a moment that is already over (68). In the citation, this “inorganic” point of view –​comparable to the unbound perspective of free indirect discourse  –​belongs to technology, at least in the way it would appear “under transformed relations of production” (68). Once released from its unchanging yet ideologically shifting presence as the apparatus of equivalence, it is the perspective of technology itself that emerges as the rightful mediator between human action and phenomena,

226 Coda between the autonomous artefact and the world. But, as Adorno’s unexpected shift in mood towards the conditional indicates, this time –​in which science might be imbued with the active ability to attend to material need, rather to exploit it –​is not yet. “The shame felt in the face of natural beauty stems from the damage implicitly done to what does not yet exist, by taking it for the existent” (74). Rephrasing the implications of Adorno’s analysis, we could say that if the possibility of such a counter-​time is available presently, it is so only in the domain of images (of which Adorno’s account partakes). In the image, technology becomes capable of freeing its own look from an immutable present-​time in which the apparatus fixes perception’s relation to the other in the mode of exploitation (via self-​reproducing logics of homogenisation and mastery) while also disguising this profit-​driven moment of “total technique” in socially induced fantasies of either a colourful or wasted present. (Thus, Adorno links the idea of the “tourist industry”, through the gendered idiom of violent exposure, to the suppressed memory of colonisation) (68). Adorno did not offer a programmatic thesis on the relationship of literary forms to the musical paradigm of late style, although he presents selective instances of literary genres and texts that are exemplary of late style in the writerly medium.1 This would leave the question of the proper relation between these various media and their stylistic modalities unresolved, and thus open to emergent forms of writing that originate outside of, or rather, after, Adorno’s own repertory of modernist aesthetics.2 Perhaps more crucially, under present conditions of late capitalism, the historically unattained relationship of technologically mediated forms of action to the kind of “transformed” perspective that Adorno sketches speculatively, above –​as inorganic, worldly, and redeemed from its visible origins in violence –​can be rendered intelligibly through what I have maintained is its most emblematic materialisation –​the form of the twentieth-​century novel. The “interior monologue” that Adorno discovers through “foreign” chains of historically inflected associations, whether recollected or imagined, are, indeed, imported into the work’s imagery, in the wake of the free indirect, or de-​nominalised perspective of the filmic image, to thereby run against the grain of what, in fact, exists (ibid). The insight orients each chapter of this study, where the text’s capacity to generate such apparitional possibilities out of the established discrepancies of its own materials or devices, is affirmed as a counter-​narrative to what the text, in its own time, claimed to express. By the same token, our approach must concede that no comparative work is possible today without an acknowledgement of how the assumption of “difference” is already mediated through transnational circuits of knowledge and capital. As a lately recognised master of critical theory for the new millennium –​and thus, as currency for the contemporary transmission of “theory” in the global humanities  –​Adorno (together with the repertoire of European music that so fundamentally informs his writings) feature

Coda  227 as part of the incorporative logic that absorbs every unambiguous designation of an outside into “the system” of multinational capital. Published in the immediate wake of market liberalisation in India, Seth’s An Equal Music remains an ambitious, if not currently memorable attempt to indicate such a paradox from within the medium (and the figure of the medium) of the Indian novel in English. In hindsight, the successfully institutionalised field and canon of the postcolonial is perhaps exactly what we are forced to encounter, in inverted form, as the invisible standard through which we judge the accomplishment and uncertainties of this “European” fiction. In effect, though, the work does not permit us to stand outside the very charge of cultural inequality that has been levelled against it insofar as the measure of our evaluation (re)turns within the novel’s humanistic conceit of equality as the locus, not of the “West”, but of our incoherent desire to be free of it. The demand for another kind of book, or indeed, another kind of “postcolonial” writer, is unmade through the unfixable geography of empire (involving both music and English as class-​based capital) in Seth’s narrative of mobility. Such disintegration is accomplished, above all, in the work’s moment of uncontrolled self-​ implication  –​that moment of resounding internal failure, when the reader’s desire for a resolution to the “external” problem of the novel’s material origins in inequality, converges with the textually reified appearance of the Classical. Through writerly surpluses that could not mend the contradictions of the narrative without also dismantling its integral (musical) fiction of an absolute form of expression, the work, in its awkwardness and many felicities, reminds us of the continuation of the canon as a still normative source of culture –​and therefore, of how the very terms by which we would dispute its ideology (“commodification”, “Eurocentrism”, “elitism”, suspect “cosmopolitanism”, even “incommensurability”) are bound up within unthinkable structures of profit and complicity. In the same way, the figure and oeuvre of “Adorno”, too, reach us, in all their negative capabilities, through their prior circulation in inequality, not in their original materialities but as dated thought-​forms, and as the endowment of unevenly accumulated cultural capital. Just as the relationship of the title of Dayanita Singh’s collection to that which it names, privacy, is not one of identity but of alterity, so also is the encounter between separate life-​worlds expressed through a relation that is always otherwise to its purported location. In its aberrational integrity, and its perhaps idiosyncratic place within Singh’s corpus, the photograph discussed in this conclusion enacts the historical forces that work, today, upon the novelistic materials that have comprised our study. Revisited through the optic of lateness, the problem of internal inadequation, or of temporal disjunction, is not a subjective effect of the writing –​say, of the writer, or of a character or subject-​position within the fiction –​as much as it is coextensive with the emergence of literary form. In other words, the extraneousness of form does not exist, itself, “outside” the writerly object, or, better, it cannot come to light apart from the relations of incommensurability of which the

228 Coda material of literature is the emblem. By negating the historical substance of the image –​that is, by casting such content as appearance and consigning the beauty of appearances, altogether, to illusion  –​Singh’s photograph restages the problem of representation, tout court, as an effect of processes of dematerialisation, inorganicity, and de-​realisation. As Bewes proposes, under conditions of advanced capitalism, the literary event cannot but partake of this inability of twentieth-​century forms to “produce [a document] of cultural authenticity” on time; axiomatically, then, just as there is no writing without the culpable mark of exclusion and inadequation, there can be no writing that does not also materialise such discrepancy as our own, most urgent truth-​claim. Singh’s fable of national modernism suggests that every visibility available to us is an effect of the failed contact between inside and outside, such that each identification within the photograph’s image-​ world (whether in the figure of an emergent people, or of critical discourses of a history of passive revolution, hegemony, the gaze, etc.) serves, only tenuously, to contain our perceptual uncertainty, our fundamental perplexity, about where exactly we stand in such a conjuncture. As in the world of the icon’s bedroom –​where figures expose the event of their own consolatory appearances to dissolution, and a space–​time bereft of a proper ending  –​ there is no writing that is not, itself, a mark of the falling-​out between the work and the world. This brings us back to the mystery of Singh’s “vanishing” forms, those inoperable intimacies that accompany the artist’s dedicated use of conventions from another century (AT 68). The spiralling (dis)affection with inherited forms is not reducible to the biographical facts, aspirations or failures of the writer-​artist (which continue to deserve interrogation). Nor do they belong to the internal thought-​worlds of the fictional characters that have made up the course of this discussion. The truth-​claim that is still yielded through such unfulfilled formations is dismissed too easily if read symptomatically, through what recent criticism diagnoses as the melancholic solipsism of postcolonial theory or the self-​serving preoccupation of the professional critic with the problem of incommensurability. Intransigent to every subjective or conceptual codification, such emotive surplus is actualised only in a writerly world of broken conventions –​coterminously –​as part of the longue durée of the novel. Testifying to the inadequacy of artificial appearances of which it is in turn a creation, the intensities discussed in this book do not belong to our real lives, tied, as we must be, “to this sad earth” –​to empirical time, and our responsibility for the real closures of history that lie behind us, and towards which the narratives discussed here, have turned (AT 68). The dialectical image of the Frankfurt School endures by pivoting less on the opposition between myth and enlightenment, tradition and modernity, than on the vanishing point that originates their disjunctive claims, and aberrational departures towards, other formations of the universal catastrophe established elsewhere, also under the law of the commodity-​fetish, as the modern. Accordingly, we are reminded that art cannot offer the consolation

Coda  229 that life, by virtue of its sheer endurance, might. Therefore, the quality of disconsolation belongs to the writing itself; it is the property, and redemptive principle, of fiction.

Notes 1 These authors and works that Adorno considers through markers of late style (in the reified use of high-​style and Classicism, corrosive cliché, in the ability of the work to construct inhuman tonalities in the wake of dissolved historical conventions), comprise of Goethe’s Iphigenie, Hölderlin’s late poetry, the writings of satirist and poet Heinrich Heine, and the “minor”, neo-​romantic poets, Joseph von Eichendorff, Eduard Mörike and Stefan Georg.   By canonising the apparently harmless romanticism of the latter, Adorno deliberately reconsiders ostensibly insignificant traditions of effete conservatism or sentimentality, as the basis of a counter-​tradition of German Romanticism. Adorno’s interest in middle-​brow to minor iterations of Romanticism as a “little” national tradition has been especially instructive for my reading of Seth, whose work exemplifies a similar, conservative-​constructivist possibility for late-​twentieth-​century Anglophonic Indian fiction. 2 Adorno himself gave extended consideration to the dynamic intermediality of the arts in the late 1960s, in “Art and the Arts”. See Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz? ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 368–​387.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my appreciation to the readers and editorial teams who have worked with this study, from Ashgate Press to Routledge, who have also facilitated its publication across the shift. I convey my gratitude to the original reviewer of the study’s proposal and its subsequent drafts, for reading with a combination of delicacy and force, for challenging interventions that enriched my experience of completing the book; and for personal generosity, in his/​her well-​wishes, for the reception of my ideas. I send thanks to Anne Donahue, formerly of Ashgate Press, for her articulate editorial leadership, and to the team at Routledge, for taking things forward with alacrity. I would like to acknowledge support received from the National University of Singapore for much of this study, including invitations to collaborate with the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (2009–​11), an early opportunity offered by Prof. Robbie Goh, which permitted me to extend my doctoral training towards new disciplinary interests. Travel and conference support from the university shortened distances and has been indispensable to ongoing conversations with colleagues in areas of Comparative and World Literature at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, first initiated in 2009 through the Fiftieth Anniversary of World Literature at UW-​Madison; and continued, through collaborations and workshop platforms, especially the bi-​annual convention of the Society for Novel Studies. For inexhaustible intellectual generosity through our many years, and his unwavering professional confidence in me, I  thank B.  Venkat Mani. For lending insight, with brilliance and modesty, I thank Chris Lee, and for our shared intellectual friendship, Weihsin Gui. I remain indebted to Ryan Bishop, who continues to open doors to new interests and interlocutors. I  send special thanks to Sneja Gunew, John Marx and Azade Seyhan for extending their brilliant scholarship, each, to these ideas from a distance, and for acts of professional generosity that remain invaluable to me. I am bound to each of my co-​educators at the Department of Language and Literature at NUS, and would like to acknowledge, especially, Chitra Sankaran, John Whalen-​Bridge, Susan Ang, John Philips, Robin Loon, Philip Holden and Michelle Lazar, and to remember John Richardson.

240 Acknowledgements For all that’s our past, and debts that I can only hope to pay forward, I thank my dear friend, Alisa Hartz. For giving time, I  thank Gautam Verma and Lorenza Talamona, for Bombay and Piacenza; Rehina Pereira, for Singapore and Goa. I  thank Maurizio Peleggi, and Laura and Marcello, in Rome, for hospitality and so much beauty. To my erstwhile doctoral students and cherished peers, Vasugi Kailasam, Hsu Fang-​Tze and Aparna Shukla, for inviting me to be a part of their bright journeys. And to Priscilona Mendez, for helping to make the time. For sharing her many gifts as curator and art educator, and for new directions, I thank the undauntable Sophie Goltz. I would like to acknowledge the community of my graduate students, without which I  would lack greatly, and the amazing students of English Literature at NUS who have come through my classes –​for endeavouring.

Index

Abbas, Ackbar 181, 194–​198 absolute music 23, 126, 128, 130, 134, 137, 147–​148, 152 Adorno, Theodor W. 12–​17, 222, 226–​227; Aesthetic Theory 14, 25, 29, 186, 224–​226, 228; “Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis (1959)” 16, 22, 70–​71, 85–​86, 188; allegory 29–​31, 71, 182; Anand’s Across the Black Waters 85–​86, 94, 96, 104–​105; “Art and the Arts” 229n2; “Bach Defended against His Devotees” 151, 163n10; Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music 108; and Benjamin 13, 31, 71, 181–​182, 186, 191; catastrophe 11, 13–​16, 30, 111; “Cultural Criticism and Society” 9–​11, 187, 189, 218; cultural history 189; dialectical materialism 3; Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Horkheimer) 16–​17, 82, 90–​91, 105–​106, 186, 224; disappearance 185, 199, 201; etui man 182, 220; Hornberg letter 182; interior, contextualising the 174, 181–​185, 191, 198, 200–​201; and Jameson 1; Kierkegaard: The Construction of the Aesthetic 182–​186; “Late Style in Beethoven” 1, 15, 17, 65, 71; and Lukács 25, 113n29; “Lyric Poetry and Society” 121, 125, 135, 146–​147, 149–​150, 158–​160, 162, 164n15, 165n27, 166n36; Negative Dialectics 14, 182, 185; “On Epic Naivete” 81–​83, 94–​96, 105–​107, 113n9, 116n29; “On Lyric Poetry and Society” 95; parataxis 81–​84, 94–​95; “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry” 81–​82, 104–​105, 107–​108,

113n9; reflection 182–​185, 202; reversal 185–​186, 190, 200–​201; and Schwarz 17–​18; Seth’s An Equal Music 22, 24, 125–​127, 135, 146, 149–​150, 160–​162; Singh’s photography 25, 173–​174, 186, 191; subjectivity, disappearance of 6; Tagore’s Four Chapters 30, 70 ageing: Adorno 15; Tagore’s Four Chapters 20, 22, 41–​53, 67, 71 allegory 13; Adorno 29–​31, 71, 182; Anand’s Across the Black Waters 104–​105; Benjamin 31–​32, 43–​45, 47–​48, 52, 54–​56, 66–​67, 182, 221; Gandhian values 57; Goethe’s Elective Affinities 55; Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized 93; nation in “Third World” fiction 80; Seth’s An Equal Music 128, 133–​135, 145, 150, 155, 157, 160–​161, 162n2; Seth’s A Suitable Boy 136; Singh’s photography 25, 173, 177, 191, 194, 199–​200, 213, 219–​221; Tagore 19–​20, 22, 30–​32, 34, 36–​52, 56–​60, 62, 64–​65, 69, 71 All India Congress Committee 72n12 All India Progressive Writers’ Association (AIPWA) 4, 22, 101; Anand 79, 102 Ambedkar, B.R. 75n27 Amin, Shahid 56 Anand, Lal Chand 87–​89, 115nn19–​20 Anand, Mulk Raj 19, 221; Across the Black Waters 20–​22, 25, 77–​81, 84–​109, 111; Apology for Heroism 88, 115n19; Conversations in Bloomsbury 112n4; Coolie 20, 78, 92–​93, 97; “Roots and Flowers”

242 Index 109; Seven Summers: A Memoir 226n28; The Sword and the Sickle 96; Untouchable 20, 78, 88, 93, 97, 114n17, 115n21; The Village 89–​90, 96 Anand Bhavan 188, 201, 211, 214 Anderson, Benedict 81 Anjaria, Ulka 4, 36–​38, 49–​50, 56–​58, 74n23 anti-​colonial nation  6, 216 anti-​colonial nationalism 29, 35, 39 anti-​colonial resistance 81; All India Progressive Writers’ Association 80; Anand 89, 96, 115n20; Tagore’s Gora 32–​34, 62 anti-​colonial thought 93, 215, 217 Appiah, Anthony 84 Arabian Nights 39 Arendt, Hannah 12 Arya Samaj 75n27 Attali, Jacques 127 Austen, Jane 154; Mansfield Park 155 avant-​garde 37–​38, 73n17, 109, 117n39 Bach, J.S. 126, 130, 148, 151–​152, 163nn4, 8, 10; The Art of the Fugue 126, 133–​134, 142–​144, 149, 163n10; St. Matthew’s Passion 165n30; The Well-​Tempered Clavier 151 Baer, Ben Conisbee 114n17 Bahri, Deepika 2–​3 Bald, Suresht Renjen 113n8 Bangalore 206n33 Barthes, Roland 175–​176 Bartok, Béla 164n12 Basu, Sriparna 59, 65 Beckett, Samuel 113n11 Beethoven, Ludwig van 17, 147, 165n27; “Heiligenstadt Testament” 164–​165n22; Missa Solemnis 14, 16, 70; Piano Trio in C minor 153; Seth’s An Equal Music 24, 130 Bengal: Partition 29m 33, 38, 42, 75n29; Tagore 29, 32–​33, 38, 40, 42, 51, 74n24 Benjamin, Walter: and Adorno 13, 31, 71, 181–​182, 186, 191; allegory 31–​32, 43–​45, 47–​48, 52, 54–​56, 66–​67, 182, 221; Arcades Project 179–​181, 186; Benjamin: Selected Writings 179; Charles Baudelaire:

A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism 179; cultural history 197; disappearance 180, 199, 202; etui man 180–​182, 186, 220; interior, contextualising the 176, 179–​182, 191; national culture 197; “On Goethe’s Elective Affinities” 31–​32, 47, 53–​56, 61, 66–​69, 71, 75–​76n32; “On Unpacking My Library” 211; Origins of the German Mourning Play 31, 43–​48, 54, 66–​67, 182; Singh’s photography 173, 176, 179, 186, 191, 193, 202; Tagore’s Four Chapters 43, 45–​48, 52, 56, 61, 67, 71 Benson, Stephen 126, 129, 134–​135, 139, 142, 149–​150, 152–​154, 164n12, 165n28 Berman, Jessica Schiff 92, 94–​95 Bersani, Leo 203n3 Bewes, Timothy 10–​12, 25, 222, 228 Bhabha, Homi K.: “high phase” of postcolonialism 2; minority-​ perspective 128, 164n21; postcolonial time 84; Seth’s An Equal Music 127–​128, 139, 143 Bharatiya Janata Party 7 Bildungsroman 89–​92; Anand’s Across the Black Waters 20–​21, 88–​90, 92–​95, 102, 109; Anand’s Coolie 93; Anand’s Untouchable 93; Anand’s The Village 90; Seth’s An Equal Music 124; Tagore’s Gora 32; Tagore’s The Home and the World 34 Bohurupee theatre group 73n21 Bombay First 207n37 Booker Prize 121 Bourdieu, Pierre 181, 204n11 Bowen, Elizabeth 94 Brahms, Johannes 159, 164n12 Brazil 18 Brennan, Timothy 80–​81, 112n7 Britten, Benjamin 164n12 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre 153 Burton, Richard 39 Bushnell, Cameron Fae 127, 139–​145, 147–​148, 150–​151, 165nn23–​24 canon: Anand 85; Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis 70; English literary tradition 1; late modernism 113n11; measures of 222; metropolitan 156; Nehruvian modernism 60; nineteenth-​century

Index  243 English novels 154; postcolonial 1, 3–​4, 6, 227; Seth’s An Equal Music 123; Tagore 30, 38–​39, 55; Western classical music 122, 127, 134–​135, 137, 139–​140, 143–​147, 150–​152, 158, 160, 163n4 Castle, Gregory 90–​93 catastrophe 70, 228; Adorno 11, 13–​16, 30, 111; Benjamin 13, 31; Goethe’s Elective Affinities 68–​69; Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized 93; Tagore’s Four Chapters 20–​21, 29, 31–​36, 41, 47–​48, 53, 60 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, Kopal Kundala 204–​205n13 Chatterjee, Partha 9, 92; “Bombs and Nationalism in Bengal” 73n18; The Nation and its Fragments 114n17; Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World 29, 215–​216, 223nn3–​4; The Politics of the Governed 196; Tagore’s Four Chapters 35–​36 Chattopadhyay, Arka 74n26 Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra 20, 29, 223n4; Krishnacharirta 76n38 Chaudhuri, Amit 121; Freedom Song 162n2; The Immortals 162n2 Chaudhuri, Supriya 32, 174–​179, 184, 204–​205n13 Chaudhury, Suniti 73n19 Chauri Chauraha incident 72n12 Cheah, Pheng 114n14 China 7, 206n37 Chow, Rey 201, 202 Cold War 217 communism 7 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness 156 cosmopolitanism: Anand’s Across the Black Waters 80, 94, 100–​101; critical 72n9; nation-​form 84; Seth’s An Equal Music 22, 124, 140; vernacular 84; World War I 99 Cowasjee, Saros 115n20 cultural criticism 9 Curzon, Lord 75n29 Dalhaus, Carl 124–​125, 127, 152, 163n8, 165n30 Dandi March 73n12 Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia 39 Das, Bina 73n19 Das, Chittaranjan R. 72n12

decolonisation: Anand’s Across the Black Waters 79, 80–​81, 87, 90; Anand’s The Village 90; Bhabha 127; Bildungsroman 92–​93; contradictions 44–​45; and expressive traditions 6; failed 5; global modernity 217; Hong Kong 195, 197; identitarianism of new literatures 3; migration following 12; Nehru’s Discovery of India 215; Seth’s A Suitable Boy 135; social realism 4; state formations 7; Tagore’s Four Chapters 47 developmentalism 217 Dhareshwar, Vivek 110, 117n39 Dickens, Charles 116n25, 154; Great Expectations 155 Dirlik, Arif 217–​218 disappearance: Abbas 194–​197, 199–​200; Adorno 185, 199, 201; Benjamin 180, 199, 202; Jameson 198; Singh’s photography 170, 192–​194, 199; Virilio 194, 200 distributive justice 7 Donne, John 125, 142 Du Bois, W.E.B. 165n24 Dussel, Enrique 115n17 Dutta, Nandana 76n35 Dyer, Reginald 115n19 Eichendorff, Joseph von 229n1 Eliot, George 116n25 Eliot, T.S. 115n21 Elland, Howard 55 Esty, Joshua 92, 94–​95 etui 180–​182, 186, 193, 220 Eurocentrism: Anand’s Across the Black Waters 85; Dussel’s critique 115n17; global modernity 217; Seth’s An Equal Music 22–​23, 151 failure: Adorno 83–​84, 95; Anand’s Across the Black Waters 86, 96–​97, 102–​103, 105, 108; Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized 93; national modernism 110–​111 Fanon, Frantz: Black Skin, White Masks 11–​12, 18, 21; “On National Culture” 186; Wretched of the Earth 79, 110 First Vienna School 140 First World War see World War I Flaubert, Gustave 175 Forster, E.M. 115n21

244 Index Foucault, Michel 91 Four Chapters (film) 76n36 Frankfurt School 3, 17, 37, 228 Gandhi, Leela 99–​100 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 75n27; and Anand 115n20; civil disobedience movement 72–​73n12; ethical dissent 72n9; nationalism 223n4; and Tagore 56–​58, 73n12, 75n27, 76n33 “Gandhi novels” 56–​58 Ganguly, Keya 13, 19, 219–​220, 222; on Beethoven 17; on Ray 14, 26n15, 223n7 general elections, India: 1923 72–​73n12; 1937 215; 2014 7 Georg, Stefan 229n1 George, Stefan 116n29 George V 116n28 German Miracle 225 German Romanticism 55, 229n1 Germany: aesthetic autonomy 152; Baroque mourning play (Trauerspiel) 31, 43–​45, 47–​48, 54; cultural architecture 32; industrialisation 183; literary tradition 113n9; World War I 112n3 Ghosh, Girish 39, 122 Ghosh, Shanti 73n19 Gilroy, Paul 165n24 Gita 63, 76n38 global city 194–​196 globalist historical context: Anand’s Across the Black Waters 21; media imagery 199; postcolonialism 1–​2, 5, 14; Seth’s An Equal Music 155, 162; Seth’s A Suitable Boy 136; Singh’s photography 167, 199 global modernity 217–​218 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister 116n25; Elective Affinities 31, 53–​56, 66–​69, 71; Iphigenie 229n1; “The Wonderful Tale of the Childhood Sweethearts” 67–​69 Goswami, Manu 32 Great War see World War I Guha, Ranajit 33, 92, 109–​110, 215, 221 Habermas, Jürgen, Legitimation Crisis 115n23

Handel, George Frideric 139, 164n12 Haydn, Joseph 130 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 13–​14, 156 Heidegger, Martin 113n9 Heine, Heinrich 229n1 Hinduism: Anand’s Across the Black Waters 77, 79; Anand’s Untouchable 114n17; nationalism 7, 74n27, 218; Tagore’s Four Chapters 33, 74n21; Tagore’s Hindu Scriptures 76n38 Hölderlin, Friedrich 81–​82, 104, 107–​108, 113n9, 11, 229n1 Homer 82–​83, 106; Odyssey 81, 105–​108 Hong Kong 194, 195, 196–​197 Honore, Phillipe 126 Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Adorno) 16–​17, 82, 90–​91, 105–​106, 186, 224 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 116n25 Ibsen, Henrik, When We Dead Awaken 39, 71 Idealism 13, 14 imperialism: Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized 93; narratives 215; Orientalist discourses 223n4; and postcolonialism 1–​3; Said 155–​156; Seth’s An Equal Music 141, 155, 157 inadequation 11, 185, 227–​228 Indian Corps 112nn2–​3 Indian National Congress 35, 115n20 individualism 7, 23; Adorno 17, 126, 147; Benjamin 180–​181; Chaudhuri 175–​176; Seth’s An Equal Music 143, 150, 158; Singh’s photography 186, 199; Tagore’s Four Chapters 61; Tagore’s Gora 32 industrialisation: Adorno 166n36, 174, 176, 183; Germany 183; India 7; Ireland 93; UK 139 interior, contextualising the 174–​194, 198–​203 International Brigade 78 internationalism 7 Ireland 92–​93 Jackson, Stanley 73n19 Jallianwala Bagh massacre 115n19 Jameson, Fredric 1, 38, 197–​198 Jat Pat Todak (Caste Dismantlement Society) 75n27

Index  245 Jennings, Michael 55 Joyce, James, The Portrait of the Artist 91–​92 Kafka, Franz 190 Kantian thought 23, 125, 127 Kapur, Geeta 37–​38, 59–​60, 117n39 Kierkegaard, Søren 179, 182–​186, 190, 200–​201; Diary of a Seducer 183, 184 Kiernan, Victor 155 Kipling, Rudyard 154; Kim 94, 155 Kuiken, Kir 55 Lacan, Jacques 74n26, 191–​192, 221 Lazarus, Neil 5–​6 Leninism 20 Leppert, Richard D. 165n26 Levinas, Emmanuel 76n35 Louis Philippe 180 Lukács, György: and Adorno 25, 113n29; character mask 205n21; double quality of the novel 12; “Gandhi novels” 57; History and Class Consciousness 205n21; realism 154; reification 9; and Sorensen 2, 4; Tagore’s Four Chapters 49; Tagore’s The Home and the World 72n9; The Theory of the Novel 4, 8, 113n9; “transcendental homelessness” of modern works 224 Lutyens, Edward 116n28 Lye, Colleen 5, 24 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria 18 Marcuse, Herbert 3 Marx, Karl 11, 180, 183, 205n21 Marxism 2, 5; Adorno’s philosophy 13; All India Progressive Writers’ Association 79; cultural citizenship 158; exchange theory 175; imperialism 155; nationalist elite, class alliances within 75n27 Mason, Daniel, The Piano Tuner 165n23 McCole, John 46–​48 media imagery, and national culture 194–​195, 198–​199 melancholia, postcolonial 5, 13, 16, 228; Benjamin 32; German mourning play 43–​44, 47; left-​modernism 111; Tagore’s Four Chapters 43, 60

Memmi, Albert, The Colonizer and the Colonized 93 Mendelssohn, Felix 165n30 Meredith, George 137, 141, 160; “The Lark Ascending” 138, 139 Michelet, Jon 175 Mignolo, Walter 165n24 migration: Bhabha 84; forced 12, 45; literary 78, 88; postcolonial 12; Seth’s An Equal Music 124, 141, 161 Mishra, Pankaj 7–​8, 11, 22, 219 Mitra, Indrani 34, 59, 60 Mitter, Partha 64 Mörike, Eduard 229n1 Mufti, Aamir R. 108, 112–​113n8, 215, 220 Mukherjee, Arun P. 113n8 multinational capital 6, 37, 124, 136, 156–​157, 218, 227 multinational corporations 7, 206n33 Mulvey, Laura 214 Mumbai 206n33, 207n37 Nandy, Ashis 38–​39, 58–​60, 63–​64, 74–​75nn27–28, 76n35 national culture 193–​199 nationalism 7; Anand’s Across the Black Waters 102; anti-​colonial 29, 35, 39; competitive 174; genealogy 35, 216, 223n4; Guha 109–​110; justificatory structures 223n3; moral authority of the state, transformation of 197; Nehru’s Discovery of India 223n5; Seth’s An Equal Music 140; swadeshi movement 29, 32–​38, 40, 42, 49, 51, 59, 74nn23–​24, 75n29; Tagore’s Four Chapters 49, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 74n24; Tagore’s The Home and the World 49 nationality, and Singh’s photography 167–​168 National Urban Renewal Mission 206n33, 206–​207n37 negation, and Singh’s photography 24 Nehru, Jawaharlal: Discovery of India 215–​216, 223n5; general election campaign 215; national development 196, 206n33; nationalism 223nn4–​5; Singh’s photography 188, 190, 192, 203, 212, 214, 218–​219 Nehru, Moti Lal 72n12 neoliberalism 7, 114n14, 195; globalist historical context 5; Said 156; Seth’s

246 Index An Equal Music 22, 23, 24; Seth’s A Suitable Boy 136 neutralisation: Adorno 9, 11, 13, 16, 147, 187, 189; Tagore’s Four Chapters 31, 60 New Delhi 116n28, 206n33 new literatures 1, 3 Nietzsche, Friedrich 29 non-​alignment 7, 73n17, 217 Ong, Aihwa 114n14 Orientalism 1, 5, 223nn3–​4 Pakistan 7 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da 163n8, 165n30 Pandurang, Mala 123–​125, 128, 163n5 Panikkar, K.N. 75n27 parataxis: Adorno 81–​84, 94–​95; Anand’s Across the Black Waters 85, 105, 107–​108 Partition of Bengal 20, 33, 38, 42, 75n29 Poe, Edgar Allan 205n20 populism 7 postcolonialism 1–​14; Anand’s Across the Black Waters 21, 89, 106, 108; Bhabha 84; Bildungsroman 91–​92; canon 1, 3–​4, 6, 227; Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World 216; form as a synthesising principle 112n7; Gandhi and Tagore, continuity between 75n27; globalisation 194–​195; global modernity 217–​218; India’s capital relocated to New Delhi 116n28; literary criticism 109; melancholia see melancholia, postcolonial; metropolitan image and identity 194–​195; Mufti 112–​113n8; national development 196–​198; Said 154, 156; Seth’s An Equal Music 22–​24, 123–​124, 127–​129, 140–​142, 144–​145, 148, 155, 158, 161–​162, 162–​163n4, 165n24, 227; Seth’s A Suitable Boy 136; Singh’s photography 171, 176–​177, 186–​187, 199, 201, 214, 218, 221–​222; Tagore’s Four Chapters 30, 41, 62; Tagore’s Gora 72n6; violence 225; Wiemann 84 post-​Kantian thought 14, 125, 152 postmodernism 24, 197 post-​nationalism 41, 136, 168

poststructuralism 2 poverty 195–​196 Progressive Writers’ Association 4, 22, 101; Anand 79, 102 proprietorship 183, 186; Singh’s photography 25, 188, 191, 202–​203, 222 Proust, Marcel 167 Rajadhyakshya, Ashish 200, 202 Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder 110 Ray, Satyajit 14, 26n15, 223n7 realism: Anand’s Across the Black Waters 21, 78, 81, 86, 96, 104, 109; Bildungsroman 92; epic form 83–​84; genealogy 174–​175, 178; Goethe’s Elective Affinities 68; indices of 113n8; Lukács’ analysis 154; postcolonialism 3–​4; Said’s analysis 154; Seth’s An Equal Music 24, 127, 137, 139, 151, 152, 160, 162; Seth’s A Suitable Boy 128, 135–​137; Singh’s photography 174, 176–​179, 186; Tagore’s Four Chapters 20, 36, 38–​39, 43, 45, 47–​50, 57, 64, 69–​70; Tagore’s Gora 36; Tagore’s The Home and the World 34, 36–​37, 39, 50; see also social realism reification 14; Adorno 9, 15, 17, 147, 159, 187; Benjamin 69, 202; Seth’s An Equal Music 145–​146, 152; Singh’s photography 190, 203; Tagore’s Four Chapters 42 Rhys, Jean 94 Robbins, Bruce 156 Rosenthal, Lecia 70 Roy, Ananya 195 Rushdie, Salman 23, 121, 136, 156; The Ground Beneath Her Feet 121–​122, 162n2; Midnight’s Children 3 sacrifice 76n39, 220–​221; Adorno 105–​106; Anand’s Across the Black Waters 100–​101, 106, 108; Benjamin’s “On Goethe’s Elective Affinities” 55–​56, 67–​68; as Indian virtue 99; Tagore’s Four Chapters 35–​36, 42, 57–​58, 60, 62–​64 Said, Edward W.: Culture and Imperialism 154–​158, 162, 166n34; Humanism and Democratic Culture 160–​162; Orientalism 1,

Index  247 5; “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals” 162 Sambrani, Chaitanya 207n39 Sarkar, Sumit 35–​36, 73n18 Sarkar, Tanika 34 Savarkar, V.R. 75n28 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 163n8 Schonberg, Arnold 113n11 Schumann, Robert 164n12 Schwarz, Roberto 17–​18, 21 Second Vienna School 140, 163n10, 164n12 Second World War 79, 85, 87–​88 Sen, Aveek 177, 188–​190, 207n40 Seth, Vikram 19, 221, 229n1; An Equal Music 22–​25, 121–​135, 137–​155, 157–​162, 227; Golden Gate 163n5; A Suitable Boy 8, 11, 121, 123–​124, 128, 135–​137 Shahani, Kumar 76n36 Shakespeare, William 139 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 139 Sherman, David 183, 205n23 Shostakovich, Dmitri 164n12 Singh, Dayanita 19, 24–​25, 167–​174; Allahabad collection 188–​190, 211; Beds 170; Blue Book 204n5, 207n42; Chairs 204n5; cultural history 187–​189, 193; disappearance 170, 192–​194, 199; Dream Villa 204n5; File Museum 171–​172; File Room 172–​173, 204n5; File Room Book Object 172–​173; Go Away Closer 170, 173, 176–​177, 179, 187–​188, 194, 201–​202, 204n5, 207n42; I am as I am 168–​169; interior, contextualising the 174, 176–​179, 187–​194, 199–​203; Ladies of Calcutta 170, 194; mirror 191–​192; Mona Darling 203–​204n4; Museum Bhavan 204n5; Museum of Chance 204n5; Museum of Chance Book Object 204n6; Myself, Mona Ahmed 169–​170, 204n5; national culture 199; Pop-​up Bookshop/​My Offset World 204n5; Privacy 170, 173, 178–​179, 187–​188, 190–​193, 202, 204n5, 211–​214, 215, 218–​222, 227–​228; reversal 186; Sent a Letter 204n5 Sinha, Krishna Nandan 96–​97 slum clearances 207n37 social contract 6

socialism 7, 162, 188, 200, 217, 222; Anand’s Across the Black Waters 80, 97 social realism 4, 175–​176; Seth’s An Equal Music 22; Seth’s A Suitable Boy 8, 136; Tagore 20, 32 Sorensen, Eli Park 2–​4, 6 Spanish Civil War 78–​79, 88 spectatorship 187, 200, 213, 220 Spice, Nicholas 126, 163n4 Spivak, Gayatri 2, 109–​111 Sprinker, Michael 34, 59 Steidl, Gerhard 204n5 Subaltern Studies 109–​110, 215, 217 swadeshi movement 29, 32–​38, 40, 42, 49, 51, 59, 74nn23–​24, 75n29 Swaraj Khilafat (Home Rule) party 72–​73n12 Tagore, Jyotirindranath 76n38 Tagore, Rabindranath 19, 30, 55, 221; ethical dissent 33, 72n9; Four Chapters 19–​22, 25, 29–​32, 34–​43, 45–​53, 56–​65, 67, 69–​71; Four Quartets 73–​74n21; and Gandhi 56–​58, 73n12, 75n27, 76n33; Gora 32–​38, 60, 94; Hindu Scriptures 76n38; The Home and the World 32–​40, 42, 46, 49–​50, 59, 61, 74n23; Jogajog/​Relationships 204–​205n13; short stories 74n26 terrorism 19, 29, 38, 51, 57, 58 Thackeray, William Makepeace 154 Tilak, Balgangadhar, Gita Rahasya 76n38 transnationalism 84, 114n14, 197, 218, 226; Anand’s Across the Black Waters 89–​90, 99, 103; Seth’s An Equal Music 22, 124; Singh’s photography 199 universalism 217; Seth’s An Equal Music 22, 124–​125, 127, 149 Upadhyaya, Brahmobandhab 51–​52, 74n27, 75n28 upakatha 39, 74n22 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, “The Lark Ascending” 138–​141 Virilio, Paul 194, 200–​201 Viswa Bharati University 76n36 Vivaldi, Antonio 139 Vogel, Steven 181

248 Index Weber, Max 90 Wiemann, Dirk 84–​85, 136–​138 Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray 91 Willcocks, Lt.-​General Sir James 112n3 Williams, Raymond 117n36, 154 Woolf, Leonard 112n4

Woolf, Virginia 112n4; The Voyage Out 91, 156 Wordsworth, William 139 World War I: Anand’s Across the Black Waters 20–​21, 77–​81, 84–​109; Indian Army 112n2; Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel 113n9; Tagore 20, 33, 39 World War II 79, 85, 87–​88